Escape Goat 2
I played the first back in probably 2015 and absolutely loved it. Was gifted this one by a very generous GOGer.
Am a bit disappointed to say I didn't love this one quite as much, and a few parts I didn't really like at all. For one thing, I think it's probably the case that I'm just an average or maybe slightly above average puzzler, and a few of these boards were comparatively quite tough.
In the first game I died maybe 200 times - in this one I died 490 or so times, and while some of those deaths were amusing, or for the sake of learning, a few of them felt kinda...unfair or unfun?
One particular jump sequence on a board that I really hated. No moving parts. No sense of excitement. Just failing the same static jump repeatedly. But I'll come back to that one in a sec, because there were 3 patterns that showed up on multiple boards I wasn't fond of:
1) Mechanics/abilities not well explained or not explained at all. The big one being the cape (which I remembered from the first one), which allows you and your pet mouse to change places. Well, in this one (or at least I didn't remember it from the first) while zooming to switch places, you somehow kill mobs in your way. Several boards require you to utilize that feature, and it's fine after you figure it out, but I stared at the board the first time it came up with no idea what I was supposed to be doing for like 10 minutes before I went and youtubed it. Would not have guessed. Easy once you knew what it did. Seemed a bit like cheap/manufactured difficulty through opacity.
2) Multi-step puzzles where the early steps are easy time wasters, and the final steps are where all the difficulty is. On a number of boards you're just sitting waiting for enemies to patrol back and forth for the right moment.
3) And worse, in most cases, it's not like you can see the whole sequence before you start, you sometimes get to step 4 needing to make a quick decision with multiple moving parts. So if you die, you're working back through the boring crap again without really having learned much from the prior attempt for that moment when what you're doing does actually matter.
Which brings us back to the jump sequence. While it wasn't timed, the jump requires you to fall off one ledge, go under another ledge, and pop back up onto another higher ledge on the other side through the magic of double jumping. But jump too soon and you can't get over enough - jump an instant too late and you've already died.
At least on a keyboard, that was not fun. I was sure that's what I was supposed to do. After attempt #20 or so I youtubed it, and sure enough it was exactly what I was supposed to be doing. And because it was the very last step in a board that was otherwise easy but annoying, it felt like a cheap shot.
I just couldn't get it to work. Really almost quit the game at that point after death #50 or so. By comparison, there was one board I probably died on 100 times in the original, but the design was more fair. For one, the challenge of the jump was actually interesting, and two, it came early in the board, and you could essentially just practice/experiment over and over. Here you'd waste the better part of a minute doing the same non-hard routine to get back to try again. Bleh.
That said, I'd say there were about 3/4 of the 100 or so boards I did enjoy and would probably enjoy messing with a few of them again, so I do give it a muted thumbs up. But I would never, ever replay the whole game.
Still a pretty good game overall. Harder than the first, and more polished, perhaps, but lacked the raw fun factor for me, plus as noted I thought some of the difficulty was artificial or just not fun design.
