After a two-year absence, journalist Samuel Higgs is back in Basswood, his hometown in West Virginia. His former colleague and friend Nick has just died in a car accident which, of course, will very quickly prove to be doubtful. Sam then promises Nick's daughter to investigate her father's death. This informal investigation will lead him to discuss with a whole host of local characters, ranging from the barkeeper to the policeman, via the pharmacist or the waitress of the local café. If some interlocutors are friendly, others blame Sam for being responsible for the closure of the coal mine that supported the city, following an article denouncing a certain lack of security. To top it all off, Nick's girlfriend also turns out to be Sam's ex who, after the first game sequence, wakes up in his hotel room with a hangover, a bloody shirt and partial amnesia. . Suffice to say that the atmosphere is not really festive.
THE SATURDAY EVENING POLICEMAN
This is also one of the qualities of the game, which effectively distills a relatively heavy climate and takes up the theme, classic but effective, of the small American provincial town which looks clean on it. but which conceals heavy secrets. There are accents of Twin Peaks, Deadly Premonition or even Alan Wake in this Twin Mirror. But as much to warn you right away: the scenario will not turn your brain. We won't go into the details so as not to spoil the few surprises it contains, but know that it turns out to be very agreed in the end. On the other hand, the graphic realization turns out to be very good. From this point of view (and from this point of view only…) Dontnod really seems to progress with each new game. The faces are more expressive, detailed and believable than ever, while the environments border on photorealism at times, helped in this by very good light management.
All the rest of the adventure, however, is based on an extremely classic gameplay, made up of multiple-choice dialogues and small puzzles quickly dispatched.
The quality of the lighting can be particularly appreciated in Sam's "mental palace", a luminous and crystalline place which represents his inner reflections. These sequences sometimes serve the narration, and other times the gameplay. In the first case, they only allow us to trigger the visualization of memories, while in the second, they ask us to reconstruct a past or future event. To do this, you have to choose between several actions at different stages, until you find the right sequence. The game also commits a big mistake in taste by imposing a sequence of this type on us at a specific moment, in order to divert the attention of certain characters. Except that the preposterous plan that we are rolling out is absolutely not justified. There were a thousand ways to solve the problem more simply. In a happier way, Twin Mirror also invites us on all too rare occasions to manage Sam's panic attacks, for example by avoiding obstacles during an automatic race, by finding a familiar face among many silhouettes or by progressing in a maze.
IS SAM ENOUGH?
All the rest of the adventure, however, is based on an extremely classic gameplay, made up of multiple-choice dialogues and small puzzles quickly dispatched. Each scene of the game taking place in a specific place, the code to open the safe (or the key to the padlock, the computer password, etc.) is never far away, and never very complicated to discover . Good points all the same for the Pac-Man arcade terminal in the bar, perfectly playable, or for this automatic display and superimposition of the decorations of the description of certain objects. This avoids having to actively trigger the observation of the most harmless elements. We also liked the move away from the episodic format that the studio's previous games were formatted in. It's still nicer to be able to go through the story in one block. Besides, the latter is not very long, five to six hours of play being sufficient to reach one of the five possible endings. It's a bit short, especially since some promising characters are ultimately only skimmed over by the script. Twin Mirror would have really benefited from being a little more fleshed out. And a little more originality, in terms of gameplay and scenario, also wouldn't have hurt!
