Because it’s too vague and timid to confront the issues head-on, I was left wondering what on earth it was trying to say. Yet these distractions also usher in a subplot about mental health and how Sam copes with his condition, which Twin Mirror is ill-equipped to discuss.
It’s enough to at least put some meat on Twin Mirror’s bare bones and quicken the pace once in a while. At various points, you choose whether to listen to him or not, or fall into surreal corridor chases and mazes mapping out Sam’s emotional turmoil, where your friend tries to help you escape. Along with the mind palace, Sam has an imaginary alter ego who talks to him like a built-in therapist, advising Sam to stay calm and say socially acceptable things. The only real hook is Sam and his interior workings. In surprisingly truncated middle and final acts, the crime is revealed and resolved before you can put together a suspect list. But it never sticks on anything long enough to dig in. Like it has something to say about the collapse of American industry, the creeping poverty and isolation in small towns, and the wave of opioid addiction that preys on the lost. Their static delivery is the only sense of uncanny you’ll get in a world where the name of the local café is Café Americano.Īt times, it feels like Twin Mirror has an interesting idea on the tip of its tongue. Dialogue is punctured by long pauses and non-sequiturs, while restrained lip-synching and dead eyes turn some of the cast into ventriloquist dummies or latex puppets. It’s difficult to engage in conversations with characters who say nothing and go nowhere, especially when they’re so technically unconvincing. I assumed I’d find out more about that later, but nope. I ran into a woman called Tara a couple of times early on who was especially mean to Sam for no obvious reason. In Twin Mirror, individuals remain as they first appear, often bookmarked for later development only to never return. In Life Is Strange, the veneer of superficiality in some characters eventually peels back to reveal hidden complexities. She’s into vinyl, trashy action films and human rights – wash-away details in place of personality. Even key characters, like Sam’s old flame and fellow journalist Anna, are patchworks of off-the-peg traits. A local cop has local cop concerns about rising crime, a teenager with dyed hair wishes she could leave town, the rednecks start trouble by saying, “Well, well, well, look what we have here”. Like Sam’s memories, characters feel like constructs of recalled fragments. It never grabbed me, it never made me care. But Twin Mirror falls short in that respect too. These games succeed when they present us with interesting people, situations and themes that make dialogue choices feel weighty. The highlight in these imaginary crystal dioramas is watching them shift and cluster to represent different theories.ĭontnod’s productions are rarely taxing, of course, and that’s fine when the narrative delivers. The mind palace sequences then ask you to link the clues in ways that are either painfully obvious or simply a case of cycling through limited combinations until you find the one the game wants. Investigation is a menial process of combing scenes for highlighted objects, and since things often have to be found in a certain order, you’ll have to do multiple laps just to collect everything you need. Once you’ve gathered clues in key locations, he envisions a model of the scene constructed from glass fragments and works through the angles to piece them together. Sam is socially awkward but can see the workings of the world by entering his ‘mind palace’. Soon enough you’re trying to find out what really occurred, picking at the scabs of past relationships and town traumas as you go. You’re journalist Sam Higgs, returning to town for the funeral of an old friend, Nick, who died in an accident. But whatever the case, it feels like there was meant to be more.
Perhaps it’s significant that the game was originally planned as an episodic release before being amalgamated into this single lump.
Whenever it looks like it might break through the surface, it backs off and changes focus.
This narrative-driven mystery adventure game from Dontnod Entertainment ( Life Is Strange, Tell Me Why) never really gets beneath these stock images of American life. I’ve never lived in a decaying mining community in West Virginia, but I’ve seen bars in places like Twin Mirror’s Basswood more times than I can remember. Neon sign on the door, old photos speckling the walls, a jukebox in the corner, baseball-capped rednecks filling a booth by the entrance.
TWIN MIRROR HIM TV
I’ve seen films and TV shows set in small town America, I know the decor. He hasn’t been there for a couple of years, but it’s still familiar.
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