This dark middle chapter packs a punch, but falls down on a few important tasks The second game in the The Devil Came Through Here trilogy exhibits a lot of the strengths that made R. Michalski's first ouvre “The Cat Lady” such an engrossing game, but in its effort to be darker and edgier, it doesn’t quite hit the mark in some important areas. Much of the technical framework is the same as before: The artwork is as strange and evocative as before, keeping up with and at times even surpassing what came before. The soundscape is unsettling and studded with great atmospheric music. The gameplay is again the perspective and control scheme of a 2D platformer married to the inventory, puzzles and focus on dialogue for exposition and storytelling purposes of a point-and-click-adventure. The difference is the kind of story this game has to tell. The title is a hint that our protagonist, returning character Joe Davis, probably won’t get himself a happy ending. As the story goes along, I got the impression that he actually doesn’t deserve one, either. To be fair, his lot is tragic, and he has moments of grace, if the player so chooses. But he is a deeply troubled individual, and he is not the only one in this story: Every character in this tale is either evil or disturbed, and they all are headed for terrible fates. Downfall is relentlessly wallowing in bleak despair, beginning to end, which made it hard for me to emotionally buy into the story. Soon my engagement was more riven by curiosity: How dark, how depressing would this get? Pretty dark and very depressing, it turns out. This relentless drift to darkness isn’t the only weakness of this game, though: A few moon logic puzzles snuck in, and the plot leaves a lot of vague threads dangling in the end. That vagueness is probably intentional, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Also, Michalski again touches on a very real and thorny issue here, but this time his take on it to my mind isn’t quite as successful as his addressing of depression in The Cat Lady. Also, while Joe wasn’t really my cup of tea as beloved characters go, I found someone in here I did very much bond with, and when her final fate was revealed, I got pretty choked up. But this time it’s only one. The bit players around here are strange, surface level and unreal, no humanity on display. I’ll say this, though: I wasn’t bored. For fans of The Cat Lady like me this game is probably a net positive experience. It’s not the lightning in the bottle that the first game was, but it still is an effective slow burn horror game that wouldn’t be caught dead relying on jump scares, and that’s something. TLDR: Play The Cat Lady first, then, if you’re hooked, you’ll pick this up without prompt. If not, skip this one.

Original horror adventure game coming from polish author that made some other similar games ... the "buried alive" scene in that game could be kind of iconic, the weirdness mixed with psychodelic vibe; just like a kind of Silent Hill 2

Я играл в оригинал 2009 и могу сказать, что ремейк лучше. Во-первых графика лучше чем пиксели игр 80-х оригинала, во-вторых геймплейно ига более законченный чем оригинал (в инвентаре не остаётся лишних предметов, которых даже невозможно использовать), сюжет и квест составляющая осталась такой же, с мелкими изменениями. Итог: 9.000/10