MindsEye

MindsEye is a 2025 open-world action-adventure game developed by Build a Rocket Boy, released June 10, 2025 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. It’s the debut title from a studio founded by Leslie Benzies, the former president of Rockstar North and lead producer on Grand Theft Auto III through V, and it launched to a Metacritic score of 37 — the lowest of any game released that year. This entry covers both the game as it launched and the year of recovery attempts that followed, including a substantial relaunch effort called Arcadia.

It’s a rare case where the story of what happened around a game is at least as documented as the game itself: mass layoffs, executive departures, a union lawsuit, and a founder who publicly blamed the reviews on paid saboteurs.

Technical Specifications

Leslie Benzies and the GTA Pedigree

Few developers arrived at a debut title with a résumé like this one. As president of Rockstar North from 1999 to 2014, Leslie Benzies was lead producer on GTA III, Vice City, San Andreas, IV, and V, along with Red Dead Redemption — games that collectively generated billions of dollars and shaped open-world design for two decades. He left Rockstar in 2016 following litigation with parent company Take-Two over bonus payments, and founded Build a Rocket Boy in Edinburgh not long after, with an ambitious long-term goal: an ongoing user-generated platform called Everywhere that MindsEye was meant to introduce players to.

Jacob Diaz and Redrock

The game casts players as Jacob Diaz, a former soldier fitted with a neural implant that lets him control nearby drones, navigating the fictional desert city of Redrock while investigating the implant’s creator and contending with a mercenary organization called Red Sands. It was pitched pre-launch as a spiritual successor to the kind of cinematic, tightly directed open-world action Benzies had built his reputation on.

Arcadia and the Ten-Year Plan

Beyond the campaign, MindsEye shipped with Arcadia, a no-code mission-creation toolkit letting players build and share their own content — an early piece of the wider Everywhere vision, with modes originally branded Play.MindsEye and Build.MindsEye. Benzies described the project publicly as a decade-long commitment rather than a single release, positioning the base campaign as an opening chapter for a much larger, community-built platform.

A Catastrophic Launch

None of that framing survived contact with launch day. Players and critics documented severe technical problems across every platform: frequent crashes, unresponsive NPCs, distorted “melted face” graphical glitches, and a framerate that stayed capped near 30fps even on PS5 Pro hardware. Reviewers described the combat as broken and the AI as barely functional, on top of mission design several outlets called dated by a decade or more. Sony took the unusual step of issuing refunds to PlayStation 5 buyers, a move consoles rarely make for games already released.

The Marketing That Made It Worse

Build a Rocket Boy’s handling of the rollout compounded the problem rather than contained it. Review copies were withheld from most outlets ahead of launch, several sponsored streamers had their release-day content pulled or delayed by the studio, and early promotional coverage leaned heavily on sponsored YouTubers rather than independent press. When the backlash hit, co-CEO Mark Gerhard and Benzies both publicly claimed a portion of the negative reaction came from paid bots and coordinated sabotage by unnamed rivals — a claim that found little support and did more to damage trust in the studio’s post-launch statements than to explain the reviews.

Reception

Critical consensus was about as close to unanimous as gaming criticism gets. Eurogamer’s review, widely quoted afterward, summarized the game as sunk by a ridiculous story, inconsistent writing, poorly designed missions, and atrocious combat. MindsEye settled at 37 on Metacritic against a user score of roughly 2.5 out of 10, finishing the year as the single lowest-rated release of 2025 on the platform — a distinction it held over other notably poor 2025 launches by a wide margin.

The Fallout

The commercial numbers were as stark as the reviews. Estimates put total sales around 160,000 units against a reported development cost near £233 million — a gap large enough that industry commentary compared it unfavorably to other infamous commercial failures of the era. Build a Rocket Boy began redundancy consultations within weeks of launch, with reports citing roughly 170 to 300 affected staff across multiple rounds through the second half of 2025. In October 2025, 93 former employees signed an open letter criticizing studio leadership, and the games workers’ union IWGB filed a legal claim over how the layoffs were handled. Both the Chief Legal Officer and Chief Financial Officer had already left the company in the week before launch, a detail that drew scrutiny in hindsight.

Arcadia, Take Two

Rather than abandon the project, Benzies committed publicly to a recovery plan starting July 2025, and the studio spent the rest of the year pushing patches aimed at stability and performance. In November 2025, Arcadia returned in a more prominent form — reframed as the game’s central hub rather than a side feature, requiring an internet connection while the core campaign remained playable offline — alongside a steady cadence of free content updates through the end of the year, including new missions and gameplay refinements.

Where Things Stand Now

By early 2026, MindsEye had received seven major updates, with reviewers who returned to check on its progress finding a noticeably more stable, if still unremarkable, game underneath the fixes. A permanent price cut to $34.99 followed in spring 2026, alongside continued content drops — but player numbers never recovered in any meaningful way, with concurrent Steam player counts peaking in the low dozens well into 2026. Publishing duties reverted from IO Interactive Partners back to Build a Rocket Boy itself that year, closing out the IOI partnership announced ahead of launch. MindsEye remains, at the time of writing, a functioning, actively updated game — just not the one it was originally sold as.