Review of Memento Mori 2: Guardians of Immortality by Niclas

I must say that i really liked this game. It feels like a mix between Still Life and Gabriel Knight. The story and atmosphere has its ups and downs, but for the most time it is really good and interesting. What I really loved about this game was its challenging and fun puzzle design. Both inventory and isolated puzzles are really well integrated into the story, and some of them are very original as well. It is in fact one of the best puzzle designs I have encountered in a Adventure Game, especially during the first 3 chapters. There are some very memorable inventory puzzles a la Macgyver (the good thing is that it never felt like I was trying everything on everything, all the inventory combinations made sense when you were supposed to come up with the solution. However still challenging and creative) and some really stand out isolated puzzles during the journey of the game. Favorite isolated puzzles were for instance coming up with a combination for a pretty unique safe, comparing similarities with different paintings to get clues, creating a shadow to get clues,study a painted wall to get clues, combining transparent ship logs pages, etc.  I must also say that some of the puzzles are VERY hard, but very rewarding to solve. There is also some decent voice acting in the game as well, nothing epic, but still very doable.

So now the bad stuff. The localisation is very bad with some really bad voice stand ins. I’m not going to talk to much about this since it has been criticized heavy already by all people. This can/will hopefully be fixed in the future. Even though the majority of the puzzle design is very, very good, there are some really irritating and boring puzzles. For instance the forklift puzzle, some of the forensics puzzles are overly punishing together with difficulties finding hot spots (even when using the hot spot finder), and there are also 1 or 2 trial and error puzzles that are pretty boring. I also thought that the ending felt kind of abrupt and hurried, no real conclusion. The story was a little bit more mystique in the first two thirds of the game, and then it kind of disappeared in the end when all the pieces are falling into place.

Overall a very good game that deserves more praise than it has received. Very good inventory/isolated puzzle design combined with a supernatural thriller story. A good game if you like more adult games like Gabriel Knight and Still Life. I wish more games with well integrated puzzles like this came out in the future.

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Time Played: Over 20 hours
Difficulty: Hard