If nothing else, SOEDESCO Publishing deserves credit for trying to reignite interest in what sounds like one of the most non-threatening IPs in existence; hell, the ominous subtitle carries the lion's share of intrigue.  Fittingly, that addition also reflects its greater potential on paper.  The putatively underwhelming campaign & multiplayer combo of 2019's Dollhouse (by Creazn Studio) has been trimmed to a purely single-player affair here.  The problem then becomes: how do the new franchise heralds, Grindstone & Indigo Studios, argue that Behind the Broken Mirror isn't a pale reflection of other horror titles?

Enter into the fractured mind of Eliza de Moor.  After a rather confused opening crawl and her singing onstage in front of an auditorium (with looped applause substituting for an actual audience), she quickly collapses onstage.  She's now suffering from a strange bout of amnesia, hardly able to recall much of anything from her past life.  Her best available recourse in the 1930s is Doctor Stern's experimental medicine, alongside physically exploring her past life.  Like any good psychiatrist in a horror game, he drives her out and enables her to freely roam the countryside by herself in order to reach her old home: the titular Dollhouse mansion.  Between Doctor of the Year's bewildering approach and mismanaged presentation, there's never a time when the opening properly cements the stakes. 


Once that messiness is in the rearview, Broken Mirror settles into an all-too-familiar groove: a seemingly abandoned village in the distance, creaking hinges, hushed whispers, cawing crows, and so on.  Between its locations and the first-person perspective, the developer duo isn't shy about sharing its influences like Resident Evil Village – and VII to a lesser extent – but with 'spooky dolls' instead of zombies.  Credit where it's due: making dolls scary is an uphill battle.  And that proves too high a hurdle to clear, so instead most scares are unintentionally hilarious.

There's just something about the opening level threatening to be "so bad it’s good" that almost makes it memorable: the first pathetic scare fake-out, the fully intact skeleton lying on a bed holding a Colt .45, the jump-scares from tall wooden female dolls, and so on.  The setup can't help but also give the game away, given Eliza's absurd scenario.  Imagine a mental health patient wandering around a secluded village at night and firing a revolver she'd found five minutes into the journey, and the doctor doesn't even admonish these actions.  That's like a visiting psychiatrist seeing Chester Bennington's noose around a ceiling fan as punk rock décor.  And these aren't even foolish actions in the frame of horror movie tropes either; they're blatantly presaging this side character's ulterior motives before any proper build-up.


These types of stupid holes aren't wholly reflective of Broken Mirror's narrative, but enough so to the point of distracting from its paucity of serviceable qualities.  To its credit, Philip Freeman's line-reads as the father, Aristide de Moor, come with two distinct benefits:

1. All of his grandiloquent monologues are from recorded phonograph tapes, so you're never distracted by stilted facial animations.
2. He's actually a consistent voice actor.

If you were to view the story from a bird's eye view, it's not a train wreck per se.  How it blends the downfall of a family tragedy to a less-popular horror villain phylum has some emotional depth, but you can't sustain that goodwill with such shoddy delivery.  It's boring after you've connected all the dots an hour before two different characters give near-similar exposition dumps back-to-back.  It feels so lumpy and narratively confused to the point of me wondering if broad story concepts were hastily dumped into an AI model and revised over time to accommodate these levels.  I checked twice and didn't find a single writer nor narrative designer listed in the credits; then again, that could also be because said writer(s) couldn't bear to have their name(s) attached to this shit.

Though I see human names credited under gameplay categories, I'm suspicious of those being a smokescreen too.  To cut to the chase: if I say something like "asset-flipped, survival-horror, first-person shooter," odds are you'll immediately internalize its mechanical core.  To expand upon my spiel in greater detail: it's what I described, but with higher production values.  "Asset flip" is typically a derogatory, with good reason, but that by default shouldn't discount its effective uses nor mistake any original craftsmanship done either.  In this case, certain places like the Dollhouse Mansion and Ravenhill Village initially build genuine atmosphere through era-appropriate details; the problem is just how diminished they eventually feel through Xeroxed enemy typesand technical bugs.

Save for a rare boss fight or chase scene, all combat is just about kiting around enclosed areas – at a ridiculously slow sprinting speed – while shooting enemies.  Rinse and repeat ad nauseam while you hear regurgitated tension music and the same gunshot impact sounds until they explode into a mist of porcelain bits.  Each level has a clade of evil dolls, often with varied colors and sizes, except for the final locations which rely on repeats.  The only noticeable disparity in damage output comes solely from pistol type; shot location (head, foot, etc.) is virtually a non-factor.  And since its shooting foundation is so rigid and kinesthetically unpleasant, default aim assist feels like a necessity when using a controller.  Perhaps I'm opting for game journo mode, but if a game isn't willing to meet me halfway on standard functionality then I shouldn't feel obliged to try to master it.

Past the unpolished foundation, poor shooting also contributes to its stultifying design.  While acquiring every gun after the Colt .45 is an "optional" objective, only the worst masochist would dare to try completing the game with only that and no cheesing, because even with better weapons some level exploits feel necessary.  Cheesing here isn't the same as, say, a neat trick found in Dark Souls to kill a sub-boss from a safe distance; no, it's more the equivalent of giving it the middle finger for being obnoxious and lazy.  When one connecting strike resets your movement to walking speed, which is a death sentence if fighting multiple enemies, vomiting murderous dolls reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about difficulty.


Such unprincipled design seeps into its survival-horror and puzzle elements as well.  I can only recall one instance across this five-hour campaign when one of my guns was completely empty.  Outside of that, cute little Eliza was typically rucking more ammo than a Green Beret.  Part of the reason why stems from certain puzzles; because some of them require shooting objects in a particular sequence, Grindstone's solution for morons was to dump ammo boxes and mixing ingredients (gunpowder, reactive fluid, etc.) nearby.  Granted, it's understandable to not want to soft-lock an inept player, but the end result is a mini-arsenal for those who're smarter than a 1st-grader.

In fairness, I'll admit that a few select puzzles were a good balance between approachable and semi-challenging.  Again, for an experience spanning about five hours, recalling only three particular examples that actually captured a little theme or nuance isn't a stellar record.  The rest run the gamut of being overly simplistic filler for its own sake. 

Broken Mirror's overarching issue is that any small flash of competency is smothered by a foundation cracking on every side.  Even one of its major marketing gimmicks about Eliza venturing into another "nightmarish reality" by peering into a mirror feels like a last-minute inclusion; all this mirror world contains are slightly-altered environments and a new pathway opens up.  It just becomes a basic walking sim with virtually nothing to interact with.  It's almost insulting compared to the dual realities in Sorry We're Closed, for instance.  No matter where you look, it's fundamentally wrong to its core.


It certainly doesn't help that, layered on top of so many failings, this is retailing for $30 on console ($20 on Steam).  Even if reaching a modest dollar-per-hour value threshold, to think a middle-market game can get away with this impels me to excoriate it to the fullest.    

The only thing developers Grindstone & Indigo Studios have successfully argued is how underwhelming spooky dolls tend to be as a horror main course; even so, they didn't have to forego quality craftsmanship all the while.  Apropos of its central premise, if you held a physical copy up to a mirror you'd see a "How Not to Design Horror" book in the reflection.  From vacuous nonsense tarnishing what's otherwise a rather basic story to dogshit gameplay, nearly every aspect reads like an asset-flipped indie horror game that somehow got a legitimate publisher's attention and additional funding.  Perhaps it's quite fitting, then, that Behind the Broken Mirror managed to shatter my subterranean expectations.

Contractor by trade and writer by hobby, Lee's obnoxious criticisms have found a way to be featured across several gaming sites: N4G, VGChartz, Gaming Nexus, DarkStation, and TechRaptor! He started gaming in the mid-90s and has had the privilege in playing many games across a plethora of platforms. Reader warning: each click given to his articles only helps to inflate his Texas-sized ego. Proceed with caution.