Twin Mirror | Developer: Don’t Nod | Publisher: Don’t Nod | Year: 2020
Impressive art direction can’t save this meagre adventure from derivative, non-committal storytelling.
Two men and a woman pose in the box art for Twin Mirror

Twin Mirror

Originally planned as an episodic game, Twin Mirror instead ended up a much shorter 3D adventure lacking the narrative energy and character detail to keep players in suspense. It follows a journalist called Samuel Higgs, who after returning to the West Virginian home he left behind years prior, stumbles onto a mystery involving his recently deceased best friend. In the process of solving the case, Sam must navigate the tricky relationships he also left behind, with his former colleagues, god-daughter, and ex-girlfriend forcing him to reconcile some rather painful past actions.

Twin Mirror is a pretty game with well-made character models supporting many voice-acted cutscenes. Sam possesses the supernatural ability to recreate his memories within the mysterious “Mind Palace” inside his head, with the multi-faceted structures inside this dreamscape looking really cool. A scene of Sam climbing out of the depths of his own mind — as glittering glass platforms materialise from a waterfall in front of him — is merely one such visual which looks amazing.

The gameplay is much lighter in effect. Twin Mirror certainly flies by breezily enough, but because the narrative is kinda boring, there is a feeling of the game playing itself. The story is split into chapters where Sam investigates 3D scenes for clues. The game borrows a mechanic from Remember Me, as Sam creates mental constructs to help him re-enact crimes at the scenes where they happened. Players inspect the environment and arrange a live story board explaining how the events unfolded. It’s a cool idea, but it’s only used a few times in the whole game.

A generic plot doesn’t helps matters. Sam must clear his name by uncovering who killed his best friend, but players never feel any pressure with this setup because of how quickly the story progresses past potentially interesting moments of conflict. Any side characters Sam meets in the early stages are quickly forgotten about; his relationships are explored in little depth; and the major decisions players make don’t feel particularly impactful. Other than Don’t Nod’s sustained fascination with the topic of miner’s rights, it was hard for me to recall anything interesting about the plot after it ended.

One aspect that could have made things interesting is actually the game’s biggest failing. When you see how Sam is presented as a character — his mental acuity; his aversion towards social situations; his vulnerability to panic attacks and mood swings; it’s clear Don’t Nod wanted to explore the idea of a video game protagonist with Autistic Spectrum Condition (ASC).

They even represent Sam’s inner voice as an actual character only Sam can see — a bespectacled mystery man who provides commentary on Sam’s innermost thoughts and insecurities. If you’ve seen the movie, Mr. Brooks, it’s like that, and at certain dramatic moments, Sam must choose between what his mind is telling him, and what he feels in his heart. There are traces of good intentions here, but Twin Mirror is simply too short and underwritten for its weightier traits to gain any traction. Vague hints are dropped about Sam’s condition, and yet the gameplay fails to explore or express his invisible differences in any meaningful way. (The word “Autism” is never said either.)

Perhaps the writers were being overly careful to avoid offending anyone, who knows? Either way, such nebulous characterisation is confusing. Take the final branching decision Sam makes as the perfect example: as I sat there reading the dialogue, not understanding what life-changing decision I was being asked to make for Sam, simply because of how vaguely it was being talked about. Ultimately, this is a piece of media with nothing profound to say about ASC or how it affects the people who have it, which is not only a huge shame, but also uncharacteristic for a Don’t Nod production.

Twin Mirror is a shallow effort that should have been so much more — a game that ends before it truly begins. Indeed, there are stat screens which show percentage summaries of the choices players made during play, and even these are stowed away in a menu as the game races to be over. It’s clear this production got de-scoped at some point during development, with the end result being the weakest offering Don’t Nod has released so far.

Twin Mirror on Steam »