I was not a fan of this game, I don't remember much of the first one but between the terrible acting of 90% of the characters and not much in terms of "gameplay" this is an easy "watch a let's play" of a game

I couldn't figure out what to do at the very beginning of the game so I spent the majority of time discovering practically all the clues that were locked due to gameplay and sequence breaking about 50% of the game

None of the scares were really scary and I thought they could have done more with just practical scares I.E messing with the screen more or having more typing sequences and having it put scary messages rather than what you were typing

I will probably go back and clean up the other 11 achievements thanks to the guide by Hexwyn on steam

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2682555182

This series continues to be goofy as hell. The budget looks like it went up like crazy despite the actors performing worse. The mystery delves deeper into the ass crack of the Internet in comparison to it's predecessor, focusing much more on fake Instagram as it's primary tool of investigation, which is cool.

I was enjoying it as the rollercoaster it was up until the game forced me to make a choice and it abruptly ended, and I was like, "Oh-".

I didn't expect much out of it though. These games are like less than two dollars during sales and to their credit, provide a lot for that price tag. They're fun little mystery one offs and this one is no different.

I want to like this series so bad. I played through the first game and Pipe Dreams before and enjoy them to an extent. This series has some really fun and creative gameplay with enjoyable mysteries to solve, but their reliance on jumpscares annoy me. This one isn't as bad as the previous games when it comes to that, which is good, but the few it has are still annoying. There's also a couple weird moments like characters knowing things they shouldn't know cause I guess the game thought I picked a dialogue option I didn't pick. I might come back to it at some point cause the chart shown after the credits gives more of a reason to replay the game than the previous games had.

Simulacra 2 entra de cabeça na ideia da paranormalidade em meio a "criatura" desses dois jogos, com a mesma estética e proposta de ser inteiro dentro da tela de um "smartphone" só que agora sob a perspectiva de um Detetive ou de um Jornalista em vez a de uma simples "estranho", que independente da sua escolha inicial do que você irá querer ser no game, não mudará em nada circunstancial para a trama, só em leves diferenças nos diálogos dados pelo Detetive Murilo (seu superior). As mecânicas são basicamente as mesmas com uma adição preguiçosa de um "software" investigativo que te entrega o que é uma pista para deixar tudo mais fácil para os jogadores, além de claro mais linhas de diálogos para serem escolhidas e mais decisões a serem feitas em torno do que você vai descobrindo e investigando, possuindo múltiplos finais e agora finalmente uma tradução oficial para a nossa língua PT-BR.

Apesar de eu gostar mais da história do primeiro por ser mais coerente em torno da crítica social adotada a respeito do jeito que usamos as nossas redes sociais, é evidente o quanto esse jogo tenta aprofundar toda a história contada até aqui, com o alvo agora em torno dos "influenciadores" e até onde eles chegariam para conseguir a fama desejada, com agora mais possíveis suspeitos ao redor dessa narrativa que te darão dor de cabeça para apontar o culpado e saber toda a "verdade" por trás.

Por fim, ele como uma sequência, cumpre o seu papel, mas pessoalmente eu prefiro mais a ideia do primeiro por toda sua simplicidade e autenticidade em contar essa história, mas que claro não deixa de ser uma boa opção para aqueles que gostam de jogos desse gênero.

Simulacra 2 goes even deeper into internet culture through it's influencer characters. It's longer, has a more complex narrative, and a web of dialogue that slowly unravels the more you understand about the characters.

It totally upped the quality of the videos and "glitches" which is in character as our suspects are no longer just young adults with dating apps and a basic phone camera but rather young adult INFLUENCERS with expensive 4k capabilities.

What I do dislike about the game is that it lacks the charm of the characters from the first, making everyone involved in the narrative much more complex yet cruel and careless.

Me obsesionan los simuladores sean de este tipo, más si se utilizan para moldear la narrativa con un formato tan específico. Simulacra 2 es en mi opinión el mejor de todos, no solo de la saga sino también de este estilo de juegos. Su historia sobre una influencer muerta es pura sere B moderna. Su tono navega lo cómico y lo divertido con bastante buena mano. Te lo tomas en serio porque su formato es inmersivo, pero lo suficientemente juguetón para que cuando algo no te cuadre lo dejes pasar. Me he pegado sustos y me he reído con este juego. Muy guay la verdad

Great sequel, better than the original.
With Simulacra 2 the whole missing phone ordeal is repeated once again, but this time we see a little bit more of personality is shown, quite literally.
We still see some of the classic horror jumpscares and such, but there are also some more subtle changes present as you play.
This game seemed to have a bigger budget, because not only do we see better performances from the actors, but also new tracks coupled with every character.
The soundtrack is phenomenal in this game, and although they might make the game seem kind of goofy, it really gives it this charm the first game lacked.

All in all, this is way better than the first game, and despite not taking itself too seriously, maybe that's what this sort of games need.

I had low expectations going into Simulacra 2- while I don’t recall much about the first, glancing over my old review discloses an obvious distaste for its story and lack of player agency, and coming off of the Tomb Raider reboot, I was certainly in no mood to relive either of those facets, regardless of the diminished magnitude from an indie title. Thankfully, developer Kaigan Games surprised me: Simulacra 2 takes a bite out of the Terminator 2 playbook of going bigger whilst embracing its weird mythology, and in doing so overcomes several pitfalls from its predecessor. Unfortunately, the design wasn’t mapped out as well as it should have been, and combined with deficits in other key areas, you get a sequel that isn’t quite recommendable despite being a markable improvement.

But I always like to give credit where credit’s due, and that begins with the story. In the prequel, you played as a rando who decided to get involved in this bizarre missing persons case because of sh*ts and giggles. This time around, you’re either a detective or journalist recruited by a veteran gumshoe to look into the abruptly-closed suicide of a young woman named Maya. This vet, known as Murilo, was apparently in the first game, but if he was he certainly has a larger role here, representing a clandestine police department investigating obscure phenomena. He believes Maya was murdered by a type of digital creature called a Simulacra, and it’s your job to uncover whether there’s merit to his words.

Referring to my earlier proclamation, Simulacra 2’s greatest strength is embracing a synthesis of escalated scope and emphasized lore. The first game was so interested in being smarter than the player that it relegated its silly backstory to a grand plot twist. Here, the mythos is front-and-center, and while I would have definitely preferred a grounded narrative, I can’t deny the increased vigor from knowing from the get-go I was going up against some virtual monstrosity capable of causing instantaneous death. It brought to mind a bit of Lovecraft in the sense that you’re not really trying to kill this metaphysical being so much as you are attempting to reverse the ritual that brought it into our world. That ritual was sung by one of Maya’s three friends: individuals who were, at one point, united as a group dedicated to conquering the Internet. Yes, it doesn’t take much squinting to realize that Simulacra 2 is about influencer culture, and given the intrinsic negatives from such a network of egotists and hacks, it would have been very easy for the scriptwriters to adopt a boomer mentality towards it. Yet, as gleeful as it is to berate fame-seeking, the reality is that would not have made for a fun video game; one-sided insult humor, especially when paired with a serious topic like murder, can only go so far before it becomes tiring, annoying, and repetitive.

Thankfully, Kaigan Games strayed from this pitfall into more thoughtful territory. You still get jabs, but the characters in Simulacra 2 are fleshed out beyond your typical attention wh0re caricatures. At a first glance through their social media feeds, each seems willing to do anything for fame. But after some good old-fashioned detective work plus a private conversation between the two of you, you’ll realize that things are greyer than they initially appeared. There were many times I went into a confrontation ready to excoriate one of these fools, only to turn hollow upon discovering there was more to them than the cover story put out for their fans, and the quality of those revelations is saying something considering they’re derived from text-based convos 99% of the time. While the writers don’t add any particularly revolutionary observations about vlogger society the way Deus Ex miraculously did back in 2000, their extrapolation on the kinds of tactics people are willing to do to stand out in a heavily-competitive marketplace does make it relevant for modern audiences.

Sadly, this commentary is outweighed by all the elements associated with the titular monster, and while I do confess to being biased against this fantasy fare from the outset, I don’t think more open-minded gamers will care for it either largely due to its manifestations as a horror gimmick and milquetoast metaphor on the dangers of creator culture. With the former, you get recurrent lapses into phantasmagoric territory as Maya’s haunted phone exposes the protagonist to surreal imagery, voices from the past, and your garden-variety screamers, and all of it (minus the changing screensaver) is as goofy as you would expect. With the latter, it’s evident the writers wanted to use the Simulacra to represent the instabilities of giving away your identity/persona to online strangers (much like It Follows did with STIs), but the dialogues conveying it are so on-the-nose and not introspective enough to stand above common-sense logic.

In addition, while the actual texts are scribed well, you’ll have to deal with some VERY inconsistent live action acting when viewing recordings. For the solo videos, the performers are generally fine- in fact, I felt the web promo entries you peruse, in general, were extraordinarily crafted, from a writing and cinematography point-of-view (no doubt Kaigan had infinite real-world examples to model after). On the other hand, whenever dramatic discussions spring-up, man do these artists show their immature chops, ranging from mediocre to downright awful.

The bulk of the gameplay does partly make up for these lapses. Taking a page out of Her Story, Simulacra 2 sees you largely in the driver's seat as far as pursuing clues and uncovering the truth. Compared to the first game, wherein you had to rely on others to find stuff for you, here your phone (courtesy of a LEO app called WARDEN) periodically generates leads that guide you to your next task without holding your hand. You’ve got story beats and optional objectives, and one of the greatest accomplishments of Simulacra 2 is its mirage of player choice. Completing those latter jobs provides evidence that spawns new dialogue branches with suspects, allowing you to glean extra caches of information you otherwise wouldn’t have known; rarely did I feel that you were getting a pre-rendered generalized response regardless of what was said the way text-based adventures like Lifeline usually operate. However, the reality is none of it matters in the long run as there is ultimately only one good ending (very hard to achieve at that), the six bad ones being, more-or-less, reskins of the other. Yet the fact that I didn’t feel cheated in my playthrough the way I did with Life is Strange is a testament to the strength of that illusion.

Graphically, Simulacra 2 is relatively unchanged from its predecessor. You’ve still got beautifully-stylized renditions of popular social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter to browse at your behest. I did feel this PC port was more ergonomic than the first one as the full-screen options and ease of scrolling indicated greater care for the whims of KBM users like myself. That being said, I hated how departing from an app was treated as closing it entirely rather than moving it to the background, as every time you return you’re forced to reset from the default page rather than where you last left off.

In terms of sound, I spoke enough about the voice acting earlier. The only other person is Murilo, played by a guy named Jay Sheldon. Despite his appearance, he’s no Somerset, instead serving primarily as comic relief, which Sheldon does a good enough job of conveying in his FMV and phonic sections (though I hated how intrusive and loud his pocket dialing could get). Despite this, he isn’t a complete joke, and his textual guidance throughout the game is actually helpful, never being overbearing nor generic.

With regards to SFX and music, there isn’t enough to say- when it pops up, it’s fine, but compared to Welcome to the Game, I did feel the developers could’ve been more evocative with the sonoric parameters of the Internet.

In the end, Simulacra 2 is targeting a niche audience. It does a lot to push this subgenre of the adventure game forward, but too many half-baked concepts put a cap on its higher aspirations.


Note- It’s amusing how people would rather SMS you than speak on the phone (especially an older head like Murilo). I know fans will claim that it had to be this way given the messaging format of the title, but you could’ve had reaction options that triggered varying voice responses from the person on the other side of the line (in fact, the endgame does just that).