Mysterious Journey 2

I like puzzles that make sense and these did. You push a button, you see the result without having to hunt around for what's going on. For example, in Mysterious Journey 2, there's several puzzles where you have to form a circuit or connect one side of a grid to another by clicking on dials. )...very straight-forward puzzles. Draw the grids out and it is not difficult to work out on paper. In another, you find your way across a fog enshrouded pathway (very cool!) by plotting the path from below.While there is very little having to combine information from several sources to figure out a puzzle, it does occur once or twice druing the main part of the game and again at the end. And there's a few math-based puzzles, too, in varying degrees of difficulty. (Hey, that's what Universal Hint System is for!) Still, gamers with more experience than I might not have much problem wtih them.An earlier reviewer mentioned that 'half' the time a puzzle led to nothing- just an area to look out of. I'm not sure where the reviewer is referring to, but I did not find that to be true. You open a door and there's something to find, learn about in a cut-scene, see, or do behind it.The storyline is interesting and well developed, and the ending is satisfying.As far as graphics, I'm not a tech person, but I found them to be very pretty. I wish I could have roamed a bit more in a few places- the graphics looked just too inviting to simply view from afar! The landscape is filled with bright colors and intriguing designs. This is not click and point, so you are able to move about freely.The music is not great, but at least it does not detract from the game. The voices are fine- a cut above most games. The mechanical voices are done with a bit of special effects- a nice touch. The computer-rendered people move fairly naturally. You have little control over settings, but in my experience, the game ran fine. (Athlon 64X2, GeForce 7600GS)I wish there were more games like this. Puzzles clues that are scattered hither and yon only to make little sense is not my idea of fun. I would recommend Mysterious Journey 2 to anyone who wants an easier game that does not over-tax their brain.

The game plays well on windows 10. The only problem is that I found most of the puzzles to be very hard to figure out. Yes, I had to have help with several of them. If you like involved puzzles that are difficult to figure out, this is the game for you. If you like a game that has puzzles that seem logical and you have a chance to getting on your own, then keep looking, this game is not that.

What can we say? My wife and I love puzzles! Some of our favorite adventure games have been absolutely packed with puzzles: Riven, Rhem, Schizm (the first Mysterious Journey) and Reah (the hard-to-find precursor to Schizm). We have just finished Mysterious Journey II - Chameleon, and I am glad to report that this game has puzzles in spades!We have also recently completed two other new adventure games, Uru - Ages of Myst and Journey to the Center of the Earth. In our minds, Chameleon is the best bang for the buck because it has about the same graphical *wow* as Uru, and much more logical and seamless puzzles than both Uru and Journey (check out our reviews of these other two games for more info).Obviously, a lot of comparisons can be made between this game and either its predecessor, Schizm, or its contemporary competition, Uru. In our review of Schizm, the biggest faults we gave it were that the live-acting was excruciatingly awful and it had a couple of really stinker (illogical, lateral) puzzles. However, Schizm made up for this by taking its players on an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous journey. The pre-rendered graphics of the DVD version of the game were some of the most awe-inspiring images ever put into a video game of any kind up to that point.For Chameleon, since the graphics are now constantly rendered in real time just like Uru, the level of details and lushness of the scenery has diminished just a skosh, but they are still drop-dead gorgeous. It only lacks the sheer immenseness of Uru. As a plus, the awful live acting of the Schizm has been replaced with 3D-rendered characters and more professional-sounding voice actors (although one female character near the end of the game was still painfully irritating - probably a girlfriend of one of the developers). But, you only see and hear the characters during the 3rd-person cutscenes while the rest of the game is played in the much more immersive 1st-person mode.As for the puzzles, they were some of the best we've played in quite a while. They weren't as interconnected as in some games (Riven and Rhem come to mind), but they were extremely varied in difficulty and always seamlessly integrated into the environments of the game. And, boy, were they fair puzzles, as well! Despite their difficulty at times, we only needed to get ONE hint during the entire game (on a particular puzzle that requires you to make a pretty illogical leap to come up with the solution). For all of the others, we were able to just buckle down and noodle out the answers on our own. People who do not like to work with alternate-base numbering systems or pattern observation should NOT get this game. It will frustrate you to no end.Just a couple of irritations (beyond the girl's voice). The game does not come with separate volume controls for speech, music and effects, so sometimes the background noises drowned out the critical conversations. Fortunately, they added the extremely helpful option of reading the game's transcript so you can go back and read what you missed. The music was very good but quite repetitive (hence the need for a separate control). Also, more than just a couple of the transport cutscenes were flat out missing. We were looking forward to riding some of the conveyances in the game (chairlift type devices) only to have it fade to black and then fade back in at the new location. Couldn't they have squeezed in a few more videos on the already beefy 3-CD game? Finally, these guys still cannot come up with a decent ending to their games. Like Reah and Schizm, the ending to Chameleon is pretty anti-climactic (although, as a whole, the story of the game was quite improved).In summary, we really enjoyed this episode and hope they continue to make many more Mysterious Journeys. If, like us, you were disappointed in the bloat (and puzzle cop-outs) of Uru, give this one a look.

My husband and I are experienced puzzle game players and huge fans of the original Mysterious Journey. It was with great anticipation that we started this game, but we have officially given it up halfway through.Our biggest problem is that our machine, only one year older than the game's release date, with a decent graphics card, does not have the right setup for this game's graphics rendering. Stuff flashes in and out of visibility, the cursor comes and goes, people's arms detach from their bodies, and any prolonged animated scene completely mucks up the whole works to the point that the machine has to be rebooted (IF we can access the save screen at all).We may have been willing to fight longer if the game had drawn us in more, but the puzzles just aren't as interesting as they were in the original, except for a couple of good mathematically-based ones. Also, the puzzles were extremely linear; there was rarely a matter of collecting information in general towards solving one of several open mysteries (as one encounters in, say, Riven), but always just one puzzle you needed to solve at a time, and always of the "solve this so you can get past this door/bridge" variety, which got a bit repetitive.We moved on to a different game in our "to play" pile... and were sad to leave this one unfinished, but just couldn't take it any more.