Black Mirror III Review

Why do you like adventure games? What is it about adventure games which draw you away from the world of reality for hours at a time? Is it the puzzles? The graphics? The story line?

What is it that you hate in adventure games? Mazes? Sliders? Cheesy dialog? Abrupt endings?

These are important questions for both of us. It is important for you, the consumer, to have a good idea of what you are looking for before plunking down your money. It is important for me, the critic, to provide just enough information for you to make that decision without ruining the game.

For me, I love a well-designed logic puzzle – one that requires a good strategy and preferably some layering. Jewels of the Oracle and Rhem are a couple of my favorites. I also love a good plot device – one that leaves me thinking for days afterward about the possibilities implied. Lifestream and Myst still keep me thinking years after I finished the game itself.

What I don’t like are plot holes and loose ends. The Lost Crown made me scream out loud in frustration at its end. But what I really hate is being forced to act like a “poopy-head.” I remember finally getting around to playing Infocom’s Infidel. It had a great premise, being one of the first adventure games to explore an Egyptian pyramid. But the game starts with all of your workers abandoning you because you forced them to work during their holy days. So you are forced to explore on your own. At the very end when you “win” you are sealed in the pyramid with no way out because you drove everyone else away. I was so mad that I never spent another cent on an Infocom game.

So, what about Black Mirror III?

It is the third, and we are promised final, installment of the Black Mirror series. While it can be played on its own, it would be good to look back on Black Mirror I and II and see how strong the connection is.

First, the graphics are consistently professional throughout the series. They are not eye-popping Forget-The-Game-I-Just-Want-To-Stare gorgeous like Syberia. But they are believable. You can believe that you are in a castle, garden or dungeon without the little inconsistencies which jar you back to reality. The screen shots here should be enough to give you a feel, but still leave most of the game for you to discover. The official trailer at http://www.justadventure.com/ftp/BM3_Trailer_Englisch_KOR.mp4 also shows what the game is capable of.

People are also nicely rendered. Many times the movement was so well done that it could be mistaken for live actors. A few times it was awkward enough to look like Mannequin Theater. But usually it was somewhere in between.

Voice acting was very good in BM I and actually improved for BM II & III.

Puzzles are a mix of inventory and logical with good integration into the story line. I would rate the difficulty as Medium.

The game-play is where…things get interesting.

In BM I you play the part of Samuel Gordon, last of the Gordon line. An ancient curse on the family causes violence to break out every twelve years. People around you are dying in very bloody ways. So you research your history and visit distant relatives to collect those artifacts which might break the curse.

This is classic adventure gaming. My only complaint was how you were forced to act to get the things you needed. In situation after situation you would have to lie, steal and vandalize property to get what you wanted. In short, you had to act like a poopy-head. And there was really no reason for it. The game would have played just as well with your character telling the truth, borrowing the trinket with the owner’s permission and placing things back where they belonged (like the body in the coffin) without breaking them.

So while BM I was professionally made, I really hated the way my character was forced to act. It would take something extraordinary to get me to play BM II or III.

That extraordinary something was the trailer which you can find here. http://www.justadventure.com/ftp/The_Story_of_Black_Mirror_3.mp4

Writing (plot and dialog) tends to be the weakest link in the Adventure Game genre. However, this trailer tells us that Cranberry Production hired a professional television script writer, Anne von Vaszary, for BM II and III. I was intrigued. Professional writers have been used in the past to great advantage (Sentinel comes to mind). Thus I resolved to place BM I behind me and give BM II and III an honest evaluation.

BM II and III were written and created together. You could play them both back to back and it would feel like one game. You don’t have to play BM II since BM III has an extensive intro to bring you up to speed, but they really should be played in order.

BM II begins twelve years after BM I ended. You play the part of Darren (not-a-Gordon), a university physics major who is spending the summer with his mother in Biddeford, ME. Everything is just as boring as you feared it would be, when all of a sudden… But that would be giving away the plot. Suffice to say that there is a connection to Willow Creek, England and Black Mirror Castle.

At first I was quite pleased. There is a variety of characters and each one has a unique and distinctive personality. The voice acting also gave each character a life of his/her own.

Let me say here that BM I had excellent voice actors. Unfortunately, it was obvious that they had been handed a page of lines to read but without any sort of context. For example, the character is to respond to a question by saying, “No.” So the voice actor is asked to read the line, “No.” But how should they read it? Friendly? Happy? Angry? Teasing? Threatening? Mocking? Scared? Finality? Flat? The choice was frequently wrong and as a result many short conversations were badly disjointed. It was only during the longer speeches that you could get a taste for how good the actors really were.

This is never a problem with BM II and III. Dialogs are full and always sound like characters really are talking to each other. The only time things get awkward is between dialogs. Your character may have several questions to ask of the other character. So you select one of them and the person you are talking to gets very upset. You then select another question and they are all calm and happy again. It is as if the first dialog never happened. On the one hand, this is unavoidable since the programmers have no control over the order in which you ask the questions. On the other hand, there is no gaming element here so why not just have the two characters go over everything in one dialog?

The story line is just superb. The first thing you will notice is that there actually is a story which comes out of the game. Many adventure games dump all of the story into the introduction and ending. The game itself then becomes a simple challenge needed to connect the two. But BM II begins without you knowing anything. Every puzzle you solve reveals a little more of what is going on, presents another mystery, provides another clue and gives you an indication of what needs to be done next. Big questions loom in the background while immediate challenges must be faced.

OK, a few paragraphs earlier I wrote that “At first I was quite pleased.” What happened to change that? Just that it soon became apparent that every single character in the game was placed there to get in my way. In fact, most of the puzzles in the game are to get around people. How do I get past the hotel clerk to get Angelina’s key? How do I get past the guard? How do I get past the nurse? How do I get past the postal clerk? How do I get past the other hotel clerk to get Angelina’s other key? And on and on… It would be one thing if some of these people just needed help. But pretty much all of them are antagonistic and will shut you down if they can. I began to suspect that our professional writer specialized in soap operas.

I realize that you must have some conflict to make a story interesting. But to base every relationship on strife just gets old very quickly. And then it gets annoying. And finally all the fun has been sucked out of the game. At least you aren’t forced to act like a poopy-head. I must not have been the only one to complain because your character now goes out of his way not to break anything and to return those things which he borrowed.

So where does that leave us? In Black Mirror III we have one of the best written games to come along in a while. The craftsmanship, integration and balance are outstanding. But it places you in a world where no one will help you and no one will believe you. Not exactly a happy place to be.

I give the game an A- based on its fine construction. It will be up to you to decide whether you will have fun playing it.

System Requirements:

• Operating System: Windows 7 / XP / Vista
• Processor: 1.4 GHz
• Memory: 1 GB RAM
• 2 GB free hard drive space
• Video Card: DirectX 9.0 compatible 128 MB with Shader 2.0