It's been a busy few years for developer Dontnod, starting with its breakout hit, Life is Strange, and the well-received RPG, Vampyr, which was released earlier this year. The developer clearly knows how to craft compelling stories. While a sequel to Life is Strange is just around the corner, the developer has another narrative game in development in collaboration with publisher Bandai Namco.

Twin Mirror is very similar and yet very different from Life is Strange. It is a similarly crafted choose-your-own-adventure game with an emphasis on the story. It has supernatural elements and will throw you head-first into mysterious circumstances.

We control Sam Higgs, who recently returned to his hometown of Basswood. Sam isn't a traditional hero. He left town after his girlfriend refused his marriage proposal and only recently managed to return for his friend's funeral. The result is clear: a long night of drinking upon returning to a city that seems to hold more bad memories than good.

Speaking of memories, those are usually pretty foggy after a long night out, so Sam awakens (hungover) to a maid furiously knocking on his hotel room door and prompting him to check out. What ensues is reminscent of the opening in Indigo Prophecy, as we find a bloody shirt in our bathroom sink when we try to get ready for checkout.

This is the opening sequence of our Gamescom demo for Twin Mirror, and it showcases the kind of game that Dontnod is trying to create. To regain our memory of the night before and the origin of the bloody shirt, we have to go to a place called our mind palace, a structure in our head that we can physically walk through to reenact theories of what might have happened. In order to do that, we have to jump in and out of the mind palace and search for clues in the real world, which we can then piece together and run through in our head (literally).

This sounds similar to a detective game, and this early segment in the demo was pretty straightforward. We had to find all available clues in the room and put them in order, which wasn't a tough task, but this may change as the game progresses. It felt too simple for what it was, but there's hope that this may become more complex or, even better, may change the game if we have the option to piece together memories in a different way to influence the outcome of the game.

The demo ends as quickly as it started, with a hesitant checkout and a major decision: Do we leave the bloody shirt in the bathroom, or do we take it with us? Like many other narrative games, Twin Mirror emphasizes choice. It actually features a second character who's an imaginary character that only we can see and converse with. Think of him as your conscience whispering in your ear. At the beginning of the demo, he told us to not enter the bathroom but to just check out and leave. It's up to us to listen to him, and this could create some interesting scenarios.

According to Bandai Namco, Twin Mirror will feel like a city that is alive, with many individual stories we can discover when talking to its inhabitants. It's being sold as an "intimate thriller" that does not punish player's choices but aims to be authentic in the way it deals with different paths that the player can take.

The presentation could use some more attention prior to the game's release. The first of the three planned episodes isn't expected until 2019, but the visuals need an update to address the visible pop-in and blurry textures. The voice acting could also stand to be spruced up, but there should still be time to address these issues.

Twin Mirror is a good concept if it's pushed in the right direction and taken a step further than the similar games that have come before it. The presentation isn't quite there yet, and we can only speculate how the gameplay and story features will mold and evolve throughout the three episodes. We hope for the best, especially given the quality of Life is Strange. Twin Mirror: Episode 1 - Lost on Arrival launches sometime in 2019 for PC, PS4 and Xbox.