The characters are as forgettable as the story, and the mystery is handed to you on a silver platter as you make your way through the narrative. Twin Mirror’s foundation of returning home to a tragedy after leaving because of a tragedy doesn’t work. On the bright side, I enjoyed the voice over, but the game lacked the soundtracks that I typically love from Dontnod. If that wasn’t enough, the gameplay is almost just as difficult to navigate as I struggled to interact with objects requiring Sam’s position to be exact to trigger an action. It has moments of looking great, but then NPCs’ bodies disappear, each transition is met with rendering issues, load times are insane, and environments aren’t that interesting. This was probably because he doesn’t even know who he is as he struggles to interact with those around him, and so the choices feel more like what I think the person he’s talking to wants to hear rather than the ones I believe he wants to say. Still, I found it hard to connect with Sam, regardless of how many choices I made during the dialogue. This is where Sam sees the most growth within himself, and we see why exactly he needs his invisible friend. The story’s best moments incorporate Sam’s Mind Palace, which has Sam entering a meditative state as he clears his mind and focuses on the issue at hand. Sadly, the rest of the characters are surface level, and the relationship with this spunky little girl named Bug just never stuck with me. It’s not bad, but the narrative becomes only about their past, which is pretty set in stone considering what they’ve been through. The pacing is just off in that regard as you retrace your night so early on, followed by you teaming up with another character named Anna for what feels like 3/4 of the rest of this short adventure. The story is also haphazard in nature as you travel from one area to the next, meeting townspeople that have no real impact on you. This may have been because there’s no on-screen indicator pointing out how your choices affected the branching paths, so your shooting in the dark every time. Still, they’re few and far between, with dialogue choices not having the weight that I’d expect from these types of games. These choices with your instincts are significant and caused me to put thought into the outcome. Still, there are significant choices that you can make in the story based on whether or not you side with Sam’s invisible friend or not. I would have liked more room for mistakes, but these moments play out the same way no matter how you approach the story. You have to search for clues where you can’t progress unless you find every single one, and then you have to play out the events, but you can’t progress unless you choose the correct path. I wouldn’t say I liked how the narrative required you to solve every case the same way. While Sam’s relationship with his invisible friend is one of the game’s strongest elements, the mind palace elements could have been used more because the feature is just as strong. Further, Sam can travel into his mind to piece together events as they happen using clues while accessing memories. It’s a way for him to cope, but it can also affect his relationships negatively. Sam is seemingly cursed by an invisible presence that gives him pointers on how to talk to people. The biggest issue with the narrative is how many ways it could have gone right. Even the build-up to the reveal is cut short with just a simple exposition dump without any real pay off. Sadly, the narrative is weak and fails to use its large cast of characters properly as it relies on generic twists that don’t cast doubt on anyone except for who’s pulling the strings. However, the tension stops there as it feels like we are on a linear path to the truth of the bloody shirt and other crimes caused around town. Sam now has to piece together what happened the night before, along with some other mysteries that loom over the town. He’s not well-liked in the town, so he means to make the visit brief, but after a night of drinking, he wakes up to a bloody shirt and not a clue how it happened. The reasons for him leaving revolves around a story he wrote that got the town mine shut down and his girlfriend at the time turning down his marriage proposal. Twin Mirror introduces us to Sam Higgs, an ex-reporter returning home after two years when a friend passed away in a car accident. The new mature direction is commendable, but they fail to create any form of tension or excitement in this underwhelming experience. When it comes to Twin Mirror, we find a lack of both. However, their success has also been backed by larger budgets and unique gameplay elements. Developer Dontnod is known for their advancements in the adventure narrative genre.
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