The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark

Like its predecessor, a love letter to all the classic '90s point'n'click adventures. This sequel is an improvement on the original (longer episodes with better puzzles), but don't play it until you've completed the original, as it brings back characters and makes a lot of references to the previous game's hi-jinks.

This is very similar to the first game (and picks up chronologically where the first one left off): Mini point-and-click adventure episodes where you control Detective Francis Mcqueen and his friends as they solve spooky happenings in the town of Twin Lakes. You don't carry any inventory between episodes and there are no game overs or soft locks. I liked this one less than the first. The adventures are much bigger in general in this game and so I frequently found myself having to run all over looking for things. Episode 7 does a perfect job by having a lot of different areas and some quirky puzzles but it locks you out of places once you don't need anything else from them whereas on the other maps you may find yourself doing a lot of legwork to areas that you aren't aware are no longer relevant. I forgot to mention this in my review of the first game, but almost every time I got stuck in either game it was due to a pixel hunt. The devs have done a great job of making all the rooms look busy but that's better for ambience than it is when there's one usable item on a cluttered shelf. You can hold shift to highlight clickable spots (game doesn't mention this afaict) but without labels it's better than nothing but not amazing. There's an attempt at a more connected story this time with some missions leading directly into each other but there's still not really a plot or character development to speak of. The Darkside itself operates as a combination afterlife/hell/mirror universe and fails to have a coherent flavor as a result: in one mission it'll be Twin Lakes but nicer and populated by ghosts and in the next it'll be the an eerie void or the desert from Beetlejuice. Meanwhile, plenty of spooky stuff (vampires, werewolves, sirens, immortals, the moon) all seems native to Brightside so it's a bit of a distinction without a difference. A fun joke but hard to love. Also, the supporting characters don't recur nearly as much this time around. They generally only showing up once before returning for a side episode. That stinks. I would play a whole game as Emily (who I mistakenly conflated with Alice Jones in my last review). As a final down note before I recommend the game anyway, Episode 6 is rough. Huge map, two sections where you aren't given much guidance, and a final puzzle that you have to play to figure out because the objective is completely inscrutable from viewing it. The first chunk of Episode 9 is also really ungood. At one point you have a bunch of plastic ponchos that you need to turn into a plastic bag and it's not clear why that's a problem and the game doesn't give any tells you that you don't need to enter when you click on it even though you 100% definitely do suggestions at all (usually both games are quite good about telling you when you're on the right track but just missing one thing, here you just get the default error message). Meanwhile, there's a guarded door but instead of telling you it's guarded, the game tells you that you don't need to go in there. Later it's unguarded and you can enter and exit but, at the finale, it becomes guarded again and instead of saying you need to do something about the guard tells you that you don't need to go in there when it's 100% objective. It's the weakest section of the entire game but the rest of that case was much better. All that said, same conclusion as the first game: if you want fun, bite-sized point and click adventures with quirky characters and aren't too worried about deviously hard puzzles or deep lore then you'll have fun with this one.

Considerably longer and more elaborate than the excellent first game, for better or for worse. Must play for fans of the original, but absolutely start with that one imo.