The Mirror Lied was made with RPG Maker, which is a lovely tool for churning out generic JRPGs.
The Mirror Lied is not a generic JRPG. It was made in four days by Kan “Rieves” Gao, who normally pours his energies into his RPG epic “Quintessence”. It does retain some (largely superfluous) equipment, stats, spells, and ability screens which seem oddly out of place, but you’ll only need to look at them once. You play as Leah, who is “level 1″ and has “10 hp”. You won’t be fighting any rats or collecting gold, though; you’re stuck in a big, quiet house, with nothing but eerie phone calls, a computer you can’t access brimming with unread emails, cryptic, threatening notes, and a very thirsty plant. You move around and check objects, find things that open things, read things, and try to piece it all together.
But it’s not survival horror either. You’re exploring, gradually learning the extent of your environment’s interactivity with a growing glee and a creeping dread. This dread is an awful tension that almost never gets released; it’s an essay on anxious terror and how to exploit our fear of the unknown in the simplest way. The intro sequences does this masterfully; a jarring sequence of staccato camera pans across empty rooms as they gradually fill with furniture to the flash of cameras, set alight by the foreboding piano score and the ticking of a clock. This is a cinematic gem.
It’s also a fairly basic puzzler. Most of the problems consist of unlocking a series of containers which each contain the key to another container. It really doesn’t tax you at all, and I’d have liked for the challenges to have a little more bite, especially considering that the weighty story does a good job of carrying this game on its own. Your relationship with “birdy”, the ambiguous character who phones you to offer hints, and your relationship with your father as his emails pile up unread on a computer for most of the game, is thrilling. It’s one to experience for the story alone.
Not that you’ll have to; it’s backed up by some excellent lighting that really fills the screen, and makes great use of that dark space around levels. Not to forget the music, the relentless music-box chimes that haunt every space with minimalist grace. The game doesn’t require much thought to complete, but it commands a lot of thought for the cryptic, ambiguous story.
It could have used some more substance, but the style is sublime, and the ending is worth the twenty minutes it’ll take you to complete it (just don’t expect to understand it first time). The first moments are the best, though, as the intro unfolds with a cinematic gravitas I haven’t felt since Braid. It’s a wonderful experience. Just don’t hit f12, search everything twice, hit ESC for your inventory, and get to the phone at all costs.
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hehe I played around with RPG Maker XP a while ago in college. Won the best story for my class, had you in Iraq trying to find Paris Hilton’s WMDs aka her privates haha. You also fought Tom Cruise but he transforms into a Scientologist Monster half way through, inspired from FF3 multiple stage boss battles. We used an alternative rock soundtrack too, oh and you could use condoms to save a life lol. This game looks unique though but wow seriously four days?
So he says. Unique it is, certainly. It’s like when Yahtzee started making action games with the adventure game engine, except in reverse – this is really an adventure game, except you never leave the one little area so it’s not “an adventure”. I enjoyed it!
Sounds pretty cool and the art style is lovely. I’d play it if I weren’t hopelessly sucked into Dawn of War at the minute.
20 minutes? I think that, more than anything, has sold me on the game (that, and the glowing review). Stupid being an adult, not having as much free time.