Deluded Mind (v1.7)

Hillstone Asylum turns a missing-person investigation into a first-person descent through grief, paranoia, and chemically induced terror. You play Dean Catrall, an FBI agent carrying the trauma of his daughter’s murder when a routine operation ends with his abduction and confinement inside a decaying psychiatric institution. A note points Dean toward his missing partner, Robert Page, but the hallucinogen coursing through his body makes every corridor, voice, and shadow suspect. Deluded Mind leans into oppressive psychological horror rather than cheap spectacle, creating a bleak atmosphere where the scariest threat is often the player’s inability to trust what they see.

Progress centers on searching the asylum, following story clues, examining its disturbing rooms, and solving environmental puzzles that open the way forward. The central pressure comes from the drug’s effects: taking too long on a puzzle, or making mistakes, brings harsher hallucinations and increasingly hostile distortions of the environment. That system makes puzzle solving more than a simple obstacle, since hesitation can actively make navigation and perception worse. Randomized events also prevent every scare and supernatural interruption from arriving at exactly the same moment, giving repeat runs some unpredictability even when the main story remains linear.

Its strongest feature is the way the asylum’s reality continually fractures around Dean, blending investigative suspense with grotesque nightmare imagery. Detailed interiors and an aggressive soundscape do much of the heavy lifting, using distant noises, unsettling ambience, and sudden changes in familiar spaces to keep tension high. Deluded Mind suits players who enjoy the puzzle-led dread of games such as Outlast or Layers of Fear, but want a more direct narrative built around an FBI investigation and personal tragedy. Horror veterans may find its mechanics familiar, while newcomers should be ready for a deliberately punishing approach to puzzles and a consistently grim tone.