Dontnod Entertainment, developer of the wildly successful interactive story “Life is strange” and the recently released third-person open world action-adventure title “Vampyr” has just released a reveal trailer for their next project: An interactive thriller / suspense story called “Twin Mirror”.
Players will take control of Sam, a man returning to his hometown Basswood after a year of unexplained “troubles”. The trailer gives two hints to this trouble. The first is s flashback scene of a woman holding a gun to Sam’s head before lowering it, embracing him, and proclaiming, “Sam, I don’t want to hurt you…” The second is a flash of a newspaper headline, which reads, “Death of a Basswood Journalist”, while Sam’s voiceover says “I would have liked to return under better circumstances” in the background, hinting at some involvement between Sam and this murder case.
More voiceovers show Sam returning to Basswood and attempting to settle down. He stands outside of a rainy window looking out onto a cloudy town, while a female voiceover asks him why he came back. The trailer shows Sam’s face as he looks out over the town: He looks upset, confused, and lacking a clear purpose.
But as per usual with Dontnod Entertainment, it doesn’t take long for things to start escalating. Sam wakes up one day with no memory of the previous night, and later discovers that his shirt is folded up on his dresser, soaked in someone else’s blood. The trailer then starts to show off a bit of what will likely be the game’s primary mechanical focus: Sam entering his own mind-space to reconstruct his memory. We see Sam entering his mind-space and walking across a bridge that constructs itself in front of him to cross two chunks of floating earth. We also see Sam fighting a ghostly translucent memory person. The trailer cuts from Sam landing a blow on the memory person to Sam being knocked out on the spot, hinting that the player’s actions in Sam’s mental reality will have major consequences on his physical state.
Dontnod pitches “Twin Mirror” as ‘A story-driven adventure game’ where ‘your mind is the one place to find the truth’. This project is currently in development by Dontnod, along with the much-anticipated Life Is Strange 2, which may be seen more at E3 but has yet to receive an initial release date. “Twin Mirror” is set for launch on Xbox One, PS4, and PC come early 2019.
Coming off of the developers of “Life Is Strange”, Dontnod has garnered a fair amount of trust from the interactive story crowd. From the game’s characters and trailers, it appears that “Twin Mirror” will see Dontnod attempting to tackle a story with more mature themes and characters. The game revolves around investigating a murder and finding the truth, and with stakes so high and personal, it is more likely that “Twin Mirror” will feature a “Bad End” of some sort. While “Life Is Strange” did have a very large number of player choices that could affect the story, it only had two endings, none of which were truly bad. It is possible that “Twin Mirror” will require the player to pay more attention to their decisions, and won’t be afraid to kill off an important character to impose tensions.
“Life Is Strange” also saw the protagonist controlling some kind of low-powered time rewind ability that allowed players to choose a dialogue option, see how it plays out, decide whether or not they like it, and then rewind for the other option if they feel like it. It is unknown whether “Twin Mirror” will incorporate a similar mechanic, but its matured characters and high-stakes hint that this story might force players to deal with the consequences of their actions. No second chances this time.
Featured Image Via Flickr / Jorge Figueroa
