Black Mirror

As part of a sale a while ago I bought four games that are relatively expensive. Black Mirror was most certainly a game that I never would have purchased at full price as it retails at £31.99 which, for a short, linear, point and click adventure game, is massively overpriced and that’s without going in to the game’s issues.

Firstly, the voice acting is terrible. You play as David, a guy who has a clear personality disorder in such that his reactions to things go from sounding like he couldn’t care less about what’s going on to going into fits of over-the-top-rage for no clear reason.

The storyline and gothic look drew me in to purchasing it and while the gothic look and eerie feel is there, the story line was a bit of a let-down in terms of how out there it is. Character relationships are also flitting in that they are underdeveloped and difficult to buy in to.

David isn’t the only one with voice acting issues, he’s just the most prominent. Every other character phones it in at some point. It’s just bad all round in this area, including the character models. They are poorly designed and quite often don’t sync up with the voice acting.

In terms of gameplay, this area is also shoddy. The camera and movement remains fiddly at the best of times, making even the simplest navigation an absolute ballache. Interacting with items and quick time event cutscenes feels like luck most of the time. This is especially galling during the cutscenes because getting the cutscene interactions wrong results in instant death and me being even more annoyed with the game.

And all this is after having to wait an inordinate amount of time for the game to load. This happens most of the time you change scenes which happens a lot.

The puzzles are the best aspect of the game but one of these was designed specifically to infuriate everyone and that’s the key puzzles. You have to rotate parts of a key to fit into a lock and while in real life this would be straight forward, the game is massively pedantic about the positions of the parts of the key. This is the point where I just wanted the game to be over and even resorted to watching a video to solve the last one.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 21 Achievements

Given the problems with the game, the achievements are actually relatively straightforward and just getting through the story, which is obviously difficult based on the above, will get 14 of them.

The other seven are all for doing specific things throughout the game, some notable ones involve having to keep the cursor in a circle when David gets himself wound up after some scary moments. There are a few achievements tied to this extravaganza.

However, the most notable one is one that can be missed for convincing your companion to ride a dumbwaiter down to the basement. Once this is done though, it’s just a case of playing through the game. Due to how horrible the gameplay is, I would recommend just following a guide if you were fool enough to pay money for the game. Like me.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Black Mirror is a terrible game that’s not worth the asking price in any way. It’s clunky, has no replayability, and is generally not fun. The achievements are easy though If you are willing to suffer through it.