The Journey Down: Chapter Two Review

Given the extended break between installments (over 18 months since the first chapter was released), it’s fortunate that, early on, The Journey Down: Chapter Two lets you know exactly what occurred beforehand. For a title so reliant upon telling a good story, make sure you pay attention.

This time around, and in a remarkably short space of time, you’ll find yourself on a ship, in prison, and then exploring a town that’s dark and sinister in nature before delving into such delights as an industrial park, and more. The Journey Down: Chapter Two keeps the slightly odd yet well-designed visuals of before. Each character has a face like an African mask and it’s more than a little bit creepy. Adding to the atmosphere is the general darkness of the game, although that comes at a price - it’s actually sometimes too dark to clearly see certain things. Still, I guess that’s capturing the foggy nature of the town of Port Artue.

No point-and-click adventure is worth anyone’s time without some great puzzles and The Journey Down: Chapter Two mostly does a sound job here. They’re perhaps not revolutionary in nature, and might not tax genre fans, but they’re still a pretty solid bunch that should keep you interested. Controls involve holding a finger down to see hot spots while tapping to select items. Odds are if you can tap on it, you should - usually it’s a vital item in some way.

The Journey Down: Chapter Two offers no hints or even a notebook to store your thoughts, so I’d suggest playing through it in a relatively short space of time in case you forget what you were doing. It’s likely it’ll draw you in though, so that’s no great hardship. It takes what worked for the first episode and improves it enough to make you really hopeful for the third.