Twin Mirror2020

[copied by Steam] Twin Mirror is or was the first approach Don't Nods to create a game apart from the usual LiS story. While Tell Me Why was still somewhat comparable and also tells a Comig of Age story of queer teens, Twin Mirror hits the score 20:15 Sat.1 Thriller for the mum of two kids. Sam Higgs, an investigative journalist and our game character with an imaginary friend in mind, returns after two years to a small mining town (which DontNod always has with small towns) where he has done some chaos through one of his articles to attend the funeral or at least the funeral of an old friend. That's where the story goes, because our buddy, Nick, probably didn't just die in a car accident. At least that’s how his daughter and his new girlfriend see it. Our task now is to investigate the matter and get the investigative skills out again. The story is per se captivating but somehow also very much on the hair and finally cookie-cutter detective thriller and much too rushed. Turns happen out of the blue, and if you think it’s just starting, it’s over. At 7h, Twin Mirror is not extremely short but compared to LiS 1 and 2 or Tell Me Why already much shorter. In Tell Me Why I was just at the end of the second episode after 5 hours. Especially the gameplay sections are downright laughable in Twin Mirror, even if you are used to the Don't Nod standard. The gimmick of Twin Mirror is entering the thought palace of Sam by focusing on memories or the future and talking to his second inner self. Actually a cool feature, which graphically reminds of Quantum Break but also a feature, which is much too little used. Apart from that, it is again just walking around and looking at things. Unfortunately, the writing is once again very modest and you realize all the more that the writers at DontNod like to write teendramas instead of serious thrillers and English is not their mother tongue. The fact that the story presentation by the characters is not particularly good is also related to the really bad setting. You simply notice that the speakers have recorded their lines independently of each other in different sessions and thus no flow arises. Every conversation seems wooden and as if the two people talking were not talking to each other but about each other. Sam can all too often go to objects and examine them and then say something like "Hm, yeah, that looks like a tire that belongs to a car" without it in any way advancing the story or worldbuilding. Overall, however, most of the characters are flat as a flounder and the interesting people, hardly get screentime. The decisions for which DontNod’s feature films (!sic) are known are also really irrelevant, because the outcome always remains the same and even more so than in comparable games. There are (spoiler) exactly two endings and the decisions on the way to these are either-or-questions. Sam can choose to either cause total chaos in an attempt to be a badass or make logical and calm decisions. Why choose the former? Probably just to increase the replay value. There are nuances in almost none of the decisions. Graphically, Twin Mirror, at the time of release, is the best looking DontNod game. Where Tell Me Why seemed a bit blurred and pseudo-real, Twin Mirror tries to present a much cleaner but also boring graphic style. Here you can, except for partially really strong ghosting, not complain. In the case of the bugs, as it befits a release in 2021, of course not saved. There are crashes, tone problems (just after alt-tabbing) and a crazy bug where the framerate resets to 60fps in each cutscene even though Vsync has been activated. In a game that consists of 95% cutscenes, this is of course total top. There are no fixes, not even editing the Config helped. This has reinforced the ghosting. Twin Mirror is an okay playable movie but nothing more. Unfortunately, so far the weakest game from the house of Don't Nod and due to the annoying bugs and the sometimes incredibly weak writing, there is in this case the thumb down. .

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