This game does not live up to the promise of VLR and has far too many loose ends and problems to be "good". But there's really nothing else quite like this series that aims so high and is definitely a unique experience in its own right.

Unfortunately, there are so many problems that aren't just the story. To get it out of the way, the story just doesn't form a cohesive narrative and just isn't as insane as VLR got to ignore those problems. It doesn't tie up most of the loose ends from VLR and adds new holes that are fairly egregious. While a lot of people say this devolves into nonsense, I'd say this doesn't go nearly as hard into the crazy as VLR did and that brings the game down a lot for me. It's far too serious in my opinion. In terms of pure gameplay, the UI is outright bad and the game just looks terrible. So many weird gameplay choices that I just cannot condone. The timeline is a massive pain to navigate and you have to resort to hunting for the next section, made more difficult by how unintuitively it is organised. The memo and file system is really irritating to navigate and a lot of the time you need to have both open and the game just doesn't let you. The memo system has added a new "ink" system that keeps going down the more you write on screen which was already useless and limiting but for SOME REASON, ERASING MAKES THE METER GO DOWN TOO. There's also some abject garbage with certain choice paths where you need to type in something instead of being given a MCQ, but sometimes the text to unlock some paths is not communicated at all which completely halts your progress because you don't know what you're supposed to be doing. The puzzle rooms are all of middling quality and maybe 3/13 rooms were actually interesting enough. It just devolves into either a "click everything" fest or a linear "follow the instructions" snooze.

The game also just looks terrible. They went for a fully 3D modelled aesthetic but the textures are really horrible and ugly. The PS4 version has a much better lighting system that adds dynamic shadows that fixed a lot of glaring problems with the art style but that's completely missing from this version. The music, while great, is largely simply tracks from VLR and I didn't recognise any new tracks.

All the good in the story and the sheer ambition does not outweight the facts that the game looks bad, plays bad and ends bad. If you're a VLR fan, you're probably invested enough that you'll play it anyway. For anyone new to the series, don't start with this game and maybe don't play it at all.