The graphics are in pretty much the same style but a lot more polished, more The Oatmeal than Here's Toby. It looks nice enough if still very much in that 2010s Flash style, and one could argue it's lost a little of the hand-drawn charm which also fit quite well with the 'asylum scrawlings' vibe of the first one. This seems to be a more idyllic prequel, though, so it might work well. Already a little lack in polish, though, as the music and sfx volume sliders seem to have had their labels swapped. Also, in a similar way to Deponia, the writer-director has decided to open it with a song written and performed by himself, sung in a weird Buddy Holly pastiche backed with a minimal Nordic sound. It goes on for three minutes over a black screen and the opening credits, it's just massively self-indulgent and (I assume) weirdly translated. Then they do this thing where the narrator talks about how spyware has noticed that kids are playing the game so they're going to remove all the swearing and violence and robots, and then there are a few lines of dialogue before a big tutorial guy pops up in the corner and starts talking at you, and it's all so much. Just tell your story, Daedalic!
A little further in. One thing I've realised is that this is actually a sequel to the first one, not a prequel. It seems like the endings of the first game are kind of different in various versions, so it's probably not worth getting tangled up in the lore, but it doesn't seem like stuff matches up. It also portrays Edna as school-going age, which makes all the shots of her in her underwear in the first game even more gross.
They've written this with a Space Quest style narrator for the descriptions, and with the protagonist, Lilli, being a near-mute little schoolgirl. Which is an interesting choice, but the narrator drones on too much and does very slow line reads, plus his only joke is 'everything is lovely and definitely not really dark!'. It also means that Lilli has very little characterisation, and they feel the need to have every single dialogue starts with the other character saying "you're staying quiet Lilli, but I bet you want to ask me about..." It doesn't really seem to add anything except being quirky.
I haven't got stuck on anything yet, but the main problem is that again it's fairly unengaging. So far the only story has been 'the mother superior tells you to do chores, and some weird guy has shown up that Edna wants you to get rid of(?)', and again you're just walking around the various rooms of a single building. I think that's a big problem with all these Daedalic adventures - they don't tell a story with the puzzles, they just say 'here's a kooky world, you play a character in that world and you want to escape, walk around a bunch of offices and shops and stuff until you figure it out'.
I kept going because it's a fair bit easier than the last one. They've STOLEN the joke of the player character killing loads of people as they solve puzzles from BTDT and they've STOLEN the concept of a clown providing different shapes of balloon to help you solve puzzles from TGP (and I guess Grim Fandango).
There have been a couple of logic puzzles (of the 'the red shield can't be next to the blue shield but the blue shield must be above the yellow...' type), but thankfully they give you an auto-solve button. (I think if you have to do that kind of thing then you should maybe reconsider putting the things in there in the first place, personally, but at least they saved me the bother of going to a walkthrough.)
Okay, so the game does get you out of the convent fairly quickly (even if it is just to a fairly basic Pacific Northwest type area - a small town with a bar, a sheriff and a cemetery, plus some caves and a lake), and it uses a Psychonauts/Dark Seed mash-up conceit (jump into a hypnotic projection of your own mind which mirrors the real world and allows you to kill off mental demons which each stop you from doing one type of naughty thing like play with fire) to take you to a few other weirder locations too. Unfortunately, one of these is 'Wild West town', which is pretty dull too. Unfortunately, the jokes are still bad, the puzzles still ropey, the polish levels still low, and the narrative has switched from consisting wholly of 'escape' to consisting wholly of 'find Edna'.
It's all moot now, though, as I hit a game-breaking bug where if you don't talk to two characters in the correct order, a vital option never comes up and you're stuck. Daedalic have been aware of it for at least four years now, but their only offered solution is to download a savegame from their website. I can't really blame them, as TGP has that Dan pathfinding bug and our only answer is 'hope you saved recently!', I don't know how many big Daedalic were when they made this game (I guess you could argue that as they got bigger they should have supported their older games, but it's not always that simple), and as a veteran adventure gamer I should have thought to keep multiple savegames when playing through an old indie game! The important factor is that the game's not good enough for me to bother with making sure I've got the right savegame for the right game version and I'm putting it in the right place, as well as playing through a bit of the game again.
Watched a playthrough of the rest of it. Apart from one upskirt panty shot of Lilli (who's like 6 years old, Jesus Christ, Daedalic), the only things I noted were that it soon goes back to the asylum of the first game (so, not only more rooms and corridors, but the same ones you already spent a whole game stuck in, and they don't even do the clever TGP thing of letting you use previously unusable objects from the first game) and brings all the old characters out, then has some weird turn-based strategy minigame as the climax before doing the now standard Edna And Harvey ending of a twist, a multiple choice and an abrupt halt.
Rating: a little more polished, but still unengaging thanks to all the usual Daedalic problems.
