The Room 2 is the sequel to another puzzle game of the same title where you solve gigantic mechanical puzzles by sliding, opening, poking, turning, finding and placing objects on a fantastical device only to peel layers upon layers of additional puzzles hidden inside the first ones. It’s a pretty good game, but not as good as the original.
As a weird design choice, most levels are comprised of multiple little things instead of one big box that you can examine on all sides and carefully check every nook and cranny. The last ‘room’ of the game has about 6 different tables where you have to move between to solve the puzzles. It feels a bit overwhelming in a bad way, you have to check everything once at first to see what you can interact with, there’s no good starting point, at least by having one big complicated box, you know that the outer layer is the way to go, then you peel back the puzzles.
They add a few ‘mini-games’ here and there that provide interesting breaks in the puzzles, nothing too involved, but some light board games and other kinds of puzzles really go a long way to keep the player interested. That being said, some of the things they re-use a bunch feel boring after the third shot. These tricks are clever only the first time, I didn’t enjoy having to type words using a slow type-writer only to get another word that I had to type in, for four times. Once I knew how a device worked and ‘solved’ the puzzle behind it, I felt like you shouldn’t go back to it. At least they were good to show what you wouldn’t use any more by making it non-interactive.
The hint system also seemed ill-conceived. I felt like the game rushed to give me hints too quickly, only after a few minutes of analysing the puzzle in front of me would the little noise of available hint and the icon appearing in the upper left corner would pop in. And sometimes, instead of figuring out the puzzle myself, I just clicked on the hint button, almost by reflex, only to have the solution delivered to me.Either wait a bit longer or leave the hint button always there, don’t pop it in when you ‘think’ the player’s stuck. And some of the hints were useless any ways, like the one in the picture above. I’ve been solving these stick puzzles for five rooms now, game, “looking at the thing above the temple” isn’t giving me anything. But that should be easy to fix, just tweak the triggers for certain hints to appear a bit.