Mimesis
A lot like an AI artist, great ideas with impressive power at their fingertips, but lacks creativity and substance.
Mimesis is a fascinating social experiment wrapped in a very bare-bones roguelike. Its AI-driven mimicry can be genuinely unsettling and makes for memorable stories with friends. Still, the basic level structure, repetitive factory runs, and harsh resets turn that initial intrigue into a grind. If you’re curious about AI-powered psychological horror and have a regular co-op group, it’s worth watching as it evolves, but right now, its ideas are stronger than its long-term appeal.
You’re dropped into the game on a bus that requires repairs every 3 stops. Your repair station is stocked with vending machines dispensing various weapons and tools. These can vary from a shotgun and an electric fly swatter to a simple torch. Now, how to purchase these items? You start your bus to your first stop. From our experience, there seem to 3 locations you can travel to. Factory, Subway and Mansion are unlocked randomly from the third cycle onward. The Mansion presents the highest base difficulty among all maps. Once you have arrived at a location, you must enter and search the maze-like hallways and rooms for anything and everything you can pick up. Items hold different value and it's imperative to manage your players' load as you only have 4 slots. There are 3 stages or levels, as it's called, and each one requires you to reach a monetary goal to repair your bus.
Where the game shines is the monsters on each map. There are 10 varying monsters, each with its own unique attack and behaviour. The most common would be the Mimesis, a perfect copy of you and your friends, down to its ability to mimic your voice. This is truly where the fear kicks in, you're alone searching for items to sell, separated from your team and having to decipher whether the being in front of you is your teammate or a murderer. It will mimic you down to your heavy breathing on the microphone or your friend's strange one-liners. Originally terrifying, it did lose its charm a bit once you and your friends figure out methods to combat its repetitive lines. If all your team members have torches, then getting them to flash them as a means to differentiate them from the mimes is quite easy.
The other monsters don’t use this mimic tool and are far more “violent” per se. The Brute Bunny is a massive, muscular rabbit that charges from afar and delivers devastating slam attacks. Mr Delpit, a motherly monkey that mistakes players for its child. It grabs and carries them away, far from the exit. The owl emits eerie hoots from afar. If you get too close, the Standing Owl will perform a spinning death attack. Heavy D, A massive elephant that bulldozes everything in its path. You can hear it coming by the upbeat music. If you bump into it, you will be knocked back, forcing you to drop all your items. The other enemies we never came across were Bombesis, Maegoostro, Sentryper and Ramblam. I can’t speak on their abilities as we never faced them, but a quick Google search shows they are out to kill you like the rest.
“Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?”
We really enjoyed this game for an hour or so; it was relatively fast-paced and refreshing. It introduced something new and showed us where the implementation of AI in gaming can go. I think if the developers can keep the levelling fresh and maybe introduce more items to sell/pick up, they could truly be onto something as good as Among Us. A larger group is recommended; 3-4 players is honestly the most fun. The maps are very bland and repetitive at times, feeling a little cut and paste with little to no interaction. I would like to see more interactive tools like traps, hiding places and weapons.
The game is quirky and innovative, and it shows that there are still developers who are willing to try something new. With this, we chose to give the game a Performance improvement plan (PIP), a score of 4.9/10. It’s new and fresh with great ideas, but requires more core materials to keep its player base interested. We’re excited to see them expand on their great base game, hopefully updates will see us return in the future and adjust our review.
Mimesis earns a bonus point for its novel use of AI voice cloning. That simple trick makes each run feel memorable, because every run generates new, personal mind games instead of repeating scripted scares.
Employability score - Mimesis is easy to pick up for an hour at a time, with no story to remember and mechanics that are tense but not overly complex. It suits a group that wants focused sessions where everyone can jump in, survive a run, and log off. The downside is how punishing failure feels. If your group dies you are sent back to the first map and have to spend another long session clearing that early mission before you can see the later areas and enemy types again. There are save points that help you bank some progress, but the reset loop still makes it harder to get varied, satisfying runs when everyone’s time is limited. Mimesis scores a 0.75 for employability.