Black Mirror has you taking on the role of Samuel Gordon, a man who fled his ancestral home to escape his tragic past. The death of his grandfather has brought him back to the castle he left 12 years ago and it's up to him alone now to find out the true history of the Gordon family and the curse that seems to surround it. Black Mirror boasts both incredibly moody settings that suit the dark story well and over 5 hours worth of spoken dialog to flesh out and build that story. However, some of the illogical quirks that have become standard in adventure games bleed over into Black Mirror and can drag down this otherwise solid and entertaining game.

Black Mirror follows the conventions of other point and click adventure games, using characters set on 2D painted backgrounds. You explore different areas for clues, talk to people, and come across the occasional puzzle that needs to be solved. The game uses some clever innovations for navigation; instead of watching your character walk across the same room as you pass through it for the 15th time, you can simply double click on any portal to immediately be sent to the next area. You also have a map of the castle and surrounding areas. Clicking on one area on the map will send you directly to a central area there, making going back and forth from town to morgue to castle much easier and faster.

While these are great time savers, Black Mirror also has its share of time wasters, the most frustrating of which is being told to wander around while a character prepares an item or clue for you. Some of these are as easy as going a screen away and talking to someone else, but as the game progresses they take more and more time until you find yourself having to visit every known area twice before you can make any progress. Another time waster is the pixel hunt, an adventure game convention that many long-suffering gamers have grown to loathe, which consists of having to move the pointer very slowly over every tiny part of the scene to look for anything that shows up as usable. Black Mirror won't do this to you often, but with over 150 areas in the game even the occasional pixel hunt can be a daunting prospect.

The puzzles in Black Mirror take two forms-- there are environmental puzzles that can be as simple as coming up with a way to foul up a lawnmower to make a pesky gardener go away and there are game-like puzzles that can be anything from a strange game of chess to a tile slider or even something as straight forward as putting the pieces of a torn picture back together. While there are several environmental puzzles, there aren't as many of the game-style puzzles, and most of the game consists of talking to the residents at Black Mirror and the surrounding areas and finding clever ways to get past obstacles that are in your way. There are some environmental puzzles, especially in Chapter 2, that could have used better clues-- suddenly the normally self-aware Samuel loses his interest in maintaining his bodily safety after repeatedly assuring the player that he wasn't going to do something that could hurt him-- but there's very few that will really stop the progress of a dedicated gamer.

The story of Black Mirror is both well constructed and well told. There is a ton of spoken dialog in the game to flesh out this story, and while the Samuel is stiff and often emotionless, the majority of the voice acting is surprisingly not bad. Hardcore gamers might find some of the twists in the story a bit predictable, but even if you know what is coming the atmosphere and moodiness of the setting makes it worthwhile to continue. The visuals and audio do a lot to create this atmosphere, using beautiful animated 2D backgrounds that drip with melancholy. Most areas of the game do not have music, but instead ambient sounds that bring the settings to life. The real shame here is that the character models do not live up to the rest of the package. They never look like they actually belong in any of the settings, and their animation leaves something to be desired.

Perhaps the biggest failing in Black Mirror is that the ending comes too soon. After spending so much time building up this great story, the end, while logical, doesn't have the same narrative buildup as the rest of the game. Black Mirror occasionally sways from the brilliant to the frustrating, but the narrative stays strong and the game stays focused. Adventure gamers yearning for some old school gameplay will want to pick this game up.