Black Mirror Reviews
There are a lot of moments where Black Mirror is pushing just on the verge of being a really solid adventure game, but those moments are too few and far between, hampered by technical issues and sloppy controls. The story is a good one, and those who are willing to wrestle with these shortcomings in favor of an interesting narrative will likely enjoy their time with Black Mirror, but in the end it is a barely better than average title.
Black Mirror does a great job setting up an unsettling atmosphere and telling a story filled with mystery and intrigue, but it falls short in creating challenging puzzles and memorable gameplay moments. It’s a case of good storytelling bogged down by uninspired gameplay. However, if you like macabre tales and ugly family secrets being dragged out, it’s got a great story to tell.
The sad part of Black Mirror is that there's a really solid game here and it could have just used more polish to reach that.
Black Mirror needed more time to expand its mythology, flesh out its characters, beef up its puzzles, and smooth out its technical kinks.
The narrative, voice work, atmosphere and world of Black Mirror itself are all excellent with some nice touches throughout. The execution of the game isn’t quite so nice, with dodgy controls, frame rate issues, a bit of visual jarring and horrible loading times being amongst the negatives.
Black Mirror is a good graphic adventure and an interesting update of the original trilogy. It is true that coming from King Art Games and after his latest work, The Book of Unwritten Tales, we could expect much more. Although it improves in some aspects the originals, it has failures as topical characters or the absence of a soundtrack.
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While there’s certainly substance in Black Mirror, I think that that substance just isn’t translating well on PC – I’m made to remember Hiveswap, released earlier this year, which had somewhat similar elements but much more to actually DO, and with an interface that actually worked in your favor.
It is hard to recommend Black Mirror with the amount of technical flaws present. In the game’s current state, it simply is not worth the time, even with the decent story and puzzle element.
Black Mirror is a great reboot, it took what made the original series great and expanded on it without having to reuse the same story. It's atmospheric and dark with a few twists and turns which you uncover as you go along, sometimes by giving you more questions than answers. Don't expect gore and bloodshed but expect a psychological horror with thriller and supernatural themes both thrown into the mix.
It's an uphill battle to recommend the game to anyone but the most committed fan of adventure games, and Gothic horror, and even then, there's a scant 5 hours of gameplay there.
Black Mirror is serviceable with fun gameplay elements and an engaging mystery at the center of it all, but the exploration and animation keeps this game from being great.
Black Mirror had some potential in its core premise and its influences, but the result is sadly a poorly designed, average-at-best adventure. Devoid of choices and consequences, null in replay value and forgettable as an overall experience, it might be worth picking up on a sale if you are an achievement hunter or desperate for a Gothic-themed story.