Twin Mirror's solid character work and strong environments

With Twin Mirror Dontnod abandons the episodic model it has experimented with since 2015's Life is Strange in favor of a six-hour standalone release. The result is a focused crime thriller with some great character work. However, Twin Mirror's exploration of its story Check Out This Blog Post Via Superweapongames and mechanics suffer somewhat from its brevity, relative to Dontnod’s recent work. It's longer than an episode of Dontnod's serialized games but still shorter than what it needed to be to explore characters with depth and tackle the heavier subject matter and themes its narrative alludes to. Twin Mirror comes to a conclusion just as the plot and gameplay are really beginning to gain momentum.

In Twin Mirror, players take on the role of Sam Higgs, a tenacious investigative reporter returning to his hometown of Basswood, West Virginia, after a period of self-imposed exile. Two years prior, Sam published a damning investigative piece on unsafe practices at the Basswood mine, which employed a huge portion of the town. As a result, the mine closed, putting a huge swath of Basswood out of work and pushing the town into an economic depression. In the midst of this firestorm, Sam proposed to his girlfriend Anna, another writer at the paper. She turned him down and, struggling with the personal and professional devastation, Sam left town without a word. In the time since, Anna has started dating Sam’s longtime best friend, Nick.