Twin Mirror

Is there life for episodic adventures after Life Is Strange?

PC, PS4, Xbox One

Developer Dontnod Entertainment

Publisher Bandai Namco Games

Format PC, PS4, Xbox One

Origin France

Release 2019

There are times when Dontnod’s games could almost be parodies played straight, their scenarios as bizarre as their execution is earnest. Consider Sam Higgs, the stubbled babyface at the heart of three-part psychological thriller Twin Mirror. He’s just awoken with a shattering hangover in a motel room, having returned to his hometown of Basswood after a two-year absence to reckon with some unspecified personal trauma. In the bathroom there is a shirt covered in blood, the origin of which Sam can’t remember; Sam, coincidentally, is shirtless. There’s also a dent in the wall and a broken phone lying beneath it.

A lesser mind might simply have looked at all these things and made some basic correlations. Sam, however, is something of a modern-day Sherlock – specifically, the kind played by Benedict Cumberbatch. He resorts to his Memory Palace, an ethereal realm of floating boulders, lazily orbiting train cars, and staircases that solidify under your feet as you walk. Here, you can enter a gap-walled projection of a mundane environment and interact with silhouettes to relive preceding events, switching between the Palace and the waking world with a shoulder button to yank pieces of evidence into the illusion.

Having cobbled together enough clues, and picked your key props, you can play back the full scenario to advance the plot. In our demo there appears to be only one viable version of events, but the game’s scoring you on the results suggests that it’s possible, in later situations, to deduce awry, with various endings hanging in the balance. Join up the dots to the simulation’s satisfaction and the tattered surfaces of the illusory space slowly fill in, like sand flowing through an hourglass.

This is no mere design gimmick, but part of Sam’s backstory, an ability he has had from birth. A precedent is Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher, in which a character takes refuge in his mind’s ‘memory warehouse’ after being possessed by a malevolent alien. It’s to be hoped that similar upheavals are in store for Sam, because so far, using the Memory Palace feels about as captivating as asking somebody to pass the salt in semaphore. While the mystery of the bloodied shirt has a certain thrill, the individual deductions you’re asked to make at this stage are utterly humdrum, and the act of making them painfully circuitous.

The Palace isn’t just a convenient overlay in the Ubisoft style, the same geometry with different objects and textures, but a distinct environment. Before we can begin our analysis of the motel room, we’re asked to take a brief but tedious tour of some teleporting doors. Perhaps later episodes will reveal all this to be a satire of augmented reality, or of the tendency in games to clunkily systematise everyday acts – the developer’s description of Twin Mirror as a “dark” and “mature” story suggests otherwise. Adding insult to injury, the deduction scenes oblige you to sit through Sam’s quasi-internal monologue, which is so far every bit as graceful as the terms “dark” and “mature” suggest. “Time to stare into my own abyss,” he declares at one stage, gazing at his barechested reflection. Right you are.

At three episodes in scope, Twin Mirror has less space for emotional development than Life Is Strange or even the average Telltale series. For all the grandiosity of the Memory Palace mechanic, it feels like a generic side-story made with limited resources: just one more vaguely Lynchian tale of secrets and surmises in a grubby American backwater. The CSI elements may yet prove their worth if later scenarios have more fun with the surreality of the mechanic while stiffening the challenge, while sharper dialogue could work wonders, too. Still, it’s peculiar to see Dontnod debuting such insipid-seeming fare alongside Life Is Strange

2, which will launch first and probably still be underway when Twin Mirror arrives. If this is an attempt to extend the studio’s clout as an episodic storyteller beyond its reputation-making series, Sam feels like the wrong man at the wrong time.

The CSI elements may yet work if later scenarios have more fun with the mechanic