I’ve always looked at the La Mulana franchise from the exterior; A love letter to older games, it was always a bit too opaque and too rough for me, so I never really played the first one. The second one looked really promising and interesting, so I gave that a shot. It was indeed, full of possibilities and mysteries to solve, but still too opaque and difficult for me. The lack of direction, the ease at which the ruins will just kill you and the old-school style of saving your progress and losing everything else you do if you die made me stop playing. It’s too bad, because otherwise I really would’ve loved trying to go through La Mulana 2!
Playing as the daughter of the protagonist of the previous game, some time has passed and the ruins conquered in the first title were transformed into a tourist attraction. Monsters have emerged, so you need to explore a new set of ruins, located into the underside , armed with your trusty whip and puzzle solving skills. The game still follows some neat concepts from the first one; You can buy and install Apps to your computer, which do things like showing you a map, let you read emails, view data on enemies, scan murals and the like, and you have to buy or find these around.
You also have a bigger inventory screen this time around, well split between weapons, usable items, etc. You can quickly change weapons, subweapons and usable items with some shortcuts, and you need ammo for your valuable ranged attacks. Combat is pretty okay, you recover all your health when you gather enough experience from enemies, the quirks of the movement are easy to learn and it never felt unfair on that end.
You’ll also get weights that are used to solve puzzles (usually by placing them on pedestals), triggering various reactions in the ruins. Sometimes you need to do more obscure things, like whipping a specific part of a room, facing in a direction and waiting. Sometimes it is way too obscure for me, and I got stuck.
You can also get to a few areas of the ruins fairly quickly, which didn’t help. I was lost because I couldn’t figure out the puzzles, but I also had access to a lot of new maps, and I had no idea where I should go. Moving around this “Corridor of Blood” also was a slow, boring pain. I finally caved in and looked at some guides to see where I should go next, but I wasn’t a fan. This is especially true when I just died to traps here and there and had to restart from my latest save. Crushing traps, poison gas traps, spike traps, laser traps, this game loves its traps.
Overall, I wish I could’ve gotten into this game. There’s probably a ton of stuff to explore, enemies and items to find and if you can stomach the purposefully retro design, it’ll probably be your jam. I just didn’t have enough time and energy to figure it all out.
