Black Mirror
At the mansion of madness
DEVELOPER KING ART • PUBLISHER THQ NORDIC • PRICE US$ 30 • A VAILABLE AT STEAM kingart-games.com
As soon as you start playing Black Mirror it feels both somewhat modern and something like a throwback. There’s a good reason for this. Black Mirror is an original psychological horror story but it’s also a reboot of a respected but barely remembered series of horror-themed point and click adventures, with three games published between 2003 and 2011. It feel old fashioned in the fact that it’s not going for jump scares or survival horror style vignettes, but rather using the story characters and oppressive atmosphere to instil the player with a more nebulous dread. That said, the interface and pace of the game feels much more modern, with interactive objects or points of interest being highlighted and the puzzles being both logical and tactile. While not always successful, there’s something kind of charming about Black Mirror. It wears its inspirations on its sleeve – the only readable books in a library when you first explore it are by H.P. Lovecraft and Poe, and everything revolves around things mankind was not meant to know.
It’s refreshing to play a horror game that’s more about atmosphere than it is about jump scares. It’s 1926. Players take the role of David Gordon, a young man left a rather creepy ancestral home after the death (via self-immolation in the brief interactive prologue) of his father. Cue a distant and cold matron, a confrontational and unpleasant butler, a cadaverous groundskeeper, a mysterious boy, a sly lawyer and lots of spooky sounds. One of the very first quests sets up the tone of the game neatly. David, on his first night in the Gordon estate must explore the house and find his way into his father’s study to find more information on what happened to him as none of the residents of the house seem willing or able to tell him any details of the death. This involves sneaking around the house by candlelight, eventually finding an old writing desk in the library, solving a multi-part but logical puzzle to open a secret compartment in the desk, finding a key, using that to open the study doors, then solving another puzzle to uncover some information. All the while there are spooky noises in the background, and the flickering of candlelight. It’s quaintly charming.
The modern Black Mirror introduces a mechanic new to the series with interactive apparitions. These ghostly visions help flesh out the history of the Gordon clan and add a nice layer of the palpably supernatural to the game but they never really feel as though they are fully capitalised on. That’s the problem with the game as a whole – it brings up some interesting ideas and hints at some fascinating situations, but as a whole the game plays it too safe to really nail scares or the cosmic dread of its Lovecraftian premise. It could be a matter of resources – Black Mirror doesn’t look particularly great and lacks polish – or perhaps a factor of the mostly traditional adventure game format. Whatever the case, Black Mirror has a certain charm that makes it rather endearing, but ultimately it fails to live up to both its premise and the games that came before.
the only readable books in a library when you first explore it are by H.P. Lovecraft and Poe