Twin Mirror - Dontnod's new mystery thriller

[taxalot]

Early reviews are not very good.

 

[Martyr]

this weird investigation stuff reminds me of that FBI or whatever agent in Heavy Rain ... and that's not good.
I think Dontnod should rather focus on pure reality as a setting next time; the memory parts in Tell Me Why would've been better imo, if they would've just been memories and not some supernatural crap.

 

[Infinitron]

Ooof: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...pale-imitation-of-better-detective-adventures

Twin Mirror review - a pale imitation of better detective adventures
In dire need of more reflection.

Awkward, riddled with plot holes and unintentionally offensive, this is Dontnod's worst offering to date.

A car drives down a quiet road, past rows of trees, until you eventually glimpse a town, its long-abandoned factories stretching into the skyline. The images are accompanied by a sombre song by folk artist Sean Rowe. Welcome to Basswood, West Virginia.

It's an impressive way to start, not least because of how good Twin Mirror looks, and Dontnod knows it - just a few minutes before reaching his destination, protagonist Sam Higgs gets out of his car and glances down at Basswood from a viewpoint awash in the rays of the setting sun. But then Sam opens his mouth - and things inevitably go downhill from there. Sam has returned to his hometown to attend his best friend Nick's funeral. Trouble is, as Sam puts it, he's ghosted Nick for two years after leaving Basswood in a hurry, and now Nick's ghosting him by being dead. This, maybe five minutes into the game, is the first moment I put the controller down and looked into an imaginary camera like I'm on The Office, because this is the type of writing you are in for.

Sam used to be an investigative reporter at the Basswood Jungle, where he uncovered the local mine's violation of safety protocols. His reporting led to the closure of said mine, and to a lot of angry miners, who greet Sam with the mating call of every fictional bully to his victim of choice: "Well, well, well, look who we have here!" It emerges rather quickly that no one in Basswood is strictly speaking a nice person, not to each other and certainly not to Sam, who most residents have decided was single-handedly responsible for the demise of the town.

Here's the point at which I would normally find a good bridge to Twin Mirror's detective gameplay and Sam's mind palace, an imaginary location he occasionally accesses memories from, but that also works as a crime solving device, or the fact that Sam has an alter ego called "Him" who keeps getting involved. But I can't, frankly because the game itself can't find a way to tell you why these elements exist or how they are connected. Anyway, Sam wakes up after a bar brawl gone so bad he has no memory of that part of his evening, which leads to him finding out about, and thus investigating, Nick's murder. Sam goes back to the bar to work out what happened, and after finding different pieces of evidence, he enters his mind palace to reconstruct events in a visually quite stunning way, similar to the reconstruction mechanics in games like Detroit: Become Human and The Sinking City.

Before you can connect the dots however, you need to find evidence in a certain order. The order is in no way obvious, which leads you to take several laps around a crime scene to either find things that are clearly there but can't be interacted with yet, or to you suddenly finding items that have appeared out of nowhere in places you previously searched. Once Sam has found everything, you can listen to his deductions and decide what happened. There's no penalty for not coming to the right conclusion, you can mix and match different hypotheses before testing them. Once you've put events in the right order, Sam will have a eureka moment of sorts, and explain what happened. Twin Mirror has about three such instances of detective gameplay, all of them not only boring excuses for investigations ("find the thing that makes a noise suspiciously like a set of blinds rusting in the wind") but also completely arbitrary - each time Sam says he's found out how things definitely happened, the alternative outcomes are actually no less feasible. This form of detective work is nothing you'd need a mind palace for. It's also not how a mind palace works, which I'm mentioning because a mind palace, used correctly, could have been a very interesting investigative tool in a game.

Twin Mirror clearly isn't the game it was supposed to be. In development by a smaller team within Dontnod - not related to Life Is Strange - since 2016, it was announced in 2018, then later delayed following lukewarm previews in 2019. It also went from a three-episode game to a single game of roughly six to seven hours. I believe the game was heavily cut - you'll notice it sometimes in the way dialogue sounds like it's referring to conversations that should have happened, but didn't, or the way scenes will follow onto each other in a way that makes me think something was supposed to be happening in-between. The many items you can look at in every location often come without voiced dialogue, probably due to budget constraints. As good as the visuals are, they're wasted on an industrial town - a game can look as good as it wants to, it will still seem bland if there's nothing to see. As detailed as the character's faces are, they have next to no facial expressions, mostly just opening and closing their mouths, which is hard to overlook when everything else is so detailed.

At this point, you could mark Twin Mirror down as unfortunate and call it a day, but you'll notice I haven't talked about Him yet. A mind palace, as funky as this one looks, is a memory technique anyone can learn, but Sam doesn't just have a mind palace, he also talks to an imaginary person and gets lost in his own head to the point he becomes unresponsive. There are also segments in which Sam becomes presumably so stressed and upset (I have to say presumably because like many things in this game it's just not clear enough) that you have to play a mini-game to calm him down.

Dontnod never commits to giving Sam's behaviour a name, but it reads like an attempt to depict someone on the autistic spectrum. As a developer with a strong record of tackling mental and socio-political issues in their games, Dontnod does itself no favours with being noncommittal, but it also becomes painfully obvious that this was likely the better choice in Twin Mirror's case because to me it feels like no research went into the portrayal of a neurodivergent person. After Dontnod finally took steps to actively work with the people it's portraying by collaborating with GLAAD for Tell Me Why, this is an especially disappointing step backwards.

As someone the game is indirectly portraying, however coyly, I also find Twin Mirror to be quite insulting. Sam is supposedly someone who has trouble with social cues and finding the correct way to talk to people, so he has "Him" as a sort of angel on his shoulder, Sam's "socially well-adjusted" part, as the game puts it. Trouble is you never actually see Sam having problems. All you know about Sam's behaviour, and in fact most of his relationships, is delivered second-hand. People will say things to him like, "Don't be that way you can be'' or "Are you doing your, you know, thing right now?" and no one will elaborate.

The tenor of every conversation is that Sam is weird, while the dialogue choices always present you with completely normal, if slight crotchety options, and most importantly, the option to be as pleasant as a peach is also always available. Had Dontnod gone through the effort to actually present some sort of emotional turmoil or, you know, shown his difficulty with social interaction, Sam could have been an example of much-needed representation, but as it is you see a man understandably struggling to deal with everyone being an arse to him. A prominent example of Sam's "weird behaviour" is disappearing off the map because his hometown just branded him a traitor and his girlfriend abruptly left him. Sure, it's not stellar behaviour, but it's not something only a person with mental disabilities would do. Worse, within what's roughly one day of in-game time Sam will magically cure himself from his weirdness, in a sequence that is as confusing as it is patronising. It's maddening and actively harmful that Twin Mirror conflates developmental problems with being a dick just because the writers seemingly couldn't do the research required.

So much of Twin Mirror is left completely up to interpretation because it always refers to situations you as the player didn't get to see, leaving you with no connection to any of the characters. As a result, the game is just uniformly awkward. From decisions that lead absolutely nowhere, to characters that are paper-thin, the writing veers wildly in tone, and the gameplay wastes all of its potential. I was so excited to see the Dontnod formula applied to a story about adults, but Twin Mirror is simply not that game.

https://www.pcgamer.com/twin-mirror-review/

TWIN MIRROR REVIEW
A psychological mystery that fails to go any deeper than the surface.

With Twin Mirror, Dontnod has left time travel, telekinesis and mind-reading behind, stepping away from the supernatural themes of its previous games and switching it up for grounded psychological drama. A story of mystery and conspiracy is well within the Dontnod's wheelhouse, but the studio's first self-published game is unfortunately a little underwhelming. It starts out as a great detective mystery, but its unwillingness to explore difficult topics with any depth is a big issue.

Twin Mirror follows former investigative journalist Sam Higgs as he returns to his hometown, Basswood, in West Virginia. After being MIA for two years, Sam's visit is far from a celebratory event. He's been informed that his best friend and fellow reporter Nick Waldron has passed away, so he drops by to pay his respects at the funeral. As Sam begins to explore his childhood home, he gets caught up in a bigger conspiracy involving his friend's death and the mining town's community and decides to follow the case until the end. The town isn't Sam's biggest fan. Before he bailed, he wrote an article exposing the lack of safety measures in the local mine, which led to it being shut down, leaving many people jobless and angry.

From Twin Mirror's opening hour, it's pretty clear that Dontnod has perfected the technique of laying out the foundations of a mystery. Before you attend the wake, Nick's daughter, and Sam's goddaughter, confides in him that she thinks something about her father's death feels off. Shortly after, you're introduced to the Basswood townsfolk, and with the idea of a conspiracy already worming its way into your brain, your investigation cap is firmly on as you begin to chat with the locals. It's a great set-up, the stage is set and you've met all the players, so it immediately starts your mind racing about who could be involved and why.

For the first hour or two, I was genuinely excited to solve this small-town mystery. I love the aesthetic of Basswood too, the mining town has an unglamorous West Virginian charm that makes everywhere a joy to explore. Its dingy dive bars, mountain viewpoints, and cheap hotel rooms are packed with information about Basswood's residents and the tough times they've been through. It paints the perfect portrait of a struggling town where community matters.

Detective work plays out similarly to exploration in Dontnod's previous games. You're dropped into a new area and need to walk around examining objects and finding clues. This mechanic works particularly well when you're getting to know the town, examining posters and looking at photos hung on the walls of bars, but when gathering evidence for your investigation it's far from streamlined. You always have to find evidence in a certain order, meaning that you'll be doing multiple laps of the same scene until you discover things at the right time.

After gathering up enough evidence, Sam will enter his mind palace (which involves closing his eyes and thinking really hard) and these sequences are a highlight of the game. The mind palace is where is a place where Sam can put his analytical brain to the test and can use the evidence gathered to reconstruct several possible sequences of events. Examining the different timelines that Sam has visualised, you need to decide which one is the truth and pick the one that plays out exactly how events went down. This can be anything from how a bar fight developed over the course of a ten-minute spat or the reason why a car inexplicably swerved off the road. Versions of this mechanic have been used in plenty of detective games before, but Twin Mirror's take on it, where you build scenes from shattered glass, stands out.

Head scratcher
Even though the evidence gathering is flakey, I went into the rest of the game excited to uncover the secrets of the sleepy town of Basswood. Unfortunately, the investigation never really cranks up—it barely gets going at all. There's no sense of crescendo or eureka moment where you crack the case—the investigation just fizzles out. There are plenty of story threads flying around, but none of them land. Sam never really addresses his guilt for destroying the town's main livelihood, for instance. Even after he's confronted several times by angry townsfolk who are suffering because of his decision, he never really engages with it head-on. Was it right to publish the truth at the cost of people losing their jobs? It's a tough question that the game sidesteps.

Never exploring these themes beyond the surface pretty much sums up Twin Mirror. There are moments inside Sam's mind palace where he shows guilt and compassion for the characters he's hurt, but they're in the form of vapid minigames, like running through empty doorways that say 'breathe' on them or trying to find your twin in a crowd of people.

Speaking of our mystery man, Sam's twin accompanies him throughout the game, but he exists solely in Sam's mind, piping up to provide another perspective on a situation. He's different from Sam in that he's more socially conscious, trying to keep his fleshy counterpart out of trouble and helping him navigate tricky conversations. He appears in key moments, where the player's decision is meant to impact the rest of the game. After trying different paths, however, I didn't notice much difference.

Many of the fears that I voiced in my Twin Mirror preview were about the representation of this character. Although the double is, thankfully, not part of a Jekyll and Hyde situation, Dontnod is deliberately coy when addressing what exactly Sam's double is. Throughout the game, Sam walks the line between trying to be his authentic self, and acting in a way that is 'socially acceptable.' His other half tries to stop Sam acting how he likes, voicing his disapproval when his bluntness rubs people up the wrong way.

It's not only Sam's bluntness that is at odds with his double; he also has problems reading people, occasionally places the truth ahead of characters' feelings, and struggles with the invisible social etiquette of conversations. Together with his analytical mind, this makes it seem like Twin Mirror is suggesting that Sam's on the autistic spectrum, and his struggles with staying true to who he is and social conformity run throughout the game. Although Dontnod's portrayal of Sam avoids the condescending and grossly misinformed tropes found in a lot of media, there are certain story decisions that make Sam feel like a ghost of that representation. Dontnod doesn't commit to this idea, only alluding to these topics instead of exploring them with insight and understanding.

There are some interesting ideas in Twin Mirror, but the game doesn't spend any time digging into its challenging topics. There's a foundation of a story about how we relate to others and the conflict of being authentic over being accepted, but ultimately it's all hollow.

Twin Mirror feels like a string of scenes sewn together with thin narrative threads, and is ultimately a game that says nothing, lacking any sort of commitment to subjects that it coyly alludes to. For a studio whose voice is celebrated for being loud and clear about improving representation in games, Twin Mirror a misstep for Dontnod.

THE VERDICT
52

TWIN MIRROR
Twin Mirror begins with an intriguing set-up but, disappointingly, ends up going nowhere.

 

[Venser]

The main character looks like Ed Norton, he's missing time and has an imaginary friend/double? Haven't seen that before.

 

[taxalot]

Meanwhile in a Dontnod meeting :

"Okay, we tried mexicans and racism and they didn't like it. We tried transgenders and we got basically ignored by everyone. Now we do autism and it's still not working. What are we missing ? What used to work ?"
"Lesbians ?"
"Fantastic! Rewrite Life is Strange 3 immediately !"

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Reviews are rather bad.

 

[WallaceChambers]

Yeah, I just finished this game and it's horrible. I almost want to say Twin Mirror is worse than Life is Strange 2; it's not that bad but it's just as incompetent in different ways.

Twin Mirror is a complete failure of a mystery story. It's over so quickly that there's no time to build suspense or intrigue. You basically follow one real lead right to the final confrontation and the person responsible is patronizingly obvious. The game also tries to have all these unearned "epic" emotional moments but they all fall flat since nothing built up to them.

A part of that is heavily implying, but for some reason not outright saying, that Sam is autistic. The execution is extremely cringe worthy, culminating to this weird moment where Sam confronts his alter-ego within his mind. Inexplicably this boils down to a choice between being more sociable or caring about facts and truth. Which isn't enough of an inherent dichotomy to really make sense (digs at the concept of objective truth seem to be woke perspective seeping through), let alone how stupid of a notion it is that someone could just choose not to be autistic.

The crime scene recreation/investigation puzzles are cool but there's like 3 of them total and since they're in service of such a shit tier narrative, ultimately they're a waste as well. Just horrible horrible game. Tell Me Why is unironically 10x the game Twin Mirror is despite its intermittent cringe.

 

[taxalot]

The only reason I'm playing this shit is that it got cracked, it's short, and I'm waiting for Cyberpunk 2077.

But oh my god, yes, it is terrible and cringy as fuck. How could they fuck this up that bad?

 

[Ezeekiel]

Dontnod falling from grace, eh?

Excellent.

 

[taxalot]

Finished it.
It's indeed an unmitigated disaster.
There is no redeeming qualities. Choices are absent. Story is absurd. Characters are uninteresting. Gameplay is non existent.

I disliked Life is Strange 2 but it was a masterpiece compared to this crap. At least Tell Me Why had a story to tell.

 

[Humphrey Plugg]

I also just finished Twin Mirror. I don't really have anything else to add to what has already been expressed beyond a need to record my befuddlement at what a joyless slog the entire experience is. A game where the main character uses his remarkable analytical prowess to... wallow in self-recrimination about his sad sack life? A game with the rip-roaring opening of the same man gloomily regarding a banal text message on his phone, pulling his car over, going for a brief walk and then getting in his car again. This is the energy level for everything that happens in the rest of the game.

I want to particularly single out the character of Joan, apparently a teen (tween?) daughter of the protagonist's now-dead friend, but who is so peculiarly rendered, animated, written and voice acted that I was expecting a reveal that she was adopted from the crash site of a UFO.

I remain surprised at how badly so many detective games handle the "detective" parts given how much more board games like Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective and its ilk do with a lot less. Even by the current standards of the genre, there are almost no mechanics here: the "construct a timeline" sections is the closest and it's still better to churn through the very small number of feasible solutions manually rather than clunk around the environments trying to do actual deduction. The "mind palace" bits are just the same as the normal game with a slightly different palette and the look/read/talk verbs replaced with "remember".

 

[WallaceChambers]

I'm really torn between not wishing this game on my worst enemey and wanting more people to play it so I can read them shit all over it.

 

[ADULF HITLOR FAN KLUB]

This is out, doesn't look like anybody much cares though.

Nobody cares about this and nobody cared about tranny simulator Tell Me Why either.

Dontnod should do us all a favor and just shut their lame studio down.

 

[Ringhausen]

Tell Me Why is unironically 10x the game Twin Mirror is despite its intermittent cringe.

I was with you until this. At least something happens in Twin Mirror. There's a story, there are revelations, a culmination and a conclusion.
Tell Me Why was Nothing: The Game. There was no conflict, no stakes to anything, the most exciting thing to happen were a couple of disagreements on some memories (which was followed by a shrug).
Even the tranny was just a gimmick that wasn't explored at all or face any bigotry or anything. It was just baffling how boring and lethargic throughout the game was.

What they both were was just cheap as fuck. So few characters, so few locations to visit, no music. Did Life is Strange go so grossly overbudget as to not make them a good profit?
Telltale refused to improve their formula in any way, but at least they didn't scale back their games like this.

 

[LESS T_T]