anger

Super good, honestly lives up to the original, which I did not expect. The artistry in this game is incredible and they cranked up the wacky level designs to 11. Took most of the best parts of the first game and made them even better, took most of the worst parts of the first game and fixed them. Solid story, solid characters, solid all around, and extremely creative and simply a joy to experience. I spent so much time playing this game with a stupid smile on my face.

There are a few negatives, firstly: the game is extremely easy, and as far as I know there's no option for harder difficulties. I didn't ever die or even come close to dying during my entire playthrough, and I'm not particularly good at video games. The only exception was the final boss fight, which I did die once during, and I might just be salty but I think it's because the boss' reach is bugged to be too far during the second phase haha. The combat in general can feel good sometimes but be pretty janky feeling other times, but in either case it remains true that you don't exactly feel much of a threat from the enemies. Some boss fights were fun but some got old pretty quickly. The design for each one was super interesting though and the art team really knocked it out of the park.

The puzzles aren't really puzzles, and any time there is actually a puzzle the characters just tell you how to solve it, so you don't really often have to think through things on your own. The game is just a bit of a walk in the park in this regard, it takes you through a lot of fun experiences, but you don't actually have to do much beyond press buttons in order to progress. The only time you have to figure things out on your own is for getting certain collectibles, which I have to admit are really fun to hunt for, at least in my opinion. The levels are so fun to be in and look around that it never gets boring to look through all the nooks and crannies.

Sometimes things just take too long when you are at a critical point in the story. You're getting an exciting story beat but then forced to play through three separate 10 minute segments in the middle of it that maybe aren't super fun. Not a huge deal but it can interrupt the pacing at times and feels like they included a gameplay segment just to pad out the runtime of the game instead of adding something interesting or fun to the game.

My only other main critique of the game is sometimes characters just get annoying. Not because they are written that way, but when Rasputin repeats for the 5th time in the last 30 seconds that he hears a collectible nearby, it's like, alright game I get it. Or when I go off to do a sidequest and Rasputin feels the need to remind me that I should actually be doing my main quest. Mainly it's Ras getting on your nerves by constantly talking during gameplay, but that seems to be an issue for single player RPGs across the board. What really gets me are during boss fights, hearing the bosses repeat the same 4-5 voicelines over and over and over again during the entire bossfight. It's just irksome and there's no reason for it.

Over all super positive experience, just hope for the next game DoubleFine tighten up a couple of things and spend a little more time asking themselves "is this going to be fun the third time?" before working really hard to implement something.

I've poured two thousand hours of my life into this game. It's perfect.

I hate it. Buy it now.