The Black Mirror (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 5.5 (2.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Scott Osborne
• Reviewed on: 11/07/2003
• Released on: 10/20/2003
• Originally published on GameSpot: The Black Mirror (PC) Review

Good voice acting can bring a game's characters to life or at the very least make a flat story seem a little livelier. As vital as it is, voice acting still seems to be an afterthought in many games. For some games, it seems like the hiring criteria are merely that the actors can speak English and can stay awake through the recording sessions. For a perfect example of how bad voice acting can almost single-handedly ruin a game, look no further than The Black Mirror, where the voice-overs are so horrid as to make the gameplay almost unbearable at times. That's actually just one of The Black Mirror's faults. It's true that the game has some real strengths, too, but the lousy voice-overs, clumsy writing, and glacial pace make it too hard to appreciate them most of the time.

The Black Mirror's story feels like a rambling mishmash of Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Scooby Doo, and the board game Clue. You play as Samuel Gordon, scion of the ancient Gordon clan that has inhabited Black Mirror Castle in England for centuries. Samuel's grandfather, William Gordon, has died under the oddest circumstances. Prone to secrecy and increasingly odd behavior, the elder Gordon started locking himself away in one of the castle's towers, where he was researching mysterious family legends. One night someone or something made its way into the locked tower, and Gordon fell--or was pushed--out the window, impaling himself on a wrought-iron fence far below. With the family in mourning, Samuel returns to the castle and reacquaints himself with his grandmother and meets various family friends and servants, like the butler and family doctor. In his quest to get to the bottom of William's death, Samuel also explores other locales, like a quaint nearby town, an old church, a morgue, and a mine.

The Black Mirror is pitched as a nightmarish mystery, but there's precious little about it that's frightful, and you'd be hard pressed to find a less emotionally engaging game. There is one neat twist near the end of the story, but almost every character along the way is bland and forgettable; no one seems particularly real, let alone worth your interest. The game's protagonist is downright annoying with his prissy, affected mannerisms, generic appearance, and generally silly air.

This is all doubly unfortunate because a huge chunk of The Black Mirror revolves around making Samuel have interminable conversations with everyone he meets. Talking is the main way to gather clues and to make the tediously linear story progress from point A to point B. Yet who wants to listen to such boring nonentities? Hackwork dialogue certainly doesn't help, nor does the comical propensity of many characters to avoid contractions and needlessly announce whatever they're going to do next: "I will go now," and so forth.

It's not merely the bland, unfocused writing that makes these conversations so tedious: Voice acting stumbles to a miserable new low in The Black Mirror. Almost everyone speaks in an unbearably slow, stilted, declamatory style, as if trying to explain something to a small child or give directions to a foreign tourist. Couple that with the sometimes comically posh British accents, and you get a recipe for disaster. The drying-paint pace that the actors adopt, coupled with the clunky dialogue, makes the simplest exchanges stretch out for a seeming eternity--The Black Mirror is painfully slow even by adventure-game standards. Not surprisingly, the actor who voices a grave-digger literally sounds like he was falling asleep behind the microphone during the recording sessions. Since adventure games typically lack any real action, character building is vital. Here it's almost impossible to care about the characters, both because they're fleshed out poorly and because they often sound so unrealistic or downright laughable.

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