The Rise of the Golden Idol

Even more of a banger than the first. If you intend to play it, no need to know anything else. It's a rare occurrence that a detective game has a great mystery at its core that isn't also easy to solve. The clues are often subtle, some useless, some are there to throw you off, it often leads you to wrong assumptions without you realizing. You start with seemingly random and unrelated scenes. It feels great when you start seeing the connections to everything later. It's better played without long breaks in between, if there are any it's good to refresh your memory on everything that happened up to that point. The game requires focus, if you are doing anything at all at the same time, you might end up staring for hours, getting no closer to solving anything. The total playtime can vary a lot, depending on how long everything takes you. The music is awesome, the art style and direction is fresh as hell and has character. Most importantly I found the story, mystery and characters very compelling and connecting dots between everything very satisfying. Perhaps I'd prefer it if you couldn't brute force anything with the '2 or fewer' thing and I'd kill for something even more challenging in the future. If you are of a curious nature, mystery enjoyer, puzzle solver, you need to play this.

It's rare that a sequel to a good game successfully captures the magic of the original. And this one... may or may not. Depends on the player. But for everything it changes, it expands with sheer WALLs of lore. XD I enjoyed this very much, to the point where I will set it on the same quality shelf as the original. They experimented with some things, and kept true to others. There are some chapters of this game that FAR outshine the original (the apartment complex chapter is a microcosm of sheer storytelling), while still building the same world. Great game, great DLCs.