The creators of Life is Strange seek something more based on Twin Mirror

French game studio Dontnod loves the supernatural. The great success of the team was the original. Life is strange, starring a teenager who had the ability to rewind time. The sequel featured a boy with telekinetic powers, and in 2018, the studio dabbled in role-playing games with Vampire, which put the players in the role of a bloodthirsty citizen of the night. But around 2016, the team decided they wanted to create something a little more robust.

Finally came up with the idea of Double mirror, an adventure game about a former investigative journalist named Sam who ventures to return to his hometown after the death of his best friend. Naturally, he is shrouded in a much larger mystery that involves the entire city. Sam has a few video game skills, including a “mind palace” to piece together clues and solve mysteries, but there are no superpowers or mythological creatures.

“You want people to understand the mystery,” says game director Florian Desforges of the decision to avoid the supernatural. “Yes, there are some supernatural elements in how we portray Sam’s unique mind, but the story itself, the logic of what is happening, the motivation of the characters, all of this is rooted in reality.”

While the team knew from the start that they wanted an informed story, it took time to discover than That story would be. The problem, according to Desforges, was that just because a story is interesting doesn’t mean it offers interesting ways to interact with it. What made Sam and his quest to uncover his hometown secrets compelling, Desforges says, is that he found a balance between those two factors. The team loved the character and the mystery, but they were also excited to create ways for players to inhabit Sam’s investigative mind. “We were quite convinced that we had found the correct combination of these two aspects,” says Desforges.

Very similar Life is strange, Double mirror It takes place as a third-person adventure game, one in which players interact with the world but also make critical decisions that can influence the way the story unfolds. A key difference is the tone. Because it is advertised as a psychological thriller, Dontnod’s team wanted to make sure that Double mirror He felt tense. Originally, the plan was to launch Double mirror like a series of episodes, just like Life is strange.

However, around 2018, the team underwent a major reworking of the game based on in-game testing, which included restructuring into a single, non-episodic experience and delaying the release date. They had all the right elements, but things just weren’t gelling. “Trying to break it into pieces, sometimes I was breaking the beat,” says Dontnod’s chief editor. Xavier Spinat. The process involved some extensive rewriting of the story to make it flow as a perfect whole, as well as to restructure the logic of some of the options.

Double mirror It takes place in a small town in West Virginia, which is becoming a theme for Dontnod. French developers seem particularly in love with Americana; first Life is strange It took place in picturesque Arcadia Bay, a fictional city in Oregon, while its aftermath was a desperate journey that stretched from Washington to Mexico. The next Tell me why, meanwhile, it takes place in Alaska. “Like a thriller, we were looking for something with a certain character,” says Spinat onstage in West Virginia. “We also wanted a place that was not a big city.”

The new game is slated to launch later this year, and will hit PS4, Xbox One, and PC (it will be an exclusive Epic Game Store for one year). Double mirror It has been in development for several years and as is the case with most games at the moment, that process has been slowed down recently due to the ongoing pandemic. Dontnod’s production is particularly international; It is a French studio working with a Japanese publisher who has evaluators in Romania, motion capture work done in Germany, actors in Poland, and voice recordings made in the United States. Managing all of that has been difficult, but the team says production is still going strong.

“We have still made progress,” says Spinat, “but much more slowly than we would like.”