My favorite of the Harry Potter titles and one I've revisited quite a few times throughout the years. This one takes inspiration from the Zelda franchise and proves to be a pretty fun adventure game with a relatively small but fun explorable Hogwarts.

Chamber of Secrets came before the games really tried to match the look of the movies and was all the better for it. The art style really works for the game and gives it a whimsical feel all its own, complete with an actually endearing soundtrack with original themes not found in the movies. The voice acting can be pretty cheesy at times but is charming all the same.

Chamber of Secrets has you mapping your spells to various face buttons and working your way through a number of dungeons. These areas are often presented as "lessons" that Harry must go through to find a spellbook and unlock a new ability. The puzzles are simple enough for children but fun and some of these sprawling areas are pretty elaborate. I won't soon forget the dizzying heights of this game's restricted section.

There's a lot of varitety from the Quidditch minigame to stealth sections with lite Metal Gear Solid type mechanics where you'll try to sneak your way past the aggressive prefects. The sense of exploration really comes through as Hogwarts has plenty of hidden passes to uncover, and you can even fly your broomstick above the castle and all around the grounds.

Harry Potter fans would be remiss not to check out Chamber of Secrets- and I hope that the upcoming Hogwarts Legacy captures some of its magic.

The Gamecube/Xbox versions are seemingly only a slightly different experiences, but the differences here are extremely worthwile. While you cannot walk around the grounds fully, this is actually a HUGE benefit. It cuts down on so many boring sequences of walking back and forth, yet it sacrifices nothing as everything is still fully modeled and you can still fly around on a broom once you unlock it. The assets they saved up by removing freeroaming seemingly went into making the entire game look better, more colorful and vibrant. The game is also streamlined in a lot of other ways, all for the better. Sidequests are much faster and easier to complete, secrets are moved around to much more convenient locations, some enemies are reskinned to add to variety, and during the final boss fight with the Basilisk you get to use an actual sword rather than dagger that's just a reskinned wand. Just a purely improved experience, for me anyways, but do take that with a grain of salt, as I am binging all these games in a row.

Firstly? It’s good to keep in mind that this is the first game in the trilogy, despite it being based on the second movie. I suppose blame the release of the sixth generation of consoles being too much after the release of the first movie. Anyways, this game is indeed graphically and visually quite improved. Everything looks far more polished and there’s a lot less waiting around for things to happen. Hogwarts itself has not changed. It’s the same map as the second game, only this time the puzzles and secrets available are in my opinion quite a bit less interesting than the first game. Another thing worth mentioning is the absolute lack of enemy variety in this game. I can only remember 3 enemies you could actually fight, fire crabs, Gnomes, and the occasional Gargoyle miniboss. I suppose you could fight some plants but they were mostly obstacles rather than enemies. The ghosts in the second game are here, but they are lousy unavoidable obstacles that really demolish the Transfiguration dungeon. Another thing worth noting is I found the dungeons overall to be more boring and less interesting in how they were designed. One other key negative I had was the absolute over abundance of stealth sections. Almost every night had an un-skippable stealth section, and the camera angles were far worse here than in Sorcerer’s Stone. However there were a few positives I found here over the second game. I liked the spell variety, although one particular one falls to the absolute wayside and basically isn’t used outside of the challenge you get it from. Another thing that was far better here was quidditch, you actually got to play it and compete in the House Cup! Another positive note is that there’s a lot more life in Hogwarts, a lot more students around to talk to and a lot more side quests to go on. The final positive was that the final boss was far better here and made the overall package far more satisfying. Overall, quite a bit more polished but worse designed overall.

The first PS2 title is a strong outing for the Harry Potter games, it really raised the bar in a lot of ways and provided a great deal of wish fulfillment. Most importantly, it has a fully explorable castle, and the game leans into that a lot.

The game is split in two: day activites, such as classes in which you gain new spells and quidditch, and night acitivites, where you do things that go against the school code, which largely just mean that you'll be sneaking around prefect which patrol the halls. At night you can also visit a shop Fred and Goerge set up, with additional cards, prank items and even a spellbook to buy for beans. This currency is a tad bit too scarce for my liking, but it's not a terribly important problem if you decide to complete the game.

This version of the story takes several major liberties in order to make both sections relatively short, meaning that, for example, in this iteration of the story it is never revealed that Lockhart is a conman. He's only ever seen twice, once in Diagon Alley and once during his class. Some liberties were also taken with the intro, having two tutorial sections in Weasley's household for the very basics and some minigames, and then the Knockturn Alley and Diagon Alley, which are largely about stealth and items. It's a very memorable section, similar to the portable titles, where the Alleys are much more expansive and you get to visit all sorts of shops and other buildings. Afterwards, you get to Hogwarts itself.

With a hundred cards to collect (every 10 increases your health), there is an abundance of chests, locations, secrets and even sidequests available once you begin the aforementioned Hogwarts day-to-day routine. During the day you can use everything you've learned to get closer to completion without too many threats. The problem is, everything is a bit too spaced out, and, just like in the RPG title of this part of the series, there is just so much running back and forth for some of these things. You go to the grounds and find these tiny objects, sometimes without any indication of where exactly they could be, and to return them to their owner, you either have to fly around the grounds or go all the way back up to the top of the castle, to your common room. You have to do a lot of this to win the House Cup, and without that, the ending just doesn't feel satisfying at all. It's a bittersweet design choice, having to do ardous tasks just for a short moment of satisfaction at the end. There are some minigames to go in-between, like gnome-throwing (every attempt costs beans and is also a bit too finnicky for my liking) and a genuinely fun version of Quidditch, but they're still very short bursts of variety.

Worth noting that the castle grounds are only fully open in the PS2 version, the Gamecube and Xbox ones may avoid this problem, as they simply teleport you across it to fit on the disc.

This particular part of the saga has probably the most video game potential, with several major encounters that can be turned into bosses and several areas that are only ever appear in it. It's a shame that a lot more of your time will be spent on these mindless, clueless searches, because the story sections are actually really fun. They're a bit more nonsensical than even your standard HP game section perhaps (Some spell challenges have BUZZSAWS in them) but this style of a game works so well with the extremely nefarious and oppressive nature of the Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban, where the danger is always looming, even though it is only felt as poignantly by Harry. The Basilisk is always waiting within the Hogwarts pipes, and you can hear its faint whispers if you listen in on the chatter, though it sometimes also speaks very loudly, directly to Harry. There are also spiders roaming the halls from day one.

And, as mentioned, the bosses should deliver, and they actually do! They're not fully polished, but both serve their purpose well enough. Aragog perhaps less so, it feels like he should be able to completely destroy you, but when you fall into a hole and go mano-a-spidero he is just very limited. The Basilisk, on the other hand, is fantastic, it slithers through the pipe holes in the Chamber, it can feel your presence, but it cannot see you—it was blinded by the phoenix beforehand—so it crawls randomly and you have to avoid its gigantic body. After each strike the sword (or a dagger: it's very short because it's actually a reskinned wand) falls out of your hand and the snake attempts to slither its way before you can grab it back. In the original book, and in the movie as well, this encounter is so cool because it's more so a stealth section—Harry is running and hiding and gets that one, big final blow in— so it's weird that they never utilize actual stealth—which is a core mechanic in every iteration of HP video games up to this point—but at least the gigantic blind snake boss battle feel is there in this one.

This game in particular is very fondly remembered by people who played it, and is considered one of the best, but I honestly think a lot of the other games have it beat, even back when it was released. Technologically it was rather impressive, and it was an absolutely awesome game to show around when HP was at peak popularity, but going back to it, it sadly hasn't aged very well. Other HP games have really switched their focus onto that exploration aspect after this one came out, and they do it a lot better, while this game, unfortunately, does it rather poorly. It feels like playing a tech demo, where a lot of the ideas for what to do with the assets and the castle itself were mere prototypes. However, as a Harry Potter video game, this is an impressive and ambitious title indeed. All it really takes for this game to seer itself into an impressionable mind is to use the broom, go for a ride on the Hogwarts grounds, and stare for a bit at the giant building in all its glory.

I didn't make Harry complete the Incendio challenge several times when this was my only HP game only for him to have to relearn it in almost every following game

I always had some issues with the mobility of the Harry character: the aiming of the spells, the platforming--jumps and reaching ledges are especially frustrating along some sections, like in the Forbidden Section of the Library and the godforsaken Avifors challenge. The loading screens are frustrating and diminish the magic of exploring this quite passable version and admittedly rather moody version of Hogwarts. As superior as the Hogwarts in Order of the Phoenix is, exploring the school at night here is way scarier, especially for a child. Jeremy Soule's music is amazing, such a good vibe.

Flawed but comfy, one day I'll play the PC version. The Xbox one is very good, the final boss is disappointing but after playing almost every HP game from 5-8 this is a masterpiece in comparison.