Infinite Beyond The Mind

I have a soft spot for one-person passion projects, and Infinite Beyond the Mind wears its single-developer origins openly. Emilie COYO built a 16-stage, side-scrolling action platformer clearly steeped in arcade-era reverence, the kind where you feel the creator's reference shelf every time a soldier charges onscreen. That is both the game's warmth and its ceiling. The moment-to-moment play is built around two sisters, Tanya and Olga, who control nearly identically. You pick one, the other gets kidnapped by Queen Evangelyn Bramann and her Beljantaur army, and then you slash your way across sixteen stages toward a reunion. The core toolkit is spare: a melee slash, a double jump, a dash with a stamina meter behind it, and wall jumps that reviewers widely flagged as unreliable. As you clear stages you earn what the game calls "epiphanies," ability upgrades that give you things like a mid-air spin slash capable of deflecting bullets, which genuinely opens up how fast and fluid the later stretches feel. Local co-op drops Tanya and Olga on screen together, and the consensus across the community is clear: co-op is where the game finds its best version of itself, with shared attack pressure making bosses and tricky pit sections far more forgiving. The difficulty deserves an honest word. The opening hours are gentle to the point of feeling hollow, enemies practically volunteer to be hit. Then, around the midpoint, the game introduces bosses like the flying, orb-shooting Mirabelle Bramann and the curve spikes hard. A lives-and-continues system means losing your last life sends you back to the stage entrance, not the checkpoint, which frustrated multiple reviewers and will frustrate you too if you hit a difficult boss mid-run on your last continue. Hard mode cuts saves entirely, making it a single-sitting gauntlet. Three difficulties give you options, but the middle road is still a bit of a roller coaster. Where Infinite quietly earns its keep is in presentation. The chibi pixel art is colorful and clean, backgrounds shift per stage and give each zone its own personality, and the chiptune soundtrack by Defense Mechanism understands assignment completely. Each stage has its own sonic vibe that gradually intensifies as the game escalates, almost like the music is doing the storytelling the light narrative forgets to do. The story itself is thin and the characters never really develop beyond their premise, which is a mild shame given how much goodwill the aesthetic generates. There are also a handful of side-scrolling shooter stages where you pilot your character like a ship, a welcome gear-shift even if they land unevenly. At three to five hours depending on difficulty and co-op, Infinite Beyond the Mind knows its length. It does not overstay. The speedrun timer baked into the UI suggests COYO also knew the kind of players who would return to it. For solo players craving depth or mechanical complexity, this will feel thin fast. For anyone with a couch buddy, a fondness for Strider or Metal Slug, and zero interest in being overwhelmed, it is a genuinely pleasant way to spend an evening.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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