A good demo can do wonders and Mindwave's taste test was so good, it prompted thousands of excited players to donate 11 times its initial crowdfunding goal.
Anyone that's played WarioWare will be somewhat familiar with Mindwave's almost overwhelming, reflex-testing structure. It's a rapid-fire microgame collection that'll move almost too fast even for people with a shrinking attention span, asking you to dial numbers into a flip phone and then stitch together a teddy bear and then pop bubble wrap paper back-to-back-to-back at lightning speeds.
But Mindwave sets itself apart from Nintendo's icon with a gorgeous comic strip art style, a much weirder, gloomier world, and a more detailed story.
Here, you play as Pandora - a girl in a futuristic city where you can jack USBs into a neural slot stuck on your neck. She's won a golden ticket that lets her enter the hulking MindScape tower, which invites countless youngsters to compete against each other in microgames that take place in the contestants' psychic realms with a slim chance to win a big cash prize.
It's a slightly uncomfortable setup, but I like how the Psychonauts-style mind-jumping opens the door to more cohesive microgame collections with distinct themes or motifs. (The first has a big focus on cutesy, Y2K stuff, for example.) In between floors, you can take a minute to talk to the other contestants and some branching conversations go surprisingly deep.