I'll give it five minutes and if it's not immediately notably better than the first one I'll uninstall.
I started on the sequel, and had not realised how different it is! First off, it's 3D. Secondly, it is continuing the story of the previously-comatose boy, now in 'the real world', which seems to be a European country in WWII though it's intentionally unclear, I think. Anyway, it actually looks pretty nice, lots of smartly applied painterly shaders and textures and what have you. The character design is a little bland but looks nice enough, and there's some interesting background art. The story starts well, too, with a cutscene of you grabbing your sister and running to a bunker as a bombing raid starts, and then an opening puzzle of trying to cheer her up by finding props around the place to tell her again the story of Sadwick - a stuffed donkey toy's head for the jester hat etc. Very clever way to tie everything together. Then another bomb hits and you clamber through a hole to find your sister and find yourself in a liminal space with bits and pieces of Sadwick's world floating around, so I guess you've been knocked out and will be going back into the fantasy land. I'm genuinely curious to see how they deal with that now.
Only real downsides so far are: the hint levels are wild by default - you get icons telling you exactly what to use where every step of the way - and still a little much at minimum; checkpoint auto save only; it's unclear whether you'll have an inventory at all; there are these little puzzle steps where you have to click then hold on a heavy object and drag it a bit in the direction they tell you, in an utterly pointless and unsuccessful attempt to increase immersion. Nothing too awful and so far I'm much more impressed than I was with the first one.
Silence: WWII (bad acronym!) continued to be a mixed bag, but is probably the best Daedelic game (not that that's a high bar).
It generally looks very nice, occasionally gorgeous, sometimes a bit sterile, like you're walking through someone's Artstation portfolio. In practice, it's just 2D with lots of parallaxing and 3D character models, but that's fine. It allows for lots of neat camera moves, and there are lots of fun, detailed animations. They continue to make the world feel alive with lots of little flora and fauna getting up to antics in the background, too. The setting itself is still your bog standard high fantasy with old ruins and what have you, but as with the first game there are some fun concepts and creature designs in there too.
The puzzles are generally very easy, what with the lack of inventory, the UI context-sensitive icons and the single-button system, but at least they're not stupid as with the first game, and they make a lot of use of your pet slug with his different abilities throughout, which is great. Sometimes it's a bit unclear what they expect you to do, and sometimes the solution involves doing the same thing a few times in a row or looking at something will actually lead to picking it up - I suspect this is mostly because they have to make the puzzle steps more convoluted than they should be to get around the lack of inventory - but at least you can get out of these sticky spots by pretty much just interacting with everything a few times until it all resolves.
The story has settled down and is fairly dull now - we're with some rebels who have to get to the queen for some reason, and you want to get to the mirror from the last game so you and your sister can wake up. Not only is the Silence story bland, it is even more difficult to get involved in now we know from the start this is all fake. There's also a lazily written romance angle - they both squabble, they fall off something and land on each other, there's no reason for them to like each other except being a boy and a girl in a story. And it comes with the requisite Daedelic dash of creepiness, with the girl being dressed in a skintight chainmail body suit and boob armour, and one moment where he has to resuscitate her and in a Freudian slip says "kiss of love" rather than "kiss of life". Dude, she's certainly unconscious and pretty much dead, now's not the time. This is 2016, not 1812.
The dialogue is mostly clunky, as usual with their games.
There is some fun storytelling stuff with the dual protagonists, though, like when you set off a firework to solve a puzzle as the brother and then realise that was what saved your sister by distracting a monster at the end of her last section. And the puzzle concepts are a bit more interesting, like a room full of hallucinogenic plants that make your three loose ladder rungs seem like snakes so you have to calm them with music before you can put them in place, then as the sister you have to disable the plants in various ways so the snakes turn back into rungs.
Finished! Sadly, it got worse as it went on - the puzzles get more fiddly (especially the ones where you're controlling the slug so there's even less feedback on attempted actions and it really is just Samorost), and the story gets more tedious. Also, that specious tone of writing where it sounds like it's deeply thematic but actually means nothing at all got worse. Like "You never help me, brother!" "You must learn to shine your light and help yourself!" "I try but the shadows scare me too much and so I retreat!" What the fuck are you going on about?
And after all the silly little gimmicks like holding your mouse down for a moment to drag an item or keeping a character balanced for three seconds or whatever, they decide to end with two terrible minigames where you're doing a little race flying through cloud rings (and the mouse sensitivity is insane) and then you're just waving the cursor over a bunch of stars in the sky to draw a picture. They repeat both of these a few times, it's bewildering that they wanted to end their game with ten or so minutes of infuriating mindless crap. Then you get a choice (one of a few in the game, which so far seem to have been another gimmick and not made any difference to the game, but here actually give you two different endings) whether to rescue all the imaginary characters and let yourself die in the real world or escape the imaginary world but with the caveat that this will (somehow) mean your brother dies. It doesn't make much sense and it's not very satisfying. Either way, the entire story of these two games turns out to be: Noah is a boy in a coma whose father reads to him; he wakes up; later, he saves his sister from a bombing raid while leaving her friends to die; their bomb shelter turns out to have one weakness - bombs; one of them dies.
The overwhelming impression I have of Daedalic from all these games is a bunch of talented people in need of good designers and writers.
Rating: Lovely presentation, some fun ideas and puzzles, but still victim to the Daedalic Clunk.
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