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Disappointingly, Mary did not have a little lamb.

  • Caz
  • 11/08/2013 11:56 PM
  • 1378 views
Dark Mirror was a pretty short game, I finished it in about 10 minutes all in all so I don't know how much of a review I'll squeeze out of this.. We'll see, shall we?

It looked like a decent enough game, I'm pretty sure a lot of the tiles were from Celianna and the rest was RTP/Ace character generator. A few of the faces in the generator looked pretty similar so differentiating between characters was a little tricky at times. But there was some creative use of it to portray transformations in character. The mapping was alright but a bit spacious and clean, the RTP probably could've been used a lot better to display the house.

The game is pretty dark but not to the point where you can't see anything. You're given a flashlight, but you can still just about see the outer edges so you're not entirely lost. It still felt like I couldn't see much but I knew where the room boundaries were and where was possible for exploring (not that there was much opportunity for that, but it does seem like this was a consideration).

Sound and musicwise, I think most of the SFX were RTP and there was some custom music imported which was fairly nice stuff, though it did get repetitive fast. I wasn't blown away by the atmosphere built but I suppose it was better than solely using RTP.

The story was fairly simple: there's a slumber party, you have to play the Bloody Mary game, bad stuff happens. A cliché maybe, but I've always been one for well written, done-to-death stories instead of badly written twists. This was okayishly written apart from occasional typos and spelling errors which would break the immersion for me, but my major gripe was the deliverance: your main character is retelling her tale to a doctor as if she refers to what's being played in the past tense. For one it breaks any suspense because I now know for a fact that she survives the ordeal, but secondly it just states some pretty obvious facts. There's a part where you pick up a key and she has a flashback to say “I thought it was for the front door at first but I learned I was wrong”.. It would've been better not to spoil that, I kinda had my hopes on that door! To summarise, too much was given away by the retelling: show, don't tell.

Characters were also alright, they carried the story fairly well but they were all very much the same in terms of their personalities. I can't really remember their names, but I guess one of them was slightly more skittish than the others. Other than that, they were all pretty plain and difficult to remember/want to save. The game ended pretty abruptly with no real resolution either, so none of the characters were tied up in the end.

And now to the delicious lamb chop that is gameplay! This was fairly simple: it was an A-to-B kind of game where it told you to go somewhere and find something, or hide somewhere, or run away..


No really I was just gonna ask if she wanted some tea and biscuits.


There was a small puzzle to open a door where you had to blow out some candles, nothing too complex or anything that worked the brain. I suppose if I had to say, the best gameplay bit was probably the hiding; Mary would break down the door and you had a couple seconds to find somewhere to hide before she broke in and splattered your brains everywhere. It was kinda action-packed, or I enjoyed it at least. Other than that I wouldn't say the game was particularly spooky or scary, just kinda dark and gory.

And now the bit you want:

Visuals: 5/10
Sounds: 4/10
Story: 5/10
Characters: 5/10
Gameplay: 4/10
Theme: Ghost Stories I think? I dunno I can't find it anywhere, please correct me if I have this wrong. In any case, I'd say it fit in with the theme darn well! 10/10

Overall Score: 5/10


Posts

Pages: 1
Thanks for the review ^_^

By the way all the music and sound effects weren't RTP. The only RTP I used was the characters, except for Mary. Also if you people are going to say "HEY THERE ARE GRAMMAR ISSUES!!!!" Then please tell me where so I can fix them. THANKS!
And yes the game was in Ghost stories ^_^
Pages: 1