Black Mirror

Despite a few hiccups, Black Mirror successfully carves out an intriguing six-hour narrative-driven experience thanks to its stellar voice-acting cast, authentic atmosphere and excellent characters.

We tell you, it’s a good game! It’s not average! It might have some problems here and there, but you have to admit it is a “Good” game.

Not as prescient and urgent as it once was, but the Twilight Zone of tech can still manage to be occasionally chilling.

What makes for a truly excellent horror story? Clearly, it needs to scare you, but there are so many different ways to do that. For me, a good horror story does not rely on jump scares but rather makes you shiver for fear of the unknown. Something that draws you in and slowly chips away at sanity. Black Mirror takes its inspiration from horror literature’s arguably most iconic names and crafts a brilliant web to explore, but just how good could the revival of this long-dead series be?

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Before Charlie Brooker came onto the scene, Black Mirror was more commonly known as a series of point-and-click adventure games released on the PC in the mid-2000s. Its initial three entries were fairly well received, and after a seven year absence, the name is back with a re-imagining of its story, themes, and a mix-up in the gameplay department. So, does this blast from the past manage to replicate its past successes?

The Black Mirror series is a series fans of point and click adventures hold dear thanks to its horror setting, the eerie Black Mirror castle, and the actual experiences, filled with mysteries to unravel and puzzles to solve. The series was seemingly done with the third entry, released in 2011, but now it has been brought back by KING Art games and THQ Nordic with a reboot. The end result, sadly, is not up to par with the older games.

Black Mirror, a revival of the 2003 adventure game The Black Mirror, tells an all-new tale of murder, deceit, and powerful magic surrounding the Gordon family. Although it has some clever puzzles, Black Mirror fails to deliver in other ways, from its confusing story to heavy reliance on predictable gothic horror tropes.

Despite creating a macabre atmosphere and delivering some decent puzzles early on, Black Mirror is a somewhat insipid and uninspired adventure game exacerbated by frequent loading screens and shoddy presentation throughout. It belongs at the bottom of a deep loch.

Black Mirror has potential to be a decent horror puzzle adventure, but its technical limitations and pacing issues prevents that from ever becoming apparent. Its £25 entry fee is steep for the short experience you’ll be getting, and the end product feels like a shadow of its former self.

Black Mirror is a good story that suffers from a dated application of game styles. While this is interesting in a meta way, it is not much fun to play. The narrative itself plays out fairly successfully. but it is hard to recommend it for this alone. There is definitely space for such old school adventures on modern consoles, but this is not the game to fill it. As it stands, Black Mirror itself is a title haunted by its ancient roots and will horrify the player for all the wrong reasons.

Black Mirror starts with an interesting premise and decent voice acting, but the combination of poor controls and atrocious camera angles paired with a garbled story and uninteresting characters drag this experience to the bottom of the abyss.