Nightmares from the Deep 2 The Siren’s Call is another point-and-click adventure port to Xbox One, and it’s glaring issues are salvaged by its core puzzle designs.
Game – Nightmares from the Deep 2: The Siren’s Call
Platform – Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Windows
Developer/Publisher – Artifex Mundi
Release date – August 5th, 2016
Price – $9.99
The Caribbean Naval Museum reopens a little over a year after its curator Sarah Black disappeared and reappeared aboard an ancient galleon. Black uses the stage and the exhibit to platform her autobiography entitled The Curious Case of Captain Henry Remington. A courier arrives with a package that only Sarah can open. After a quick scissor scavenger hunt and a bit of puzzling, a mermaid asks for Sarah’s help right before she is attacked by weird fish people.
The stagnant artwork is eye-catching, and there is a great base job on the 3-D characters. There is more animation than The Forsaken Bride, but the lips and audio are out of synch and the motions are choppy and clunky. It detracts from some of the artwork itself and it loses some of the style that made The Forsaken Bride unique. The game tries to make forward progress on its animation quality, but it’s made in baby steps too small for the console. Nightmares from the Deep 2 isn’t the benchmark caliber of an Xbox One arcade game.
The minigames are methodical compared to The Forsaken Bride. The I-Spy games seemed a bit arbitrary in TFB, and Nightmares from the Deep 2 seems to rely more on purposeful items and smarter puzzles. If you haven’t played TFB, then you’ll quickly notice the game takes place in two forms: the I-Spy sequences and the interactive puzzles like winding clocks with missing pieces, making spiked coffee, and rearranging mozaics and crests.
Nightmares from the Deep 2 has an imaginative story with strange albeit generic characters. The bad guy is the shark, for example. The Siren’s Call is a cliffnote in a larger continuing story, which means you don’t really get closure after the playthrough and the bonus.
Nightmares from the Deep 2: The Siren’s Call teeters in awkwardness. Strip away the animation sequences and you’re left with a couple hours of well-presented yet repetitive puzzles. This is hard to recommend to any Xbox One gamers unless you’re searching for a family friendly game.
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