The conflict isn’t given enough space to meaningfully take hold, though. The Mind Palace and The Double start to collide in interesting ways, tearing apart Higgs’ psyche. Interestingly enough, the less you lean on The Double, the less he’ll want to help.
TWIN MIRROR GAME REVIEW HOW TO
The Double offers advice for how to best interact with others, and Higgs is given the choice of whether he wants to listen to his intuition. It’s a wonderful touch for a protagonist who has great difficulty navigating conversation and emotions. There’s a character called The Double who lives in Higgs’ head and helps analyze social situations. The Mind Palace is neat, but the other side to Higgs’ introspection ends up stealing the show. It adds a new layer to puzzle-solving that’s missing in Dontnod’s other narrative-driven games. Through a hologram-type filter, we piece together the correct sequence of events to recreate a handful of crucial scenarios. Here, we get to live out scenarios step by step, like what progression of events would cause a truck to careen off the road and into a tree. Higgs has the ability to analytically imagine crime scenes in a place that’s called his Mind Palace. The opening act takes its sweet time introducing everyone and their stories the latter half is mostly only interested in major plot beats happening at a breakneck pace.Įven though it’s kneecapped by a short runtime (my playthrough was five or six hours, but felt set up to be much longer), Twin Mirror experiments with some slick evolutions of the Dontnod formula. The pacing is very disjointed in this sense. Once we’re whisked off to solve the murder of Higgs’ buddy, Twin Mirror barrels toward a conclusion without a whole lot of breathing room given to all the stuff on the periphery. Only a few of those relationships matter by the end, and the rest are never really spoken of again. That dissipated quickly because Dontnod isn’t able to build on that foundation. As someone who tries drawing the best out of all these situations, it almost felt insurmountable realizing the odds weren’t great that we could get to a place where Higgs restored his reputation with even a fraction of these people. Former bosses, former lovers, goddaughters, people who straight-up hate Higgs’ guts - everyone has an opinion and there’s a lot of conversation driving the first act.
The opening hours of Twin Mirror set a very strong foundation with all the interpersonal relationships it introduces. Popularity isn’t priority number one for a good journalist. He’s a social pariah after the town’s coal mine was closed down after he ran an exposé in the local newspaper. Higgs had a good excuse for running away in the first place. Sam Higgs is an investigative journalist who returns to his hometown of Basswood, West Virginia following the death of one of his closest friends.
Everything isn’t quite alright in the end. However, Twin Mirror is also Dontnod’s first self-published game and that might be the reason it falls short of its promise. In a lot of ways, it feels like Alan Wake by way of Life is Strange. Twin Mirror is Dontnod’s first attempt at explicitly leaning into the psychological thriller label, something it toyed with in previous games but never outright committed to. The French developer loves examining personal relationships, amplifying them through the lens of a much larger conflict, and then heaping an avalanche of emotion on top of it all. That’s Dontnod’s MO, and everyone should know it by now. Things have gone from bad to worse, from unfortunate to bizarre, and from Kinda Suspect to Super Murdery.
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