XBOX REVIEW | Mirage 7

I first came across Mirage 7 when its debut trailer popped up, and its strange blend of dark fairytale energy and sci-fi edge grabbed me straight away. The premise is immediately striking. Nadira crosses a vast desert with her lizard companion Jiji, searching for a lost oasis and the truth behind Princess Taishma, hoping it will lead to a way to bring her sister back from the dead. The journey promises ancient temples, intricate puzzles, hidden truths buried in an underground military base, and choices that shape the story. Set in a third person world where fantasy and technology blur into something eerie and alluring, Mirage 7 feels like a tale waiting to pull you into the heat haze.

Now that the world of Mirage 7 is in place, let’s jump into the review.

Things I liked!

• Gameplay | Most of Mirage 7’s gameplay focuses on exploration, light survival mechanics, and using Jiji’s abilities to uncover secrets. You can activate lizard vision to highlight objects and some items can be rotated to reveal hidden details. At certain points you take direct control of Jiji. These moments include hunting for food, protecting Nadira while she sleeps from waves of scorpions, and reaching hidden objects that Nadira cannot access. These sections added variety and ended up being some of my favourite parts of the game. I only wish I got to control Jiji more often. Exploration ties into simple survival elements.
  
  Water is essential and can be stored in your canteen. Waterleaf plants refill half of it and are fairly common, and you occasionally come across water pools. Drinking restores your health, so keeping your canteen topped up becomes important as the challenges increase. Yellow quest markers guide you towards objectives, and scrolls provide hints and story details. Crafting lets you combine items you find to create tools that help you progress. A large part of the experience involves solving puzzles, many of which are long winded and obscure, and I will cover these in their own section below.

• Audio Design | Mirage 7 may only feature a small cast, but the voice work is surprisingly strong. Each character sounds genuine, and that authenticity helps them feel far more alive than their limited screen time suggests. The wider soundscape holds up just as well. Your dagger cuts through the air with a sharp hiss, followed by a satisfying clunk when it connects, and those little touches make every encounter feel tactile. The score leans into a mystical vibe that suits the world perfectly, shifting pace and intensity whenever danger creeps in, giving each moment a subtle but effective sense of tension.
  
  
• Accessibility | Mirage 7 includes a good range of accessibility options. There are three combat difficulty settings, with Story, Normal and Challenge modes available. Puzzle hints, tutorials, subtitles, vibration and aim lock can all be toggled on or off, and you can invert the X and Y axes. Aim sensitivity can be adjusted, and the game supports several languages including English, Italian, French, Spanish and Dutch. You can also remap the controls and adjust individual audio sliders. It is a straightforward but helpful set of options that makes the game easier to tailor to your needs.

Mixed & disliked!

• Visuals |  I came away with mixed feelings about Mirage 7’s visuals. They start off fairly plain, but as the story pulls you deeper into its world the presentation steadily improves, even if it never reaches the point of being truly striking. Some of the character models look good and several of the temples you explore are genuinely impressive, especially later in the game. What’s here is clear, readable, and more than enough to carry the adventure. There are some nice touches too, like the way a spider’s web curls and burns when you hold a torch to it. Not everything is perfect. A faint shimmer sometimes flickers across the background as you explore, which can be a little distracting at first, but I eventually tuned it out.

• Technical Issues | I ran into several performance problems during my time with Mirage 7. Early on, I needed to craft a slingshot and found the base part of the weapon, but the game would not let me pick it up. Only after reloading the previous checkpoint a few times did it finally register and allow me to progress. A similar issue appeared later when fighting a larger spider‑like creature. After I killed it, its body blocked the path forward even though there was plenty of space to walk through, so I had to reload again to continue.
  
  There were also stability problems. On several occasions the game crashed completely, closing itself and sending me back to the Xbox Home Screen. One crash happened during a fight when I was dealing with multiple enemies at once. Another occurred near the end of the game when I fell through the map during a fight and had to reload a checkpoint, which set me back a little way. These issues interrupt the flow of the adventure and make the experience feel less polished than it should. I hope the technical problems I encountered can be addressed in a future update, because the core of the game deserves a smoother run.
  
  
• Combat | The combat in Mirage 7 is very simple. Your main weapon is a dagger that you swing at close range, and there is no way to lock on to enemies. Early encounters are manageable because the creatures move slowly and their attack patterns are easy to learn, and you can use a quick dodge to avoid their strikes. As the game progresses you face more challenging enemies that chase you and some even shoot projectiles that can stun or infect you, which makes these later fights noticeably tougher. You also gain a slingshot, which lets you lock on to still targets, but I never found it very effective in combat. The settings menu includes an option for a lock on camera, and I often had to toggle it on or off depending on the situation. If you are being chased and the lock on camera is enabled, the view can swing around in front of you, making it hard to see where you are going. Overall, the combat works, but it stays basic throughout and can feel awkward when the camera gets in the way.
  
  
• Puzzles | The puzzles in Mirage 7 are a real mixed bag. They start out simple and enjoyable, giving you just enough to think about without slowing the pace. As the game goes on, though, they become far more complicated. Many areas contain several rooms, each with its own puzzle element, but also an overarching puzzle that ties everything together. This layering can make some of them feel tricky and at times unnecessarily obscure. There is a wide variety of puzzle types. Some require you to move statues into the correct order, while others involve finding hidden clues and then hitting targets with your slingshot in the right sequence. You also have puzzles where you need to send Jiji through small gaps or holes in the wall to find clues that are out of reach.
  
  These ideas are interesting, but the execution can be inconsistent. A few solutions rely on very specific positioning, such as standing in an exact spot to interact with an object or even climbing onto a chair to place something correctly. These moments were not intuitive and often left me second guessing what the game wanted from me. Some puzzles took far longer to figure out than expected, and a few I only solved through trial and error or pure luck.
  
  
• Save System Issues | When you start a new game you can choose from three separate save files, but once you begin playing the game saves your progress automatically at set points. Sometimes this sent me back a little further than I would have liked, although that was not a major issue. The real problem came when the game was saved while my health was low. If you cannot find any water to heal and you are facing multiple enemies, you can end up stuck in a situation that is almost impossible to recover from. This can happen even on the story difficulty, which can still be challenging at times. If you find yourself trapped in one of these moments with no way to heal or escape, your only option is to restart the entire game from the beginning.

How long did I play the review before publishing? 13 Hours
How long to beat the story? 10 Hours
How many Achievements did I earn before publishing? 26/31 OR 745/1000G
How long to achieve 1000G | 15+ Hours
You’ll love this game if you like these | Echoes of the End & Indika

CONCLUSION

Score: 60/100

A striking premise held back by rough edges and technical trouble.

Mirage 7 has a strong premise and some memorable ideas, especially in the relationship between Nadira and Jiji and the mix of exploration, survival and puzzle solving. Good audio design and helpful accessibility options support the experience, but technical issues, awkward combat, inconsistent puzzles and a harsh save system hold it back. There is charm here, but it struggles to shine through its rougher edges.