By all accounts, MindsEye was not a good game, and I doubt its ongoing updates will ever change that perception in the eyes of audiences everywhere. The Steam reviews are at 37%, ‘Mostly Negative’ and the Metacritic matches it exactly. People do not like this videogame.
In fact, they don’t like it so much that star Alex Hernandez thought it might outright kill his videogame career. Hernandez, who played main character Jacob Diaz, said in a chat with Frvr that being, in essence, the public face of a failed videogame is a pretty tough thing to go through (even though Hernandez’s performance was good, as far as I’m aware).
“It’s hard. I’m not gonna lie about that,” said Hernandez. Not just for himself, mind you, but “for the 300 or so employees at Build A Rocket Boy, you’re like ‘I hope this goes really well.’ I want them all to get raises and have a giant party and have this be the job that launches their career.”
Which, well, isn’t what happened. “Videogamers are a unique species—and I am one of them—where… the feelings are so strong, and the internet is an anonymous place where people will share things they would never say to your face ever… Even if they thought it was a pile of trash, they just wouldn’t look you in the face and be like, ‘Everyone who worked on this game deserves to die’.”
Alas, the internet means lots of people very much are like that, and it was tough both for Hernandez to experience and to see the team he’d worked with go through.
Hernandez said that, although he’s developed a “pretty thick skin” over the course of his acting career, “It was a good two days of, like, ‘Fuck’. Just based on the response, not based on the work itself… I was like, ‘I might never work in another game again.'”
Because he was, after all, the face of the game. “Because one of the caveats of being the face on the box is that people, rightly or wrongly, will associate all of their opinions and, more importantly, their emotions about this game with my face…
“My name will now be associated with something that many people have regarded as pretty fucking bad. And as an artist, as a man, as a gamer, that hurts, it’s wildly painful.”
The good news, though, is that after having a “wallow” in those feelings for a couple of days, Hernandez picked himself up and soldiered on, even if some folks still inexplicably thought his social media pages were the best place to complain about the game. “I can’t be responsible for the whole thing, even though my face is on the box, and I have to accept the reality, there is some amount of gamers that are going to carry that negativity with them.”
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