A mystery spanning decades unfolds, but you'll need your thinking-hat on...

As soon as the title screen has loaded, it’s obvious that Black Mirror II isn’t your average point and click adventure. The Hitchcockesque brooding music of the title screen then the chilling opening sequence show that this may be part of the same gaming genre as well loved classics such as Monkey Island and Simon the Sorcerer, but aside from that Black Mirror II is completely different to anything else around right now.

It’s clear from the start that this is an incredibly atmospheric title. The opening cut scene is set in the English village of Black Mirror (The location of the previous game) during 1969. A man called Samuel is inside a mansion and seems almost possessed while a woman pleads with him to snap out of it.  A fire starts, he leaves and the woman is trapped inside. When Samuel is outside he watches the woman in the window but this time he’s emotional, he’s regretting what’s happened. What’s going on? Well...you didn’t think you’d find out about that straight away did you?

Black Mirror II takes place 24 years later and begins in Biddeford, Maine with your protagonist, a young photographer called Darren Michaels, who is working in a photo studio during his college break. (That’s university holidays to us Brits) Black Mirror II is predominantly a thriller, so I won’t give too much away here, but in the opening chapters Darren meets a hot girl - which just because she’s a bunch of pixels to you and me isn’t weird to say at all - there’s a murder and it appears that a suspicious looking British man called...wait for it ...Reginald Boris has framed someone for the killing. What IS it with British men with thin moustaches and sharp suits that foreigners don’t like anyway?

Darren is out to find out what really happened and his task will eventually take him out of Biddeford and into the somewhat quaint but rather stereotypical English village of Black Mirror...yes the place the opening sequence happened at many years before. The storyline may sound somewhat generic but it’s genuinely quite gripping and it’s easy to warm to Darren as the protagonist. He looks like he could be in Nirvana, he’s extremely sarcastic, which leads to quite a lot of dark humour, and he’ll often break the fourth wall. It’s a shame that the voice work often makes him sound uninterested, although what with him looking like a grunge fan that could be deliberate. Bloody miserable teenagers.

"Black Mirror II is completely different to anything else around right now"

Visually, the pre-rendered backgrounds of Black Mirror II look fantastic. Be it the sleepy, perhaps run-down town of Biddeford or the quaint, if somewhat creepy, village of Black Mirror they all look really good and really bring home the atmospheric atmosphere of this point and click thriller.

Yes, in case you’ve forgotten, let us remind you that Black Mirror II might be a physiological thriller, but it’s also a point-and-click adventure game and comes with all the hallmarks of the genre. You’ll talk to people, pilfer items you probably don’t have any right to take and combine said items in order to solve various puzzling scenarios...and some of these are very puzzling indeed. Anything of interest on screen can be highlighted on screen by pressing ‘h’ - and Darren can examine or take most of these.

Some puzzles are simple and are just a case of combining a couple of items before using them with a specific item, location or person, for example one amusing solution involves putting laxatives ins someone’s drink! However, like all point-and-click adventures, there are puzzles that either have stupidly obscure solutions or require you to be incredibly specific about what order things are done in. A special mention must go out to a puzzle which involves detecting something on radar towards the end of the second chapter...in order to get past it you need to find one very, very specific point. It was very, very frustrating. Of course, most point-and-click games are genuinely testing, but the difficulty of Black Mirror II may put off the more casual player.

Maybe you like a challenge though, and in that case Black Mirror II will be right up your street. It’s atmospheric; the plot twists and turns throughout the game and the relationships between Darren and the rest of the cast, specifically his boss and his mother will tug on your heart strings in one way or another.. To top all of this off it also looks beautiful. Sure, Black Mirror II may not be to everyone’s tastes, but if you’re a fan of the original, a fan of thrillers, or a hardened veteran of point-and-click adventure games, it’s definitely worth your while to pay a visit to Black Mirror.

Black Mirror II is released in the UK by LMG under the Odyssia adventure brand on the 7th of May

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