Recent reviews by Mr. Orangutan

Boring.

Environments: pretty but empty. Like walking down a hallway painted to look like it has furniture and fixtures when everything is really just wall.

Combat: in the beginning, options, abilities, and party commands really don't seem to matter. You just point, shoot, and eventually win. I can't speak to how things develop later on, as the game got so dull, I quit.

Plot: Same ol', same ol'. A long-dead precursor race has left amazing and mysterious tech all over the place. A vanished machine race returns (but not as interestingly or as compellingly as in the Battlestar Galactica remake). A secret agent betrays the galaxy for power. The MC is special. There is prejudice against humans. Whee.

Side quests: Yeah, but why?

Bonus: You get to walk through miles/kilometers of boring corridors just to go buy new things.

A cute and very short (3 hours, maybe) game of logic and deduction. Not particularly difficult, but enjoyable, with a fun, silly parody tale and well done art and animation.

Mechanically nearly identical to The Case of the Golden Idol: you look closely at certain investigation points to find official clues (indicated by an alert, so easy to find); these clues as well as character interactions give you words for your word bank. When you get a bunch of words, you play fill-in-the-blanks with a couple statements to describe a part of the story/mystery information. What you've learned outside of the clues helps you figure out the right answer from among the possibilities, but if you're missing or uncertain about a couple words, you can often brute force the right answer.

Could have been good. In fact, the game feels like so many of its elements were supposed to be deeper, more complex, more interesting. (If you check in with the Early Access community, you'll learn that this is precisely the case.) The worldbuilding is interesting and lends itself to a complex political situation that the character is caught inside. There are remnants of farming and crafting elements that were apparently cast aside at the last minute before release. There are areas that feel like they should have been more complete, should have had further things behind them. And then...well, the game is still pretty playable, though I would say the movement is a bit funky and there are still strange bugs. And toward the end, rather than continuing the more complex and interesting plot, the developers slapped on a stale, cliché ending involving mad science and stupid demonic forces and trying to bring back a loved one. Lame. Their apparent excuse is that they couldn't get all the systems unified and wanted to finish their game at the promised time. Understandable, except that they ended up removing so much just to make a final release. And disappointing.

I wanted to like it. The premise seemed weird and creative and interesting, and I love the open-ended investigation concept. But the "synthwave overdose" (as another reviewer called it) was just way too much for me. So much so that just a few minutes of play gave me motion sickness and a headache for the rest of the afternoon.

A different reviewer said "never thought I would be invested in a murder mistery much less one that makes you read lore where characters have names like Lady Love Dies[....]But yes, I am hooked in the lore...". For me, the small amount that I was able to experience before being overcome by nausea felt like it was maybe trying a bit too hard. Or just too trippy-gonzo for me.

Overall, not my cup of tea, though I'll probably recommend it to my cousin, who'll totally dig it.

So farm so lame...

No tutorial, so you just have to make an educated guess as to the controls.
No story, no context. Just a buglike character who leaves a bedroom and is told not to go into the city but apparently does...because the whole environment is urban and there seems to be nothing else to do but walk, jump at, on, or over things, and hit them.
As for the platforming, well, there are platforms...a bit sparsely spread. And you can navigate around them. But why? What's the point? What's the purpose? What are we even doing here?

Not recommended.

Excellent mystery that trusts the intelligence of its players. Cozy and creepy at the same time (but mostly cozy).

A serene, powerful experience. A truly beautiful game, breathtaking and full of passion. Brilliant, utterly believable writing, from the characters and setting to the plot and the story development. An elegantly simple interface that is perfectly designed to give the feel of being in the main character's situation without getting in the way of gameplay. Music well suited to the environment and the speed of play. Enough urgency in certain mechanics to give a sense of threat when needed without making things feel impossible. Full of mystery and discovery, tells a profound and sad but hopeful story, does a great job of letting the player think and interpret.

The game looks beautiful and the whole card theme appealed to me a lot. But it's flawed. The card mechanic slows everything down immensely, which does make things a bit more contemplative--but actions that take a second in other games take far longer here because you have to click through a number of cards.

On top of that, it's a JRPG, and I really dislike JRPGs. The story is typical and boring, the setup is typical and boring, the turn-based combat is typical, etc. (Though for me, the card facade made the turn-based, JRPG-style combat more appealing--but I may be an exception.) Nothing about the game's disguise changes that, and the fact that the card mechanic slows everything down is only going to drag the experience out longer.

Others have pointed out the game's flawed execution better and in greater detail than I, so I won't add much more. I will say, however, that while some have criticized the presence of the narrator, I really enjoyed that touch. I found the narrator interesting to listen to, and his presence made the whole thing feel more like a tabletop RPG to me, which I liked.

TL;DR: Decent puzzles don't stop it from being a boring Portal clone.

Kim Swift is rightly lauded for her work on Portal; but with Quantum Conundrum, it feels like she and the rest of the development team just phoned it in. AAA, this ain't.

On the plus side:
- Decent cartoon visuals (if you don't look too closely) that include a few clever gags.
- Clever physics puzzles that are reminiscent of those in Portal but feature different mechanics.

On the minus side:
- Those cartoon visuals start repeating veeeeery quickly.
- The overall idea is pretty much cookie cutter Portal: a zany and insane authority figure/disembodied voice directs a hapless protagonist through a range of physics puzzles separated into different chambers. Story is delivered through the Voice's monologues as you go through the puzzles, and possibly through environmental cues later on--I got tired of playing long before that ever happened.
- The puzzle chambers are separated by loooong stretches of meandering corridors and stairs that serve no game purpose other than transport. A golden opportunity for further story development was wasted here. You don't want your players wandering through emptiness long enough to realize that they've stopped playing the game. And if your visuals keep repeating during that time, well, boooooring.
- The Voice isn't half as funny as the game creators seem to think he is. The zany, entertainingly callous humor was pitch-perfect with Cave Johnson; with the Inventor, it seems clear that someone thought they could duplicate that success by, well, duplicating it. Except they used a ditto machine rather than a high-quality modern photo printer.

TT's Lego games are by and large mediocre. This one, despite clearly high production values, is no exception. In fact, in some ways, it is (still, after several years) disappointingly buggy. Its positive points do not outweigh its defects.

Might as well start off with the positive. LMSH2 does feature some pretty good voice acting, though it sometimes feels a bit forced, or the delivery isn't quite right for the final in-game context. It's still a damn sight better than the Lego Harry Potter (LHP) games, which thought it would be a grand idea to replace actual lines with mere grunts, and to use the same grunt-actor to grunt multiple distinct characters in exactly the same way.

Also positive: the visuals are pretty, both during cutscenes and during gameplay. Even on my low-budget laptop. AND, the character animation is excellent and expressive.

Now that we're done with those, the bad:

Certain things that hold true for almost all Lego games, hold true for Lego Marvel Super Heroes 2 (LMSH2):
-clunky directional controls
-awkward platforming
-unskippable cutscenes that play every time (and in LSMH2, even some cutscenes that you can skip, but only after playing through 2/3 of them)
-event/action animations that prevent you from collecting in-game currency
-seemingly random character switching (at least, in the equally mediocre LHP games, this was solved with a fixed character order)
-poor vehicle controls
-poorly executed context-based controls (e.g., the button used to switch characters also lets you ride or drive a vehicle, and for some characters, change costumes--but during play, the different contexts overlap and get mixed up, so you find yourself switching characters when you wanted to climb into a big cannon, or changing costumes when you wanted to change characters)
-the ability to control camera view doesn't stay where you set it
-etc.

More specific to LSMH2, the game, which was notoriously buggy (unplayably so) on release, is still buggy several years later. I frequently found myself quitting the game so as to restart a level because an essential puzzle element just hadn't appeared and so I couldn't go any further. I'm still considering asking for a refund.

On top of that, well, I'm just not impressed with the plot so far. While it is kind of nicely wacky--more so, I think, than LSMH1--it just doesn't hold together well for me, at least not at the beginning. It feels like a bunch of incongruous story pieces jammed together and soldered poorly. Something about the opening with the Guardians of the Galaxy just isn't compelling to me--perhaps because there's no sense of the stakes for the characters we're playing, we just dive right in ho-hum gotta rescue some people because whatever I guess they're paying us. But even after that, I just don't care about any of the rest of the characters. Kang the Conqueror doesn't feel threatening at all, though he truly should. And the ever-expanding roster of supervillains on his side simply seems ridiculous in this game, whereas it didn't in LMSH1. Why? It's been too long since I played that game, and I don't want to waste any further time on LMSH2, so I couldn't tell you. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Add those disappointments to the perennial problems I mentioned that all Lego games seem to face*, and you've got one lame-o time investment. Don't buy it. Don't play it. It ain't worth it.

* It's as if TT has a frame for these games that they built ages ago, and it's got a bunch of problems, but since people keep throwing money at them, they don't bother to fix them, they just keep slapping new coats of paint on the outside.