Mind Over Magnet review: A focused puzzler that pulls you in

Mind Over Magnet is a short and sweet puzzle game that makes the most of it's central mechanic

Mind Over Magnet / Game Maker's Toolkit

When choosing a central mechanic for a puzzle game, you need something that’s easy to understand, and yet has exponential potential for it to be complex and confusing. Plenty of great concepts have been found over the years. 

Moving around a test chamber with portals is easy to grasp – you just make a magic hole in the wall, but then those pesky laws of physics come into play and you’ve got some head-scratching puzzles. The same goes for how you construct simple sentences in Baba Is You. You can describe the concept in a short sentence, and yet is the most complicated puzzler I’ve ever played.

This is why I’m surprised we haven’t seen more puzzle games about magnets, as they’re perfect for striking this balance. The broad concept is simple – they pull things together or push them apart – but that very logic has a near-infinite amount of applications, to the point where real-life physicists still don’t know everything about how they work.

Mind Over Magnet / Game Maker's Toolkit

That brings us to Mind Over Magnet, a short and sweet puzzle game about using magnets to complete one-screen puzzles.

For a game that only took me about an hour and a half to complete, I was surprised at how carefully paced it was. The game is split into five worlds that all introduce one new mechanic, and then spend several puzzles iterating on the idea and eventually combining them with ideas from past worlds to create interesting puzzles.

It immediately gives you a foundation for how to solve each puzzle, as you understand what the main mechanic for that section is, so you know you’ll have to use that in some way. In the first world you’ve got just one magnet you can pick up and move around, which then lets you attract to magnetic surfaces, as well as use as a physical object to weigh down buttons and the like. Then, as you move into world two, you get a new magnet that’s light enough to throw. Then in world three that magnet gains the ability to change polarities, and so on.

Mind Over Magnet / Game Maker's Toolkit

Each new world builds like that and it makes for a perfectly paced experience. I was never out of my depth or felt like the game was asking me too big a leap in logic. I only had to resort to using the in-game hint system once, and as soon as I saw the solution I realized I was just being stupid, rather than the game making any questionable decisions, which is always a good sign that the puzzle difficulty has been perfectly pitched.

The puzzle design is very varied within worlds too. One moment you’ll be whizzing up and down the level using the magnets’ pull to puzzle platform your way to the exit, and the next you’ll have a more stationary level where you’re using the moving parts of the level to push the magnet to where you need it to be and open the exit.

Plus the whole thing is wrapped up in a nice package. Rather than just being mechanics, each of the different magnets gets their own face and personality as you try to escape a factory that is trying to put you on the scrap heap. It’s nothing particularly special, but it’s a fun extra touch that brings the experience together, gives you a quick break from puzzling and occasionally made me sharply exhale through my nose with mirth.

Mind Over Magnet / Game Maker's Toolkit

If anything, my only major criticism is that once it ended, I wanted more. As I said before, it’s well-paced for the 90-minute experience it is, but there’s so much potential in the central mechanics that I want to see what more can be done with them. Completing it does unlock developer commentary in every level though, which given that this game is made by YouTuber video essayist Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit, is worth doing. I’ve always enjoyed his writing style, and seeing how he applied the many concept he’s analyzed his video essays was interesting enough for me to play through it a second time, even if I did already know the solutions.

Mind Over Magnet is the exact kind of puzzler I love the most. It picks one idea and makes it the focus, constantly finding new ways to make you think about it from new perspectives and combing those ideas to make challenging puzzles, rather than relying on constantly introducing new mechanics. It doesn’t break the mold or revolutionize the genre, but it accomplishes what it set out to do, making me scratch my head just the right amount to make each puzzle satisfying to solve while keeping up a good pace that never let the experience drag.

Score: 8/10

Verstion tested: PC (Steam)