The Black Mirror might go down for me as the worst, most obtuse adventure game I have ever played. The only reason I am continuing this mess is because of nostalgia. I borrowed the game from my local library once when I was in school (couldn't finish it then, of course). So I wanted to finally revisit this game.
I love the back story, the mysterious atmosphere, but fuck me if Future Games isn't one of the dumbest adventure developers ever. And they don't even have the excuse of early graphic adventure people in the 90s, when this was still a new genre (
graphic adventures, that is, text based ones have been around since before the 80s)
Most puzzles force you to revisit rooms to pick up items, you can't interact with them before an arbitrary point in the story has been reached, often something as pointless as a passing remark in a line of dialogue. It forces you, multiple times, to just wait. Pass like 10 minutes by walking around, before it allows you to continue. And there is this fucking abomination:
Behold the mouth of madness. A
random sliding puzzle. This is the final state, the starting position is totally random, can even literally be unwinnable, according to some people. I found a save game just after it, luckily.
I know that Black Mirror 2 and 3 weren't made by this same group, are they any better? Might as well delete the entire Black Mirror bundle from my acount, once I am done with this, if not.