Namco Bandai has released a new trailer for DontNod Entertainment's upcoming detective thriller Twin Mirror. This new narrative adventure game from the creators of Life is Strange follows the story of Samuel Higgs, a journalist who returns to his hometown of Basswood to attend the funeral of his oldest friend. When he arrives, however, strange events begin to unfold throughout the town, and Sam takes it upon himself to investigate.
The four-minute video mainly offers an insight into how the game’s detection systems will work, most of which revolve around Sam’s psyche. Sam is accompanied on his adventure by the Double, Sam’s projected alter-ego who resembles a cross between a prep-school student and an artisan coffee-shop owner. The double acts as an “occasional advisor” and “permanent wiseass”, according to the video, essentially acting as your detective sidekick.
As you play, you’ll encounter various investigation scenes Sam can explore via his “mind-palace”, a mental visualisation of those locations that allows Sam to reconstruct the events that transpired there. In the video example, Sam awakes in his hotel room to find his shirt is covered in blood, and then uses his mind palace to work through the different potential scenarios of what might have occurred.
Players are able to switch between the mind palace and the real-life location to uncover new clues in the former, and then piece it together with other information in the latter. It’s an intriguingly tactile way of representing deductive reasoning, although anyone who seriously uses the phrase “mind-palace” should be approached with extreme caution.
All told, the game is so embodied with the spirit of Twin Peaks you can almost see the cherry pie leaking from its ears, although the hotel scenes also remind me of the good bits of Fahrenheit, before it turned into a ridiculous battle between God and the Internet. Nonetheless, the blend of Life is Strange-style storytelling with a more involved mechanical core has me very intrigued.
There’s no firm release date as yet, but the trailer states that Twin Mirror’s first episode (of three) will land in 2019.
