(Reviewed with the Unrated patch) This game delivers pretty much exactly what it says on the tin - the hypnosis suggestions accumulating were a nice gimmick, although they'd be much better if each was useful more than once! Even so, quite fun for exploring this particular fetish, which it hits very hard. Unfortunately, this is a "game" only in the thinnest sense. You are always led by the hand to the next destination, and in fact forbidden from going anywhere else. You can't even go to the right destination by the wrong route (there's a recurring event on the 2nd floor of the inn, but you can't actually go up the stairs, you have to go to your room and then "remember" to go upstairs). Sometimes it saves you the bother by teleporting you instead, and it might as well. Battles can be skipped after losing. There is text-skip and auto-text features, and the shift key removes the dialogue box (not documented). Basically it's a bit of fluff. Translation is very good.
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.
