Escape From LaVille 2 Review

Vague puzzle adventure games can sometimes work quite well. Just look at The Room series. It's not one for plenty of exposition, yet it's still gripping in how it trickle feeds information to you. Escape from LaVille 2 isn't one of those games. While it tries to be mysterious, it just comes across as being vague and off-putting. Being so ridiculously dark doesn't help either.

Mood lighting is all well and good, but Escape from LaVille 2 is dark enough that you're going to end up adjusting your brightness settings for it. At times it's tricky to see just what's going on, meaning your only other alternative is to randomly tap everywhere. That's not a bad strategy given that Escape from LaVille 2 offers little guidance, but it's hardly fun.

The aim here is to track down Detective Campbell, previously called in to the earlier Escape from LaVille game in order to solve the case of a mysterious Green Frost virus. Mostly though, you're on your own with this really quite short-lived adventure. Escape from LaVille 2 does away with the usual hints system or even a way of seeing what items can be picked up or where you can go next. Sure hand holding isn't needed, but some kind of guidance would be useful amongst all the gloom.

Such vagaries mean that Escape from LaVille 2 just isn't as interesting as it tries to be. You spend much of your time tapping on items and piecing them together, yet never really knowing why. Only short moments of text pop up to explain things, and they're far from clear anyhow.

It won't take you that long to complete Escape from LaVille 2, but odds are you'll never really be gripped along the way. It all seems a bit like a moody teenager: trying to be mysterious, but just coming off as a bit irritating.