Go to the game's main page
Review
Balderstone #2 introduces a fresh batch of terrifying tales:
- Look after your grand-child as an elderly invalid. Weird and nonsensical, with little interactivity but a lot of strangeness.
- Examine a monster in forensic detail. Simple and amusing.
- Live the spaghetti-western lifestyle: deserts, horses, guns and a love triangle (think Claudia Cardinale as Jill Mcbain). Exudes Mexican flavour. Like oregano and cumin.
- Survive an incident in a space laboratory. The regulation "meaty" chapter (each game seems to have one). The way this introduces who you are, where you are, and what you're doing with no infodumps at all is really neatly done. Has some tricky puzzles for the first time in this series (it will become more of a feature in later games). Managed to get stuck here for the first (and only) time too, unfortunately. Had to consult the "ClubFloyd transcript" to proceed.
Also includes some entertaining hidden content: try using the (Spoiler - click to show)safeword, or (Spoiler - click to show)quitting and restarting. If you enjoyed the first Balderstone, this is more of the same quality writing and expert pacing. But it's definitely the next game in the series where things really start to fly, as Veeder gets more ambitious with bigger and more complex scenarios, while also varying the storytelling voice more between the fictional authors.
