king art adventure games are okay tho why so negative
We have developed a new interpretation that both retains the strengths of the original games and gives us more room to explore fresh possibilities in terms of gameplay so that players can experience the world of Black Mirror in a more direct and free way, and not “just” in classic point-and-click style.”
Well, it IS a reboot. They have to keep it close to the original plot somewhat. Have to hand it to them, moving this to 20's Scotland makes it better I think.And, jesus, did they make a lot of (backstory) changes just because despite both the castle and the chapel as well as the whole introductory sequence basically looking exactly the same:
- Protagonist raised far away instead of having moved away after personal tragedy.
- Called David instead of Samuel.
- His father's suicide brings him here instead of his grandfather's.
- 1926 Scotland instead of 1981 England.
- Apparently with expies of all the original cast, but now also with sexy psychologist love interest!
Black Mirror Game Review – A Fantastic Point-And-Click Horror Game
Written by Donny Chang
Gaming Review
November 27, 2017
Storyline: 9.5/10
Gameplay: 9.5 / 10
Graphics: 9 / 10
Replay Value: 9 / 10
Sound and Music: 9 / 10
Overall: 9.2
Black Mirror is a Lovecraftian decent into madness, part Call of C’thulu, part Angel Heart, part fever nightmare.
Though it shares the name, this game has nothing to do with the Black Mirror TV show. I enjoy the show, but this game just has something else about it. It is gothic horror at its finest. Like a brilliant novel, I find myself thinking about it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. It has become my safe space that I slip away to when I’m having to sit through another meeting or another reprimand for not applying myself to work. As the small hours of the morning crawl around, I want to play just one more chapter to find out whodunnit? And the answer to that question is as shocking as it is poetic, like a love letter between Charles Manson and Satan.
Black Mirror gives me the same feeling I got when I first played Resident Evil way back in the day. Not Racoon City, I think it was RE 2 which took place at the Wesker Mansion, all candlelight and shadows and gloom and impending doom. It’s beautiful! I really mean that. Every one of the over 150 locations is a work of art. Even though it is set in (fairly) modern-day England, it feels very Victorian and the anachronistic nature of it adds to the sense of unease.
As far as I understand, this version is a reboot of the original Black Mirror released in 2003 by Czech games company Future Games. They released 2 sequels to the game and I hope they do that with the reboot as well.
You are Samuel Gordon, forced back to your ancestral family manor after 12 years, upon hearing of the death of your grandfather, William Gordon. His body was found dangling off the spiked fencing below a broken window and has been written-off as a suicide by everyone but you. The family manor, by the way, is called Black Mirror. You arrive there and begin your own investigation and soon discover your grandfather’s obsession with the occult and specifically his interest in the “Gordon Family Curse”. Not really something you want to be known for, I should imagine.
You spend the first few minutes of Black Mirror uncovering your grandfather’s research into your family history and discover that the Gordon line started back in the 1200’s by two brothers who were opposite sides of the same coin (kind of a living yin/yang type thing). The one brother was an evil son of a bitch who did some really nasty stuff to open a portal to hell on the current site of the manor and the other brother killed him and contained the portal, but didn’t close it. Before expiring, the evil brother, Mordred, pronounces a curse on his brother and all his descendants until five innocent souls are sacrificed and his evil soul will be released into the world once more. Chilling stuff!
Your grandfather’s notes also make mention of 5 keys necessary to shut the portal and that’s where your adventure begins.
The gameplay is point and click, and the system works very well. The objects you need to interact with are easy enough to identify in the scene and puzzles are real brain busters. I fact, I will confess, I consulted the online walkthroughs more than once to find the solution to a puzzle or two. You spend your time exploring the Black Mirror Manor and surrounding lands finding clues and getting the keys. Five more deaths follow until the shocking revelation occurs at the end.
The story is perfect. The characters are deep and multidimensional, like characters in a good book and there’s a lot of really good voice acting. I do mean a lot. There are over five hours of voice narration throughout the game and this is, as far as I can tell, a point of contention for some.
Your character, Samuel Gordon, doesn’t sound like a video game hero. He is no Serious Sam or Max Paine type. He comes across a bit timid and unsure of himself, but I think that’s the point. He isn’t John McClane visiting his estranged wife over Christmas, killing terrorists with feet full of glass. He is just Samuel Gordon, mild-mannered English lad thrust into a Gothic world of insanity and evil. I like the voice treatment. I think it works.
There are few plot holes that make you think. How did that character possibly do that when it happened over there and that character was all the way over there at the time? Again, this is not a deal breaker. The gameplay is really good and the puzzles are the right kind of challenging and the ending had me groaning like a tormented spirit cursed to wander the halls of some haunted manor somewhere cold, dark and miserable. It’s really fantastic!
I rate this game really HIGHLY! If all the joy of Christmas is leaving a sickly saccharine taste in your mouth, this game is the cure. It’ll have you shuffling around the house in your slippers, pale-faced, muttering: “Abandon all hope ye that enters here…” So it’s the perfect Christmas gift then, in my opinion. It’s only available on PC, but it’s not very resource intensive so any fairly modern, entry-level GPU will give you a smooth playing experience.
Ironically, Black Mirror gives me hope. Hope that we are not yet living in a world where the only choices we have are the mega-franchises, the Marvels and Star Wars and Call of Duty’s of the world, but there are small independent intellectual properties out there that are as good and often better than the studio giants.
Black Mirror is a fantastic point-and-click horror mystery game. I give it two thumbs up!
Black Mirror Review
byChelsea McPherson November 25, 2017
After your father’s death, you are called to Sgathan Dubh Castle – Black Mirror Castle, for those unfamiliar with Gaelic – for the first time in your life so you may reclaim ownership of the estate… if that is what you wish. But there is something else afoot, something dark and deadly… and it’s up to you to discover what it is before its poison takes you too.
Black Mirror is a modern re-imaging of the acclaimed gothic-horror adventure Black Mirror and its two sequels. Brought to life by KING Art and published by THQ Nordic, Black Mirror follows David Gordon, who is visiting his ancestral home for the first time in his life following his father’s suicide. Sgathan Dubh Castle is a large and isolated estate set in highland Scotland. And it hides a deep, dark secret that threatens to claim David’s sanity… and his life.
The original adventure trilogy followed Samuel Gordon and Darren Michaels as they searched for the truth behind the Curse of the Black Mirror. Black Mirror is a reboot, featuring a new story and a new character, but it holds true to the atmosphere of its predecessors.
We’re thrust right into it.
Upon opening the game, I was alarmed yet intrigued to find myself in the midst of a rather intense action scene, shattering my perceptions of what this game would be like. I’d believed it would be something to one of those investigative games you would play on Facebook or the like. But no, it isn’t that at all, although it features elements like that here and there.
At the beginning – the prelude, you could say – you play as a mystery man whom I believe to be Edward Gordon, your late grandfather. He is running, he is being chased, and he is afraid. You cannot see what you are running from, which somehow makes it more chilling, although you can hear voices. Whether they are of living or dead, it’s impossible to tell.
And what a prelude it is.
This is a fairly short scene. After hiding a small totem you were carrying, and a few words about ‘your son’, you continue on until you find the spirit of a woman. A brief interaction with her, and she vanishes with a scream. You keep going until you stumble – you are quite literally stumbling – upon a Stonehenge-esque structure. In the very centre is a tablet of stone. You cut your hand and you smear upon the stone a rune with your own blood. After declaring that whomever is chasing you will not get your son, you proceed to eat the paper you carried with you… and then you smash your lamp over your head. Fuel crashes down upon your body, and fire follows.
You burn to death, and something appears beside you, something humanoid but not human. It looks around, but it does not find what it seeks.
I watched this with some apprehension, and could only really think one thing:
What the actual heck is going on here?
After that, it’s time to see the Black Mirror Castle.
The next scene is comparatively lighter than the dark, fiery demise of Grandfather Edward. David Gordon is introduced, travelling in an old-timey car through the sunset-lit highlands of 1926’s Scotland. You are made aware of a small box beside you, and you can check it. Atop it rests a note from your mother, and inside, a piece of a castle model and a scrap of paper. Six clues are scribbled on it, clues that will start your quest into discovering the truth about Sgathan Dubh.
And here’s where the mystery intensifies. You are led to your room after meeting Lady Margaret, your rather cold grandmother. After being startled by a clock and being watched by something in the darkness, you are instructed not to leave by the butler, Mr McKinnon, who cites that it could be unsafe because you don’t know the house. What’s the first thing I did? Leave and go for a wander. Once I had a candle to light my way, of course.
You’re being watched…
What did I notice?
The game features a LOT of wandering about, exploring the interior of the castle. There’s quite a lot to look at… when the camera lets you. It’s a fixed sort of camera, focusing on one area, and shifting whenever you move to another. It allows a little bit of looking around with the mouse (if you’re using a keyboard like I do). The issues I found with the camera in this style is that sometimes I could not go where I wanted to easily because I couldn’t actually see where I was going, and it was difficult to see some objects unless I was essentially on top of them. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great mechanic; I’ve seen it work in games like Final Fantasy X. In Black Mirror, it just needs a little bit of tweaking.
There also isn’t a lot of music. Most of the time I was wandering about in complete and utter silence. The music that did sound in some areas – during cutscenes, mostly, or when I found something of importance – fit in well, however. It was hauntingly ambient and had a rather prominent leitmotif to it. Which adds to the chilling mystery the game revolves around.
Glitches were abound.
After I wandered around, picked up a few objects, and met with a wonderfully grouchy Scottish man named Rory – who is the gardener of Sgathan Dubh – I headed to the library. It was there I discovered that there was more to the mystery of why I was here than I believed. Lady Margaret and the other residents of the estate were hiding things from me.
And this is where my game decided it did NOT want to play nice anymore. Instead it decided to pitch a fit at me. I could no longer flip the notes I got around, something that is important to working out the puzzles. I had to completely reset my game for this to fix. Only to encounter ANOTHER glitch with a little code I had to put in.
It ended up backwards and upside down.
This is what it was SUPPOSED to look like… This was once out of all the times I did it. Once.
Several tries later, I got it by inputting the code backwards, and worked out that puzzle. I was soon able to progress… only to encounter yet another glitch in which my candle disappeared after I set it down on a table. And two very important notes vanished as well. It was enough to disappoint me, although it only took away from the game slightly.
The puzzles provide a great challenge. It’s actually fantastic. And they work well with the mystery of the Gordons.
Any other things of note?
Outside of glitches that break the game, the characters seem well fleshed out. Most of them are quite reserved, even cold towards you. The only exception to this is Rory – who seems friendly in his own way – and the maid, who’s quite terrified of you especially when it’s revealed you can see strange things… just like your father could. That’s an aspect that further draws one into Black Mirror’s rather well-done story.
I also relate to David in a strange way: he babbles in his sleep. I do too. Some very disturbing things, admittedly. But it helped my immersion.
Another thing is that it’s not as point-and-clicky as I believed it would be. It’s a rehashing of that style, allowing for free roaming and exploration coupled with elements of a point-and-click style. For this game it works quite well, so no complaints here!
Final thoughts on Black Mirror:
This is a very well thought out game. It’s chilling, it leaves the player questioning things, and it’s reminiscent of the Eel Marsh House from The Woman in Black. With a lot of inspiration coming from Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, this game is a sure hit for lovers of gothic horror. It does need a few major fixes, especially in regards to the glitches, but above all it’s a great game with a spooky story and a thrilling mystery.
THE GOOD
THE BAD
- Characters were fleshed out
- Gripping beginning
- Intriguing mystery
- Puzzles are difficult but not impossibly so
- Use of Gaelic and runic symbols fits with the antiquity of the estate
- Scenery is beautiful
7.5
- Camera setup is a little bit wonky
- No option to toggle keyboard controls
- Subtitles sometimes didn’t match up
- Game-breaking glitches
Good
Review Summary
A good little gothic horror game that may need a few more tweaks to become something spectacular. Definitely something worth looking into if you like horror, though.
Black Mirror REVIEW
The Good:
Suitably macabre storyline; lovingly designed, gloomily gothic Scottish setting for the new Black Mirror mansion; impactful creative visualisation; decent voice acting.
The Bad:
Dated and clunky gameplay controls, graphics and character animation; copious backtracking and incessant load times; shifting camera angles disorient in open spaces; some flawed and repetitive gameplay design.
Uneven
2.5 stars out of 5
Scoring System - Editorial Policies
Our Verdict:
A brief reboot of the cult classic series, Black Mirror does well to pile more richly atmospheric doom and gloom on the Gordon family, but is hobbled by creaking mechanics and poor design decisions.
Written by Shuva Raha — December 1, 2017
A frantic run across a moonlight-drenched Scottish moor brings John, one of the many ill-fated scions of the Gordon family, to an ominous stone henge. Chased by apparitions, real or imagined, the man stumbles upon an ancient bloodstained alter, and begging forgiveness for failing his son, sacrifices himself in a valiant effort to atone for the sins of the fathers. The misty, foreboding moor, John’s spiral into madness, and the tragic prelude will be oh-so-familiar to any fan of the Black Mirror series, but this is not the Gordon family or the Black Mirror castle as you may remember them. As John’s adult son David steps onto the premises of the fabled family manor a few days later, armed with little more than a cryptic note warning him about the Gordon curse, you feel genuine apprehension about the horrors that lurk in wait for him in its maze of rooms and corridors.
The fourth series instalment, but the first to be fully developed by KING Art Games, is simply titled Black Mirror and attempts to rekindle the saga six years after it was originally concluded. A reboot rather than a sequel, it is billed as a ‘modern re-imagining’ set in the early 1900s, with David coming to Scotland for the first time since his mother fled to then-British occupied India to save him from his unfortunate legacy. On a positive note, this episode is creatively aligned with its predecessors in terms of gothic doom and gloom, and weaves a duly macabre storyline. However, it is fairly short if you exclude the hours of backtracking across the sprawling mansion and neighbouring areas, waiting for frequent and lengthy load times along the way, and the constant struggle to perform even the simplest of tasks due to the clunky controls. The family home is lavishly decorated, but the 3D graphics are dated by at least a decade, with characters moving awkwardly and often through each other and furniture. The Black Mirror revival is clearly a labour of love, so it’s unfortunate that the experience is let down by mechanics that simply do not match up to the ambition.
The game centres around David’s arrival at Sgathan Dubh – ‘Black Mirror’ in Gaelic – in response to the family lawyer’s letter to sort out inheritance issues in the wake of his father’s death. David is coldly received by his elderly grandmother, Lady Margaret, the ramrod-straight stern matriarch of the Gordon family. She disdainfully dismisses her deceased son as a flaky troublemaker, and is uninterested in bonding with her grandson. David himself is a bit of a milquetoast, a benign but likeable young man. He is curious and adaptive, and works to systematically unravel his family’s secrets. The story uses Edgar Allan Poe’s concept of ‘dreams within dreams’, blending reality with visions of the past to create a layered narrative. A host of ghosts, portrayed by fluid white outlines, cavort about the mansion and infringe upon David’s consciousness, propelling him to tease out the Gordons’ tragic history one lurid chapter at a time. It is a complex and disturbing tale of noble intentions, incest and abuse, familial treachery and brazen cruelty, spanning generations and entwined with hints of the paranormal.
A ragtag bunch of supporting characters also inhabit the mansion: overbearing butler Angus; mousy maid Ailsa; blind and withered gardener Rory, endowed with a surprisingly elaborate backstory; and David’s uncouth, acne-riddled, redheaded cousin Eddie. Andrew the lawyer is as shifty as they come, and keeps matters muddied while being perfectly polite. A young blonde doctor from the local asylum, Leah, is shoehorned in on a vague pretext, possibly to add a strong female character to the mix. She partners with David for most of the game, adding little value but complicating the already-tedious mechanics by being another obstacle to navigate around.
Even as the game sets up the twisty plot, it tortures you with its incredibly tiresome navigation. I played with a gamepad, which is only marginally better than the keyboard-mouse combination, but the trouble is inherent in the overall game design as much as poor implementation. Even its most basic activities like walking and aligning the characters with relevant objects are difficult to control, with slight adjustments leading to large variations and jerky movements on screen. The constantly altering camera angles do not help. With increasing complexity, like interacting with moving hotspots during tightly-timed sequences, the problem escalates exponentially. It is possible to die abruptly and repeatedly while you fiddle with the finicky controls, forcing you to reload from a recent autosaved checkpoint or a manual save that may not be immediately before the fatal moment. On one occasion, you encounter just such a sequence right after clumsily piecing together a jigsaw, and each time you die, you must restart by reassembling the puzzle. David also suffers from intense brain seizures, and you must scramble to resolve that before the painful keening sound overwhelms you as well.
As annoying as they are, fortunately the ‘action’ elements are limited as the game is largely focused on conversations and exploration, with a handful of quests. Some of these are inventory-based, such as ridding the cellar of spiders. Interacting with the inventory involves multiple clicks, and each time you must rifle sequentially through the collected objects for the right one. The few logic puzzles generally involve cracking ciphers to unlock doors and drawers, and some trial-and-error pattern matches. Strangely, many of these occur in the first chapter, creating the early impression of a very traditional point-and-click adventure, though the game progressively deviates from that approach the further you progress. Special mention must be made of the frustrating master key puzzle – this key has multiple tiny arms that must fit patterned locks, but even after you figure out the strategy involved, it is incredibly awkward to position the tiny arms in close-up using the clunky controls. This puzzle is repeated four times with various combinations of additional complexity.
While the game is generally linear, the quest log is very useful for the many occasions when you cannot intuitively tell what to do next. David mostly explores alone, or with outsider Leah, so his diary entries are essential to get the detailed context and backstory. There are a few decision points, like whether you want to break open a desk or unlock it with a pick, but these are mostly academic and have no bearing on the overall outcome. Another major problem area is backtracking across the mansion and the grounds looking for people and places. It is an expansive arena comprising several large rooms, kitchen and dining areas, cellars and secret spaces, the infamous old wing, as well as external locations like a lake, a greenhouse, an abandoned chapel, and the nearby ruins of an old village, each of which is preceded by a noticeable load time no matter how often you visit. Characters can appear randomly in any location, and some areas are difficult to find in the dimly lit scenes, especially where Leah holds the only source of light and trails far behind David. Moreover, certain hotspots are triggered by ongoing events, requiring you to return to places and examine items that were previously inactive.
The graphics are also a mixed bag due to technical issues. A lot of attention and detailing has gone into creating the historic, imposing Sgathan Dubh. Though slowly crumbling to ruins alongside the Gordon family’s decline, its plush interiors, laden with embroidered carpets and curtains, game trophies, expensive furniture and decorations, are a testament to its decadent history. The eerie ambience is enhanced by much of the game being played by candlelight: the shifting shadows and reflections off glass cabinetry, the beautiful stone-and-tile flooring, and ceramicware as David explores the antiquated mansion at night is a visual delight. Some characters are intricately detailed, like grizzled Rory and still-elegant Margaret, while others, like Leah and Eddie, are somewhat rudimentary. All have plasticky, doll-like hair.
There is a lot of impactful creative visualisation, both in-game as well as in the many cutscenes that tie the segments together, such as the illusion of the chapel turning into an underwater montage, David and Leah exploring the lakeshore by moonlight, the assorted dramatic crimes committed during the course of the game, and the depiction of the throbbing, glittering black evil that lives at the heart of the manor. There are many small touches as well, such as the realistic diary, scribbled in a tough-to-read cursive handwriting with notations and mistakes. Such attention to detail hints at the effort invested by the developers, but while graphically the game runs consistently at over 60 FPS, allowing for stutter-free visuals on high performance systems, the outdated technology results in clumsy character animation. Lip sync sort of matches spoken dialogues, though most facial expressions are wooden except during strong exaggerations.
The script is well-written, and easy to understand despite the brevity of the game's 5-6 hour play time. While some names and references may be confusing at first, eventually all loose ends are tied up – in fact, one may argue, a bit too neatly. There are some minor typos in the subtitles, and in some places Leah is referenced as Hanna. The voice acting suits the personalities and circumstances of the characters in tone and tenor. The difficult-to-imitate Scottish accent appears only rarely – strongest in Rory’s diction, and to some extent in local girl Ailsa’s lilt, while David, Margaret and Angus the butler speak in modern, neutral British accents. The classical themed soundtrack contributes strongly to the ominous atmosphere, and the title track with bagpipes creates an instant connect with the Scottish roots of these Gordons.
The Black Mirror reboot does justice to the series by staying true to its dark, treacherous heart that has doomed an entire lineage of tormented men and women. This instalment delves into the root of the family evil, and explains how the Gordons came to be cursed, despite the nobility of their original intent. It does not shy away from exposing how the curse steadily corrupted their behaviour over the years, and like the imperfect but unforgettable original that rattled adventure gamers in 2003 with the audacity of its cruel plot, this game also dares to walk a path rarely taken in this genre. Unfortunately, the other notable curse this time is of a largely technical nature, and the poor design decision to play right into those limitations. These operational difficulties at least tarnish, if not outright eclipse at times, the narrative and creative effort on evident display throughout. As a series fan, I do appreciate the effort to revive the series, and there’s no denying that there is still scope to expand upon this storyline, so I hope this isn’t the swan song for the franchise just as it’s being reborn. On its own terms, however, I can recommend this flawed adventure only if you are staunchly committed to the spirit of the story.
i watched it on netflix and thought it was stupidSo has anyone actually played this or has it been just declared shit a priori
4 of them if you're not trolling.There was a Black Mirror game?