Review for Twin Mirror. Game for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 31/12/2019
The best word to describe Twin Mirror is "competent". Everything he does is competent, nothing is notably badly done, but on the other hand nothing surprised us. After our 2 title runs, we found ourselves quite disappointed, not because of insufficient work but because of a lack of soul in everything Twin Mirror tries to do. The DONTNOD adventure is written better than other works in the same genre, in the sense that it has a sensible narrative that flows from start to finish, but brings nothing compelling to the table, ending up giving the impression of lasting longer than it should despite in reality it does not last very long. But let's go deeper, and see what convinced us and what we didn't like about the first self-published game by DONTNOD.
Twin Mirror is a modern graphic adventure, along the lines of works such as Life is Strange or Detroid Become Human, in which narrative and scenic presentation are at the fore. Graphically, Twin Mirror is undoubtedly DONTNOD's most ambitious and successful title. The step forward compared to Tell Me Why is remarkable, and the graphic aspect is probably the only thing we can promote in this new production. The settings are detailed and alive, the animations of the characters are woody, but not enough to break the immersion and the play of light creates some quite suggestive scenes. Twin Mirror therefore started with the best premises, but it takes very little to begin to notice how empty everything that revolves around the good graphic presentation is.
Without further ado, let's dive into the main theme of this review: narrative. The story follows Sam, an ex-journalist with a dual personality and the ability to use his mind as a "palace" to control himself and dig into his memories. Following the death of a friend, Sam returns to the town he fled from years earlier after publishing an article that destroyed the lives of many citizens, resulting in the closure of the mine that supported them. After being incited by the daughter of the deceased, Sam will begin to investigate the death of his friend, with his doppelganger and his mental palace always at his side.. The basis of the narrative is interesting, nothing extremely imaginative, but certainly with a lot of potential. This potential will not be exploited.
The mental palace turns out to be an excuse for tedious and banal micro-puzzles, thus throwing away all the magnificent ideas that they could have to develop a materialization of the inner world of the protagonist. Because of this, Sam is flat and boring, thanks also to the multiple choices between his ideas, which are always rude or childish, and those of the doppelganger that instead lead him to behave like a normal person. The intrigue behind the mystery is immediately broken by the fact that the suspects are so clichéd that they unwittingly communicate the entire story through their role in the presentation phase.. The worst thing a mystery thriller can do is have a solution so trivial that it is discovered far earlier than the writers intended, and Twin Mirror is gravely guilty of this sin. There are no particular slips in writing, everything that happens is logical and sensible ... even too much, to the point of being predictable and banal. As mentioned at the beginning of the review, it is competent writing, but nothing more.
The cast of secondary characters is also extremely boring. We go from characters perpetually wrong in every possible situation like Kathy, to others who are simply people with common sense who can never be wrong. These characters aren't bad in their bubble, but as a whole they don't work. Nobody has the charisma to drag a plot as banal as that of Twin Mirror through the few scenes that make it up. Added to this is a sterile approach to gameplay, which is based solely on collecting clues in closed rooms and formulating opinions by choosing between 3 different options until the right one is found. We have tried several times to erroneous hypotheses in search of a bad ending, hoping to go astray to make the events a little more interesting than we have been seeing until then. Obviously, there is nothing behind these wrong answers. The endings are dictated by a few choices, even made pretty well, but which are completely unrelated to the gameplay sections.
So let's conclude with a few words about performance and soundtrack. The latter falls under the same umbrella as everything we have described so far. S.i is a competent soundtrack, which accompanies without burdening or annoying, but also without giving any emotion or helping any scene to have an impact. In terms of performance, Twin Mirror performed pretty well, running fully at Ultra settings on a mid-range PC.
Ultimately, Twin Mirror we can only recommend it to those who adore this videogame genre with all their heart. The sterile narrative and forgettable characters are the condemnation of a game that dares very little in whatever it wants to do. The result is a competent title, which works and has a beginning and an end, but which we don't think is worth the (little) time it takes to complete. This is not a terrible or badly done game, but a title that has nothing interesting to offer; which, according to the point of view, can be even worse.
► Twin Mirror is an Adventure type game developed by Dontnod and published by Bandai Namco for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 31/12/2019
