izigame.me

I really liked the first game, so I went into this one with high expectations. Unfortunately, those expectations were not met for a few reasons:
Firstly, the deductions. It's a bit hard to quantify difficulty and flow with these open ended mystery games, so I'll say this- I had to use a guide 3 times over the course of this game, not the in game hints, a straight up external guide. Call it a skill issue if you want, but in the first game I only had to use one once and it was for the much more difficult dlc. The worst part is, I didn't need the guide because I couldn't deduce what happened, I needed it because I couldn't figure out how to format the answer. I don't know if this is true, but it feels like this game has wayyyy more blanks per page than the first game and definitely more words. This makes the gameplay incredibly frustrating. Furthermore, some of the end chapter pages are so incredibly long and data-dense they took longer than the actual episodes.
That's another problem. For some reason, despite having more words and longer pages, the episodes themselves are much shorter than the first game only having 1 to 2 locations up until the final two episodes. It's weird because you gather information much faster, the cases are much shorter, but the difficulty feels artificially jacked by how much information you yourself have to provide in order to progress.
The story also feels much worse than the original. I've seen people who say that the story of the first game is nothing special and they really only really liked it for the puzzles, but I disagree, I thought the story was very smart. Even the dlc, which is pretty divisive, felt satisfying to me, although I'm probably in the minority there. This game's story is disappointing. As a sequel, it uses the same grand conspiracy motif with lots of intrigue and characters with their own selfish motivations, but the conspiracy this time around ends up feeling a little too simple. It's interesting, but it lacks the punch and directness of its predecessor. This especially sucks because I actually like the characters a lot more in this game, but every single ending for each character is lackluster. I have no idea from a thematic standpoint why some characters are punished and others aren't. The story also goes off on a lot of weird, unnecessary tangents that muddle the whole experience. There's an entire chapter called "The Tests" which is full of nothing but non-sequiturs. The chapter isn't even that bad, it just comes in the middle of two important chapters that make the whole thing feel like a pointless distraction. The story is already told non linearly, why couldn't they have put it earlier or something? There's also a giant loose end that the game leaves open for the dlcs they've already planned, which just feels lazy to me.
My last complaint sounds like a nitpick, but it feels important to me: There are significantly less deaths in this game. I know the Golden Idol games aren't exactly meant to be murder mysteries, but I feel the mysteries are at their best when death is involved, for storytelling reasons. Deaths in these games are atmospheric, they build this sense of menace and intrigue. It also nicely wraps up the narrative, it gets rid of the supplementary characters or the villains in a satisfying way. This game starts out with incredibly thick atmosphere, lots of mysterious deaths that really get intrigue going, and then it all grinds to a halt halfway through the game as you solve a bunch of relatively minor incidents that have next to no weight (I mean, one of the cases boils down to accidental vandalism. Regardless of the grand story it's trying to tell, that's boring and it feels like a waste of my time).
Ultimately, I'm very disappointed with this game. I did have fun playing it in the beginning, but it feels like they front loaded all of the cool stuff and the latter half is just weak semanticizing. I'll still probably play the dlcs because I like the game's format and I know the team behind it can make some really entertaining puzzles, but I definitely won't be paying full price for them.