ETA: the developer is working on an upmake with real art that you can wishlist on steam now! i'm really glad.

https://jjohnstongames.itch.io/the-roottrees-are-dead/devlog/690887/the-roottrees-are-dead-but-for-real-this-time

6-10 hour family deduction and mystery. absolutely love this, especially as the work of one person almost totally alone. please don't pay for it, because the art is all AI generated -- that's a weird, bad choice the creator made and i don't understand why. the AI art is so bad that it does not ever add a sense of realism to anything, so it could really easily be simple line art or something similar. hell, he could have used visual novel sprites. if there's ever a release with real photographs or real art -- wait and pay for that.

Imagine the worst murder mystery story you can think of.

What would it contain? Perhaps it would lack investigation? Maybe the motives would be flimsy? Or maybe you have thought of the story where the villains are so painfully obvious that nothing about it is gripping?

Deadly Premonition 2 is all of those, and then some!

It's hard to describe Deadly Premonition 2 because so much of it is just a mess. Not a cute, funny, low-budget mess like the original was, but a seemingly cynical pile of garbage.

Deadly Premonition 2 has no reasons to exist. If you want a glimpse into York's future, or just want to follow him on a different case, you should probably look into fanfiction. Technically, the game does both of those things, but I can guarantee that even a free story on the internet would most likely be better written.

The premise of the game is that it's set in the modern day, but mostly takes place in the flashback, as two FBI agents question agent Morgan about his previous case. Scenes taking place in 2019 are arguably the best part of the game and should've probably been released as a light novel for people wondering what happened to the main character after a somewhat ambiguous ending of the first game.

During the first hour or so of the game you might be tricked into thinking that the game is good: it looks and sounds fairly nice, and it has that comfy feel of the original. However, as you play more, you might begin to realize that the game has nothing in store for you.

First thing you might notice is that Deadly Premonition 2 has very few characters in it: maybe half the cast of the original. Bigger isn't always better, but unfortunately the cast of the game is also a bit too cartoony. The original had its fair share of weirdos, but aside from a few residents, most were pretty realistic. The first character you meet here is a hotel chef/owner/bellboy who acts like he's three different people.

It seems like most characters were written to be quirky in a way where they have That One Thing, instead of being written as characters. There's a sheriff that talks in taglines. A half naked barman whose catchphrase is "yeaaaaaah?". Local priest who keeps repeating "pitiful". It's obnoxious and gets tiring really quickly.

Perhaps the worst of them is a tribal shaman Houngan, who appears before York to give him hints on how to proceed with investigation. I'm not an expert on cultures, so it's not my place to judge how well he was implemented (although admittedly, York quoting him and trying to impersonate him in a funny accent is fucked up), but he's not so much a bad character as he is a bad story. What I mean by that is that Houngan IS the story of the game.

York from Deadly Premotinion 1 had unconventional ideas about investigations. He trusted coffee more than anything else, but ultimately he did know his trade. The first game had you go to the police, the morgue, crime scene, then had you chase down leads.

There's none of that in the sequel. The story of the investigation is: Houngan appears, gives you a hint on what to do, you do that. What he wants from you is even more unconventional than following coffee patterns: get a strike in bowling, for example. Sure, all his hints lead to something, but it ends up feeling like you don't do any investigating in this murder mystery game, and his hints are so disjointed and weird that you only end up looking at the crime scene about halfway through the game. AFTER you know who the killer is.

Deadly Premonition 2 never cares about the "mystery" aspect of its story at all. The moment you set foot in the first dungeon, York gets a vision naming the killer. Sure, there are other people involved, so it's not that bad. Or, at least, it wouldn't be if you didn't catch the mastermind behind the whole thing before the game reaches midpoint!

Speaking of dungeons, if you thought that Deadly Premonition 2 would improve on the worst part of the original, you'd be wrong. Dungeons in the original were bad little Silent Hill-esque spooky dark world replicas of real places that always felt underdeveloped. Dungeons in the sequel are identical - and I mean completely visually identical - hallways with some checkpoints in the middle. Oh, and also there are only three enemy variations in the game and an entire ONE gun you get to play with.

Free-roaming has also received a downgrade. Arguably the best part of the original Deadly Premonition was the side content, and it's impressive how much the sequel dumbs it down. All the quests in the game are bad. At best they're an inoffensive fetchquest, and at worst they are deliberately made to waste your time.

There's a reason why I think Deadly Premontion 2 would work best as a light novel. If you cut out all the fluff, the game would be maybe 2 hours long. The quests go absolutely nowhere and include such hits as:

- Following a dog for about 15 minutes (be sure to not hit midnight in game so you won't lose track of it when the cutscene plays!)

- Getting three random items from either very specific places or places that are open on certain times and bringing them to the pastor one after one. You will receive a reward that, as far as I could see, has no use within the game.

- Talking to hotel chef. Note: nothing in the game tells you when the owner of the hotel is in his "Chef" persona, and you must only do that when he is in-character (which is about 4 hours a day)

Those aren't even sidequests. These are the main quests of the game! I wrote them down because sidequests are usually dumber are usually of "Do lots of one thing" variety. They're also as committed to waste as much of your time as possbile (do note that this game, unlike the prequel doesn't even show side quests on the map or above characters, making completion nearly impossible). However, it's likely that you would drop them after completing about 10 when you realize that the game has nothing to reward you with.

The best reward the game can give you is a new suit. The usual reward, however, is yet another accessory. Various beads, necklaces and incenses that you can use to increase everything, from firepower, to minigame luck. Those aren't a bad idea, and can even modify your gun a bit so it fires like a shotgun (although you'll probably just stick with regular bullets), but after you've received your 10th accessory, you'll probably drop the quests altogether and be sad, while you remember how Deadly Premonition would reward you with weird items, car upgrades and new guns.

Not even the ending is worth it.

Lastly, I want to bring up the big issue of the game: the transphobia. If you've heard any discussions of the game, it's probably due to York being written in a weird way. A progressive dude who cares for trans people but casually deadnames and mixes up pronouns of the only trans character in the game. Frankly, this didn't bother me much, as York is kind of an asshole, but if you thought my review made the game sound interesting in a "so bad it's good" (it's not) kind of way, I feel like I'm obliged to give a trigger warning to both this and York's ridiculous accent he makes when he impersonates Houngan.

The only way I can see Deadly Premonition 2 being worth it is if you want something to just waste your time: do random sidequests where you find spots with the help of photos and kill X amount of enemies. Even if sidequests suck, those moments are somewhat comfortable and easy to just chill to. If you're curious about the game as a continuation, however, just don't bother.

Greatest RGG Studio game story-wise that I played. There was barely any down time during my 43 hours with the game, and if there was it was entirely on me as I stepped away from the main story to do degenerate amounts of gambling, drone racing, side questing, friends missions, finding stickers for skills, just taking silly photos, looking at cats. It's honestly almost perfect, wish you did more lawyer-ing during the story tho, the bits that were in court were amazing but way too short and did not require much from you.

Bear and Breakfast is a game with a fantastic concept and great bones, but unfortunately, those two things are not enough to make a good game. By the time the game has lulled you into a pleasant routine, it continues to pile unnecessary, underwhelming additions to both the management simulator and the narrative, until both barely mean anything at all.
The first hour or so is a miserable slog through character dialog that's endearing at best, trying a little too hard to engage you in a story with not nearly enough information. This becomes a running theme with the story, all culminating in the final character interactions of the game being wildly overwhelming info dumps that are never foreshadowed and entirely devoid of purpose.
But when you start getting hands-on with the bed and breakfast management, the game transforms into this extremely satisfying loop of planning and building rooms, decorating your hotels, and doing extremely basic fetch quests for a charming cast of animal, human, and aquatic real estate representative(?) friends, each of which help you unlock new features to make your hosting business easier. You have a couple different systems to work with; foraging for materials provides you with the means to build functional furniture and landmarks that attract visitors, the trash your human guests leave behind can be used to buy decorative objects from a mischievous raccoon’s dumpster. Your humans all have their own preferences, which introduces a points-based rating system for your venues and the bedrooms you assign to patrons. None of this is particularly complicated, but that’s a plus for me; I’m not very well versed in the management genre, so “Baby’s First Management Sim” is pretty much a positive in my book. It’s all going swimmingly until the game stops in its tracks… for a horribly designed cooking system.
Ironically, the character who introduces you to cooking, Julia, is the best written character in the game besides our lovable bear of the hour, Hank. She has a brief backstory, ambitions, a little character arc, and cute dialogue. Her passion, regrettably, does not live up. The cooking system is atrocious. A card-based culinary system sounds like a fantastic idea on paper, but this game doesn’t utilize any card game concepts for anything other than cluttering up the UI. The game wants the process of foraging for and preparing a dish to take as long as possible, but your guests will eat them at a ridiculously fast pace. This, along with the truly terrible heating system required for the last two properties completely killed the pleasant gameplay loop that had been building up for hours. Once you’re given the option to hire your furry friends to help you manage these systems, it’s a little too late and far too expensive. After days of struggling to make enough profits per day to continue engaging with the gameplay, I ended up just leaving the game open and idle while doing other things. I came back hours later to a magically fixed economy, with enough money to finally finish the story.
The narrative to this point has been mostly nonexistent with some enjoyable character writing. The last few hours of this game consist of grating fetch quests with grand plot twists that manage to be both completely out of left field and entirely uninteresting. If any of these story beats and concepts had been foreshadowed, alluded to or set up in any way, I think it would have been fine. But for all of them to be plopped into your lap like an afterthought at the very end of the game is the final letdown of Bear and Breakfast.

I really enjoyed the first 10-15 hours of Bear & Breakfast. Around the middle of the game, the emphasis shifts from designing to managing, which I found noticeably less fun. There are ways to eventually automate certain tasks, but by that point I was already feeling a bit burnt out.

I also found the epilogue to be unnecessary and tonally out of place with the rest of the game. There is a good game in here, but there is also a lot of unnecessary padding.

I played on Steam Deck and it worked well enough, though I imagine a mouse and keyboard is probably the preferred way to play.