Coming back home isn’t always easy. Developer DONTNOD understands that, and the studio’s upcoming investigative adventure game Twin Mirror drills down into that unease, featuring a gorgeous West Virginian backdrop and a murder mystery to pick through alongside a special imaginary friend. It often seems like a mix of several different properties - certainly David Cage’s oeuvre, along with TV shows like Sherlock, and Hannibal – though a stilted writing style and some overly familiar adventure game tropes may put undue strain on the story's tensions
Playing as journalist Samuel Higgs, Twin Mirror presents the relatable scenario of returning to a history-rich hometown where the ghost of past failures linger like a shroud. That’s Basswood, a beaten-down highway blip of disgruntled miners, damn fine cups of diner coffee, and local bars where no one's a stranger. Sam been gone for two years, but the sudden death of a Nick, an estranged best friend, drags him back in, despite his intense (and possibly medicated) anxiety. He’s soon warily reabsorbed into the tiny community, urged along by his bereaved goddaughter Joan "Bug" Waldron, who suspects foul play in her father Nick’s passing.
Screen Rant was afforded some time with Twin Mirror's preliminary hours, getting to experience Basswood’s apparent conflicts firsthand, including the ones in Sam’s own mind. The game’s title at least partially relates to some of his thus-far unexplained quirks, like an alternate-world “mind palace” which acts as both escape and personal hell. There's also Sam's invisible imaginary friend The Double, who serves as a calming mechanism and confidante, seemingly knowing Sam better than he knows himself. In the earlier noninteractive preview we first covered, The Double in Twin Mirror was only visible in the soft-focus background, but here in this preview we can clearly determine that he is Sam, only with glasses and more attentive hair care.
Like other adventure game protagonists, Sam has a comment or quip about nearly any interactive buoy, and there is a loaded reliance on clumsy exposition in most any of Twin Mirror’s private ruminations and conversations. It makes for a frequently insecure script whose characters all prompt some cumbersome reflection or detail upon introduction. Several of these lines describe points which should already be obvious to the protagonist while others manifest out of the ether with strange reactions and phrasing. An early conversation with Bug in Sam’s car instantly pivots her from frustrated rage to relaxed jokes, and the inconsistent tone rarely waivers from there.
It doesn’t help that there’s also a lack of player agency in how investigative interludes resolve. Yes, as a narrative-driven adventure game, this is a recognizable genre bugbear, but most of Twin Mirror’s playable mysteries involve simply tracking down every interactive hotspot until they’re fully spent and the scene is allowed to continue. It defangs stressful sequences, like when Sam has to figure out what happened during an earlier drunken brawl and the player is left to perform the contemporary equivalent of an pixel hunt to run out the clock.
However, that’s really not the main concern, which lies firmly in the script’s unusual turns of phrase. On seeing a broken item in the abovementioned bar scene, Sam remarks that “The pot was completely shattered. Looks like it might’ve been kicked,” whatever that means. Hugh, the pharmacist in town (who seems laboriously primed as the villain for the larger plot) is described with the sentence, “He looks like those doctors you see on commercials.” A snack on a shelf in Hugh’s pharmacy brings the nonsensical anecdote, “Reminds me of a girl I met. She could only eat chips when she had stomachaches.” It’s as if Twin Mirror’s writers have never actually listened to Americans speaking to each other, or to themselves.
Twin Mirror’s heralded mind palace is also a strained device, aside from a specific sequence which we’ll describe below. Its early instances present it as a refuge, an analytical dreamland where Sam can isolate and revisit specific memories free from real world distractions. The earlier video implied that there was some control afforded for when Sam could visit his mind palace, or that it was a discrete area to be explored and interacted with, but it only pops up at bespoke moments in the game (usually times of stress), and any interactivity therein is strictly limited and scripted. Most of the time, Sam drops into it for a flashback, which just becomes tiresome; if a flashback was required of the story, it could simply be a flashback, rather than engage some fanciful crystalline dreamworld.
All that being said, the Twin Mirror preview’s final puzzle involved Sam visiting the location of Nick’s death and putting together the available clues in the environment to recreate and test the police report’s veracity. While generally straightforward, this section was much more interactive as well, with each considered clue transforming a looping animation of Nick’s car careening off the road. It showcases how the mind palace can exist more as a testing lab for detective theories than a backstory-delivery device or nightmare machine, and using it to solve further mysteries could be a promising component of the full game.
Twin Mirror’s presentation is another definite high point, full of crisp country visuals and soft autumnal lighting. The character designs are not particularly memorable on their own, but interiors feature fine textures and detail, despite the fact that these environments were mostly noninteractive. Still, a lot of the game’s visual presentation doesn’t really pose a significant departure from, say, the Pacific Northwest shown in Alan Wake, so it’s also hard to describe this setting as noticeably singular just yet. The sound design is summarily excellent, though, with moody themes and a few compelling folk songs that might do a better job of capturing the Appalachian region.
There were a few binary choices in the preview which seemed impactful, letting the player side with either Sam or The Double’s intuition at key plot points. The implication for these important, untimed decisions is that they do affect the flow of the story, but we’ve also seen this kind of thing in games before Twin Mirror. It’s hard to determine how else DONTNOD intend to subvert adventure game expectations as in the hit Life is Strange series, but fans will get to find out when the studio's new game releases next month.
Twin Mirror releases on PC (via the Epic Games Store), PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on December 1.