Legend of Grimrock 2 reviews

This was a nearly perfect dungeon crawling experience (with tons of content outside dungeons)! The game oozes with style, and the environments are awesome in their square-paper format. Combat is hard but manageable with patience -- movement is essential in its (nearly) turn-based battles. Character progression is slow but perceptible, especially when you have the opportunity to fight again some opponents from the beginning of the game, and there is very little filler -- you are always fighting some monsters, trying to figure out the puzzles, or hunting for better equipment. There is tons of backtracking, but the game presents many shortcuts to accelerate your trips around the island. Exploration is nice, but the puzzles and riddles are the stars of the game. All of them are logic, though you might want to explore the world to find hints, and often a hint is quite far from the puzzle itself. I actually found myself stuck very often, but coming back to a puzzle on another day gave me new ideas; there was only one "main" puzzle that was too obscure for me (the combination to the cemetery door -- I found its hints and nearly solved it, but I would never guess the one extra bit at the end of the sequence). Moreover, you can actually finish the game skipping one (maybe two?) of the big areas; you would miss on a lot of content, but this means you do not have to solve everything, unless you want to get to the "true ending". There are also many optional riddles and secrets which just provide you with extra equipment and are entirely skippable, some of them very clever -- there were quite a few "a-ha!" moments for me. Now, do not expect too much story or lore -- though there are a few bits here and there, they are just an excuse for all the dungeon (and exterior) crawling. Score: 87/100.