Black Mirror 1

Unfortunately, I somewhat rushed through this game, no walkthrough, but sort of laughed at it and moved on, having heard that the sequals were much better... oh my. After completing all three, how wrong I was. Savor this first campy chapter! And to be honest, don't go any further unless your a point and click junky. If you decide to grind the 50 or so hours to get through the 3 games, there wont be much waiting for you at the end. That said... this game is pretty hilarious.

Black Mirror maintains a strong atmosphere, but a large array of flaws make it hard to recommend. This is a very dialogue-heavy game, but the voice acting is bad. Furthermore, every time you speak to anyone, there’s this awkward several-second pause while they go through whatever animation they have to go through. Furthermore furthermore, there’s no real way of knowing when new dialogue triggers, so you wind up doing circuits of the map, talking to people at random in case your character now has something new to say to them. It’s very arbitrary; for example, at one point, you’re in your uncle’s room, you see a portrait, and your character says out lout that this is important, and he wants to know who the person in the portrait is … but you can’t ask the relevant person until you’ve solved some totally unrelated puzzles. There are four(?) points in the game where you need to wait for someone to do something. Rather than fading to black, you literally have to spend five minutes or so wandering around the map until that person is done. Because this game is so linear, there’s nothing to do during that time, other than throw on some music or something. A lot of adventure games have a “left click to look, right click to interact” kind of thing going, but Black Mirror implements it very poorly, in the sense that nine times out of ten, left clicking on something interacts with it, but occasionally, seemingly at random, you need to right click something. On one hand, it’s not hard to right-click everything, but also, why? I hear they got rid of this in the sequels, so I’m not the only person it irritated. The identity of the murderer is obvious (at least if you consume a lot of media in this genre), but simultaneously causes huge plot holes. The ending was a huge anticlimax.

The Black Mirror is a classic point-and-click adventure game. You are Samuel Gordon, a young member of an aristocratic English family. Your grandpa passed away in very mysterious circumstances and you want want to uncover the truth. The plot is intriguing, even if the acting and the text are not on the same level. Also the atmosphere is good, dark and gloomy as a story about mysterious murder should be. The graphics is quite nice, even if it is in low resolution, but the 3d characters aged terribly. The music is quite repetitive and boring, but some sound effects are nice. From the technical point of view, I also had problems with the motion of the mouse that was not fluid and a couple of crashes when switching from the game to my browser using alt+tab. But what really drags down this adventure game are game design choices that aged terribly: it is weird, to say the least, that one needs to wander aimlessly for twenty minutes to solve a puzzle; it is even weirder that one can die and be sent back to the main menu for actions with unpredictable consequences (realistic, if you want, but not enjoyable); and the interface is just plain bad. Oh, and the game is SLOOOOOOW. You need to wait for all the slow animations to finish before interacting with any people, the protagonist walk slowly, and there is a lot of travelling between the places you can visit. Last word: It is a mildly entertaining adventure game that lasts around 15 hours, with a nice plot, but terribly old mechanics. If you are into the mystery murder-horror mindset, I would suggest you to play Still Life instead (the prequel Post Mortem being nice but very old and the sequel Still Life 2 being just bad).

Story: 2/5 Worldbuilding: 3/5 Art Design: 5/5 Graphics: 3/5 Sound: 3/5 Gameplay: 3/5

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