I didn't get on with the first game at all, so I'm immediately disinclined to give this one much of a chance, but we'll see. If nothing else, it had really cool box art.
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Hooooly shit, this is awful. BASS may have been rough around the edges but this is clunky as fuck. It continues the weird menu set-up from the first one where you have to click on a separate menu button to get the opening cutscene, then start a new game to get the second opening cutscene. The FMV here, by the way, is painfully bad. Cheap and ugly as sin, with some rotten acting (they do have Kay E. Kuter in there, though); it feels like a Hammer Horror pastiche someone shot in their backyard. The UI is terrible, too - it's ugly, it takes up most of the screen, and every action requires at least double the clicks it would in any half-competent adventure game.
Standout moment so far: a ten-second cutscene of a pixely man writing a letter then addressing the envelope then licking the envelope then sealing the envelope then putting the envelope on the table then getting up and walking back to the centre of the room.
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Bleck, this is dreadful. Giving up on this. The challenge is mostly struggling with the UI, and pixel-hunts (which are worse than most thanks to the UI), but the other puzzle I got stuck on was an incredibly fiddly tape-splicing system where the recorded conversations, which in the previous game was purely a review mechanic to check for missed clues, can be taken apart word by word and rearranged. This is never tutorialised, requires you to assume a character is suddenly going to leave a room as soon as you've created the right fake voice recording of them, and is only used once in the entire game. The whole thing feels like an excuse for Jane Jensen to take a paid holiday, justifying it with a few photos of statues and some hastily copied encyclopedia entries. I am absolutely staggered that these games are so well thought of.
Rating: Red.
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