A huge improvement over Overture, Black Plague provides a lot of answers to the open-ended nonsense Overture called its story. It somehow learns to take itself a bit less seriously while also being definitely scarier, with Clarence serving as some expert comic relief who still manages to pull the horror reins fantastically here and there. Also a significant improvement in puzzles, even there still were a few that made no sense and sucked. They understood how garbage the combat was in the first game, and their response to that was to remove it altogether, which came together to great success, with the Tuurngait Infected feeling absolutely horrifying to get chased down by, and from that making the couple actual “combat” sections feel pretty fantastic to engage with.

The whole old lost mine aesthetic unfortunately gets traded out for more run-of-the-mill abandoned laboratories, but it still works great in my opinion. Black Plague definitely feels like a true predecessor of what was to come in a couple years with the first Amnesia, with the focus on hiding from your enemies instead of engaging them in combat.

The story still poses some huge open-ended insinuations that feel way too huge to wrap your head around, but at least it was way less lackadaisical than Overture’s story progression.