Checklist the game. That's what springs to mind while playing the first entry to the adventure horror series Black Mirror. Why? Because of how the game has been designed around checkboxes you need to tick in order to proceed. A form of design, that forces you to aimlessly wander around the game world in hopes of finding the one, remaining box to tick off so the game finally progresses.
It's the early 1980s. Samuel Gordon is forced to return to his family castle after 12-years of absence after his grandfather William Gordon dies either in an accident or a purposeful fall from his tower study window. Samuel is not one to believe in an accident or a suicide, so that leaves only the possibility of murder.
There is an ancient curse hanging over the once-great Gordon family. A cruse causing misery and madness, brought upon them by the sins of their ancestors. William was trying to figure out the origins of the curse and the means of stopping it. As the introduction told us, his death wasn't an accident. An evil force threw him out, preventing his studies. And this is now the road Samuel finds himself on. He knows he has to continue the work his grandfather began.
As his family isn't very forthcoming with information, Samuel begins to snoop around. He soon finds strange symbols from the house as well as tales of William having spent a lot of time at the local church during the nights. A second tragedy hits, when the gardener of the Black Mirror castle is found dead from a garden pool the very next day. What seemed like drowning at first, soon gets more sinister features.
The hunt for the family secrets leads Samuel on the trail of a set of keys hidden by his ancestors. The first one he finds is from the local church between Black Mirror castle and Willow Creek Village. The next one he fetches from a mansion owned by his relatives in Wales. Upon his return home, Samuel learns that a local kid has been killed in the forest. Wolves are suspected of this terrible attack, but Samuel has other suspicions. Another disturbing matter is the disappearance of his uncle Robert, who is a doctor at Ashbury asylum. There's also a small matter of an escaped patient, who Samuel finds out, is actually an illegitimate son of his grandfathers. The plot begins to thicken and in many ways.
Samuel manages to locate James, the escaped lunatic. He's almost killed by James but manages to get away with the knowledge of another key being hidden under the castle, in the sewers. The next day brings more ill tidings: Robert is dead, but at least James has been caught, sitting next to his body.
Back in the asylum, James has hung himself, leaving behind only one word written on the wall: Samuel. Another cadaver for the day is the local doctor, Hermann, who was also a pathologist and a family friend of the Gordon's. A strange symbol is found where Hermann and Robert were killed.
After finding the rest of the keys, Samuel manages to overhear a confession by the old family servant Bates. He states he knows the killer: it is Samuel. He has seen him skulking in the darkness of the night, hands in blood. Shook by this, Samuel knows it to be true. Not that he did the murders knowingly as he was possessed by the evil spirit of his ancestor who did, centuries ago, open a gate to the netherworld. Steeling his nerves, Samuel heads down to the catacombs below the castle to close the gate and prevent evil to enter the world. The killings were a sacrifice needed to allow this to happen, the keys can be used to prevent it.
Posessed or not, Samuel feels guilt for the horrible things that have taken place. He closes the gate but feels the black blemish in his soul, so he proceeds to take his own life despite his actions did, in the end, prevent the evil from entering the world again.
There's nothing wrong with the premise of the game. If you exclude the terrible "you were the murderer all along"-story twist, as it makes very little sense in how the story is presented, the story is interesting and the atmosphere of the game world is topnotch. It's just the writing leaves a lot of room for improvement. Especially the dialogue is bland and longwinded. It's not helped by the voice acting which sounds like it was done almost completely uninterested cast of actors, whose effort ended after they got into the booth and the cheques cleared. Though, as the dialogue is poorly written in the first place, you can always argue that the actors are giving precisely the proper amount of effort.
It's not the bland voice acting and clumsy dialogue that are the bigger problems of the game. They don't help, but the biggest flaw of the game is the design. See, The Black Mirror is an extremely linear game, that doesn't allow you to do anything before it wants you to. This leads to a tremendous amount of walking back and forth between locations, as you can't pick up things before you know exactly that you need to pick something up. It doesn't matter if you've solved the puzzle a long time before the game has gotten where you already are. In many ways, it's the kind of design that punishes the player from being ahead.
And it's not just that you can't pick up items, it's that a lot of the design boils down on having to do exactly everything just like the developer intended. For example, at one point you need to copy a key. After leaving the key to the person who can copy it, you need to leave and return to the location several times and talk to the innkeeper until he finally says that there is a key for you. It doesn't matter that you don't have anything else to do, the game expects you to tick out every box. This can lead to a situation where you think there's something else for you to do and that you can only get the key later on when all you really need to do is to complete the pointless dance routine. And there are several other situations where this happens.
Another, somewhat odd and perhaps annoying as well, aspect of the UI comes from how the mouse controls work. Generally speaking, it's all a rather simple single mouse button affair, except on a couple of occasions when it's not. See, the left click is usually used to interact with the world. It examines and even picks ups things. But at times, right-click has to be used to further examine things. This is something you can very easily forget, as about 99% of the time, you get by using the left button until you don't.
Tackle the need for vigorous pixel hunting on top of the other design issues and you get a winner in many of the worst traits of point and click adventures. The Black Mirror has its defendants, but I'd call it a tedious example of adventure gaming. It's a good example of how to ruin a game by following poor design methods too religiously.
The game does pick up around the 4th chapter, but that comes a bit too late to save the whole experience. So, despite the great atmosphere, I can't wholeheartedly recommend the game. If you are a fan of horror games, you might get a kick out of it purely because of the great atmosphere it has, but as a game, it leaves more than enough room for improvement.
There was an attempt of rebooting the series with a 2017 made prequel. That one was a disappointment as well. So perhaps, the Black Mirror is a series that was never destined to rise above its flawed design. For anyone wanting to give it a spin, you can get The Black Mirror from GOG and Steam.
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