I don’t understand developers from any era of game development who just randomly decide that they need to change the whole direction of a series from horror/survival horror to action horror when the action wasn’t even good in the original games.

Like... I get what Andrew Spencer Studios were trying to do, but Ecstatica 2 is a mess. Enemies respawn so fast that it becomes a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ nightmare, and the stunlocks are even worse here.

What really baffles me is that none of this was properly patched in the remaster, especially because there’s already a toggle option to make the spiders less of a pain in the ass, so why not include some options for stunlocks and enemy spawn rate too? Christ.

But the worst thing about this game is the constant feeling of "what the ♥♥♥♥ am I supposed to do and where the ♥♥♥♥ am I supposed to go?"

I don’t know what exactly inspired this kind of progression, but now it feels much closer to Hexen: you have some random ♥♥♥♥ to do, and after doing that random ♥♥♥♥, some other random thing becomes active somewhere else and now you’re suddenly allowed to interact with it.

And still, I tried. Honestly.

Armed with guides, I kept pushing through this wall of stunlocks, “how the ♥♥♥♥ was I supposed to know I had to hit the candle?” moments, and all the other ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, because Ecstatica 2 is not made entirely of bad things. It still has something important: a real sense of adventure, atmosphere, and style.

But then the developers came up with another "genius" idea: a hidden timer during an absolutely horrible tower of trials. Didn’t finish it fast enough? Die. Reload your save and go through the whole tower full of stunlocks and "random portal leads to another random portal" ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ again. Don’t have a save from before the tower, or your previous save was made ages ago? Well, sucks to be you.

There are very few games that I’m willing to call complete ♥♥♥♥, but Ecstatica 2 is honestly impressive in how many simply idiotic design decisions it manages to pile on top of each other, both from the original developers and from the people behind this remaster, who apparently decided that badly patching the spiders was enough while leaving almost everything else untouched.

Making the game several times bigger than the original while focusing heavily on the worst part of the first game, the action, and then turning that action up to a completely unreasonable level is certainly a choice. I’m honestly scared to imagine what the next game would have been like if Andrew Spencer Studios hadn’t closed. With a sequel like this, though, I can’t exactly say the outcome feels surprising or undeserved.

The whole thing feels less like a game and more like the developers actively ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with the player, and what annoys me most is that it also feels like they’re ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with the first game and everything that made it special.

By the end, I just felt like I had wasted my time, only for the game to finish by spitting directly in my face with this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tower and its hidden timer.

I really hope they eventually add some options that simply allow players to disable some of these original design decisions, because underneath all this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ there is still an interesting game with a great atmosphere and a genuine sense of adventure.

It’s just buried under an unbelievable amount of nonsense.

Ive dreamed of this day.

I do like this game for sure. Even so, the game is super flawed because the difficulty feels super cheap in a bad way. The fact someone thought to put a hard mode achievement just pissed me off. Otherwise, that's the only non-technical issue I had with the game. An annoying issue I had with game was the visuals would bug on software mode when going to certain camera angle. I had to set it to the classic mode for the graphics to fix the issue.

Plat/100% difficulty: 5/10
Estimated playtime: 5-10 hours
Enjoyment: 7/10