This definitely is of a piece with the first game - it opens with a lavish animated cutscene which looks gorgeous although it's edited to within an inch of its life, the game looks and sounds great (with the exception of a crappy 3D-modelled spider straight out of The Dig - are arachnids too difficult to pixel animate?) and the writing is pretty charming, but the puzzles involve a lot of bouncing back and forth between dialogue trees until something clicks and George is still a whiny insecure bag of slop. We're back in Paris and so there's a lot of wandering around galleries and cafes pixel-hunting for fiddly banal little puzzles.
I think if this game doesn't pick up soon, I may just assume it's going to be no better than the first one and move on...
The puzzles got a little more fun as I went to break into a dockside warehouse, even though there's still some shitty pixel-hunting. Knocking dogs in water (BASS throwback) and using machinery to knock baddies over and crash through doors. Pretty funny to get a 2D crate-pushing puzzle, too! Shades of things to come in the 3D sequel iirc.
So I was enjoying it a little more, then it moved from Paris to South America and I was even more buoyed by the new location. Then I realised it was another circular marketplace with the same two American tourists from the Syrian market in the first game, and my heart sank a little. Lots of talking and fiddly little puzzles coming up, I reckon...
The puzzles have descended into random madness now. I finished the marketplace bit by freeing some guy from jail for the tourist who has delusions of being in the CIA, so I had to escape down a river but then my boat got blown up so I ended up in the jungle where a priest lives in a Swiss Family Robinson treehouse where he's made lots of contraptions but they're all broken. He's playing his pipe organ (!) too loud to hear me and let me up, so rather than, say, throw a bit of coal through his window, I have to put a piece of paper on some damp leaves by the air pump then use a flint statue on the iron waterwheel to set the paper on fire to get smoke into the pump to get the priest's attention. There's no good hinting for any of this, the perspective and art is really confusing, and I thought there was something moving within the pile of leaves but I guess they were getting lightly blown and sucked by the air pump vent (!). Then the priest insists that I press his collar before he helps save Nico's life so I have to fix his primitive pressing machine that he's somehow created with two large perfectly cylindrical stones. Then he takes me to a shaman, whom I have to get a meeting with by sending him a gift - I just used everything in my inventory until it turned out that for some reason 'dog biscuits' was the correct answer. This is just terrible, it's like something we'd put in one of our games as a joke about nonsensical puzzles.
The shaman told George that an evil god will be unleashed if I don't find two magic stones, and it seems he's just... accepted that as true and taken on the quest? These games really don't provide very good reason for not just fucking off back to America.
I'm over halfway through, it seems, so I'm tempted to blitz through using a walkthrough to get me past the smallest bump, but on the other hand I just got to a very boring looking beach filled with boring looking people so I might just quit.
Yikes, even Adventure Gamers gave this 2/5. I think that's a definite sign that I should quit!
Just skimmed a playthrough video and am glad I didn't bother with the rest of this. Apparently they had a lot less time and budget for this one...
Rating: Pretty, but otherwise bad.
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