Still Life 2

One of my most hated games of all time. If you like painful pointless puzzles ENJOY! Also the ending is open and the only hint to who the real killer is is an out of date url that is no longer up making the whole painful play of this game pointless,

Still Life didn't need a sequal, especially one that comes after 4 years and awkwardly tries to both complete the story of the first game and tell a new story. The new story is pretty garbage too. This might as well been the Saw: The Movie: The Game. The amazing pacing in the first game is nowhere to be found. The puzzle mechanics are clunky and repetitive. Limited inventory system doesn't add anything, it just means backtracking in the later levels. What's funny is this game lasts as long as the first Still Life, about 10 hours, but it feels so much longer. By the end I wouldn't blame you if you just quit instead of finishing it. It just drags on and on.

If I could give this game away I would. Save yourself some frustration and give this one a pass.

Compared to Still Life (4 Stars) rather weak 2 stars because of: The chance to die is quite common, so it's an annoying "solve and save". There are several gamebreaking bugs. The game just does not continue if you do things in the wrong order, everything besides the main char goes black or gameplay just hangs up on a phone call (the game not the calL :-p). I had to fall back to old savegames and do parts of the game again. After the third time I gave up. It's a pitty because the game is not that bad in general.

After Post Mortem and Still Life, I was very disappointed with many of the choices made in Still Life 2. In some ways, it continues the downward trajectory of the last third of Still Life 1 - after a wonderful, atmospheric, and realistic game, it turned to the silly (I'm thinking in particular of the "B3" events in Still LIfe, which were uniformly goofy and really pulled me out of the atmosphere the game had set up). Well, here in Still Life 2 we see the same. Conversations, creatively handled in Post Mortem then completely nerfed in Still Life 1, here at least give some choice, but almost never any choice that matters. I suppose that's a step up. But playing a portion of the game as a "victim" ... and far worse, in some of the choices one is actually choosing the villain's conversation options, so playing the baddie - is an unpleasant choice for me (YMMV). Like too many films, the villain is essentially given super-powers, without the occult justification of the previous titles. No spoiler, but: when stepping out of the house after unlocking something, the cutscene had me howling in outrage, and I had to quit for a bit. Finally, the interface... oh, how much worse it is than the earlier titles. Every menu transition is slow. A taste of the UI: after saving a game (which takes four clicks), it takes three clicks on buttons which appear in three different screen locations to return to the game. Right-clicking to exit/backup? Not for you, gamer! And after each click there's a second or two before the next necessary button appears ("OK", "Back", then "Continue to game"). Other interface issues: unlike previous titles in the series, there is no option for gamma correction ... one screen in particular, if one steps to a certain part of the screen, goes completely black. I thought it was loading another transition! There were other non-intuitive interface choices that may send you online for help, but that's enough for now. For completists only.