Developer: Blini Games
Publisher: Fulqrum Publishing
Platform: PC, Mac, Linux
Tested on: PC
Lovecraft’s Untold Stories 2 – Review
In 2019, we got to check out the full release of Lovecraft’s Untold Stories. At the start of that game, you follow Detective John Murphy who enters an old mansion in pursuit of a weird case that leads up to the discovery of many unnatural things. The Gods of Old are real, and so are the fanatics following them, and you get to fight them all while spiraling down your own mental health. Obviously, we expected Lovecraft’s Untold Stories 2 to follow up on this story in some way, but we expected too much.
Story
Untold Stories 2 takes whatever the first game set up for a story, and tosses it out the window like a brick through glass. Lovecraft’s Untold Stories 2 is incoherent from the start and barely tells you anything. There’s a vague new story about some artist who created horrifying paintings, and you follow his trail by visiting random locations that are very, very poorly introduced. You start as “The Detective” who is now clearly not John Murphy anymore for some reason, but just a plain detective. There’s also the Witch and the Professor, and later you start to unlock more playable characters such as the Veteran, but all this happens without anything tying it all together. Everything you do in this game seems random in the grand scheme of things. The start and the end of a level are not clear, your overall mission is not clear, and nothing makes sense here. It’s a huge disappointment how poorly the game is “written” and it definitely brings the overall quality down.
Graphics
Even though the first game had a more pixelated approach that we quite liked, the second game presents us with the graphical quality of a graphic novel. Compared to its predecessor, Untold Stories 2 is graphically superior as it offers a better perspective. In the first game, you could have easily messed up by walking on a trap because the perspective made everything look relatively flat and not always logical. Untold Stories 2 made everything isometric and easier to understand. The atmosphere of the first game carried over and everything is still dark and gritty in this one, and aside from some small changes to the HUD, it also still communicates clearly what’s going on with your character. The animations of characters might be slightly stiff sometimes, but since there’s a lot of fighting going on in a detailed environment, you will barely notice this.
Sound
Even though the game lacks music during a lot of gameplay segments, the overall sound design is still quite good. When there is music, it’s mystical, eerie, and sometimes mysterious. The sound effects are always proper and plenty, despite the quality sometimes fluctuating. There’s always some monster gurgling, the rustling of picking up papers, or your character getting damaged. Sound is what makes this game feels alive. Unfortunately, the gameplay itself doesn’t.
Gameplay
While Untold Stories 2 is a complete and utter mess if you’re expecting a coherent game, the gameplay is actually pretty straightforward. In this top-down action game, you visit locations such as the asylum or the docks, and you need to fight your way through multiple rooms to get to your current objectives, such as a specific object or a boss fight. Depending on your character, combat differs slightly but you will mostly need to fire your gun, try to dodge enemy attacks when possible, and use special objects such as grenades to stay alive. Our first problem with all of this is that, while fights stay tense, you do the same things all game long. It’s not even like you need to search your way through different rooms. Just activate the quest for your current location, and a marker will show you what room to go to next.
Our second problem is that fights can be awfully imbalanced. A room can easily be filled with ten or more enemies who sometimes also summon enemies themselves, quickly getting an entire crowd of baddies on top of you. Avoiding all of them without using area-of-effect damage, such as grenades, quickly turns out to be impossible, and sometimes you are just overrun, which forces you to start over. This is simply poor programming. You can find or craft med kits and other stuff to heal special ailments such as poison, and you can try to collect equipment that gives you an edge in certain areas, but even these things do not guarantee that you do not get killed by an off-moment of poor luck as some bloke throws a grenade on you or you get stuck in a crowd. The game suggests that you can get stronger by collecting gear on some side quests, but aside from being able to soak up more damage, we found it to be of little use.
While crafting can be fun, the currency system where you collect money and info also seems useless. Sure, you will sometimes be able to buy something from special merchants who offer new crafting recipes for gear or direct crafting supplies or medkits, but all of this stock is random and more than often useless. The game could have used something like direct access to ingredients for currency, depending less on random chance. The locations of vendors stay the same but their stock changes, making it a weird chore if you want something specific. There’s a lot in this game that simply feels wrong, and playing it can feel like a bug crawling on your face at night. Sure it’s an adventure, but there are probably not many upsides to it.
Conclusion
We appreciate the detailed graphics and the sound in Lovecraft’s Untold Stories 2, but that’s where most of the positivity ends. The story is absolute garbage and extremely poorly written, making barely any sense. The gameplay is straightforward but tends to repeat itself without ever getting balanced, getting you stuck in unfairness frequently. Untold Stories 2 feels like an unfinished product that still needs to get most of the story implemented as well as get its gameplay balanced, but we doubt this will ever happen.
No Comments