man, where do i even start lol.
the story and characters are outstanding, leagues ahead of the first game. that said, i think it would not be nearly as effective without the setup from the entire first game, so it's hard to judge it purely on its own merits. frankly though, i loved pretty much every beat of the story, and the twists/reveals/tie-ins near and at the end were actually way more satisfying than i expected them to be; if i was judging the game on that alone it'd probably be a solid 10. but of course then there are the trials. luckily the minigames are still a quite minor part of the experience, but pretty much all of them are significantly worse than the originals (or just plain bad). the new hangmans gambit is so awful i don't know how it even got through testing. panic talk action is way too cluttered so it's way harder to focus on anything that isn't just the timing indicators. the new "consent" mechanic in the debates is usually just confusing and felt wholly unnecessary. the rebuttal minigame, as well as the increased number of truth bullets in general, highlight a really annoying flaw that was present in the original too, which is just... there's no time to actually think, and no mechanism provided to the player to actually inspect the relevant information without a tedious stream of pausing, unpausing, checking which things are available, possibly writing things down, etc.; even if the game just showed like a little checkmark in the truth bullets menu next to the active ones, that would be a massive improvement. luckily new closing argument and logic dive were actually quite fun; logic dive does have the same problem of no time to think though, especially when it hits you with questions you have zero possible way of predicting and expects you to pick the right answer with absurd speed. BUT as much as i can go on and on about how bad the minigames are, they are again such a minor factor that they had a minimal impact on my overall experience. ultimately a great game.
9.5/10

Reviewed on Feb 03, 2022


1 Comment


2 years ago

I'm curious what you would eventually think of the 3th game :)