Really great visual novel with some light logic puzzle elements. I found that it took me a while to figure out what the game wanted me to do when and what was even possible, which lead to some frustrating game overs. The navigation from investigation scene to the next was incredibly tedious, why couldn’t I just have a big list of locations to pick from why do I always need to do a choice tree. The real meat here is the actual trials and the characters, everything else is a big bloated and tiresome but the highs are really high. Love how the original storyline wrapped up. Now to talk about the bonus case afterwards, it felt like it went on so long compared to the others. When I thought I was almost done there were still like 4 “to be continued”s left. All the many moving parts and trials lead to a spectacular finale though and it was well worth it. This final trial was definitely the most annoying out of all of them though, lots of shoehorned Nintendo ds gimmicks and some fairly annoying characters. Especially Meekins with his earbleedingly loud megaphone, for his parts I ended up just muting the game which I shouldn’t have to do. Finishing this gets to excited to dive into a vast series of games im bound to love.

Very delightful, expectations aside I don’t know why this got so much hate back in the day. I’ve heard that the switch port makes the speed a bit faster and some things but all the level design is the same. Theres just so much joy everywhere and the UI and world design is very pleasant to look at. The collectibles are fun and movement is smooth. Doesn’t have the boundless creativity and unique feel that galaxy or even wonder has but it gets very close. I’m counting this as mastered because the goal of finishing every level with every character is lame padding for 100%.

I’ve never seen such a crazy jump in production value/quality from one game to its sequel. Everything from the music to the dialogue to the atmosphere and changing art styles really sells it for me. Was a bit on the edge for the first bit because of the jumpscares in the first one but I’m glad this one was more tasteful with it. My first play though was definitely the best, kept me immersed the whole way. Everything after though made it kind of lose the magic, I only really liked a couple of the endings whereas the others lost me a bit there. Also clicking through half an hour of dialogue in minutes just to do things differently for the other endings made it all fade away and now I was just starting at pixels on a screen. This isn’t a criticism of this game specifically, just a flaw of having a short game with multiple endings you can just breeze by to see. Overall loved it and am glad I checked it out.