I tried, I really tried to like this game, but in the end it is just painful and annoying. The game design is simply terrible.

Pros:
- Beautiful pixel art
- Pretty good music
- A cool world to explore.

Cons:
- Janky controls/momentum
- Gimmicky bosses that are meant to be killed in a very specific way.
- Some puzzles are borderline unsolvable without hours of bruteforcing, or using a guide.

So, the game is the successor to La-Mulana. The original game came out on msx a long time ago, and was remade. For that reason I was willing to forget a lot of the bad design, considering the game was pretty old. Now with the second one in the series, I expected the bad to be gone, and to be wowed by the good. Boy was I wrong.

The movement feels incredibly weird. if you are moving when you jump, you move forward with normal momentum, and have some air control. If you jump without moving, you can't air-control until you start coming back down. If you run off a cliff, you have zero momentum or air control, and you fall like a brick in a straight line. If you jump down the cliff, you have full air-control. Some actions are queued, for example hitting attack twice will queue the second attack, but things like swapping weapons is not queued, you have to make sure your attack is over before you can switch or your input is "eaten" with no results. When you get hit, you lose all control until you hit the floor. Combine all this with very challenging bosses, and tons of enemies that are trying to kick you off platforms, and it gets real frustrating real quick.

Add to that the gamepad support and configuration is pretty terrible, for example, you have to use analog controls, and can't use a D-Pad. Yet the game makes no use of the analog functions, you run, or you don't, there is no "walk". Pressing up will make you climb ladders, or enter doors though, so if your analog stick is completely to the right and ever so slightly up, enjoy sticking to every ladder and entering every door.

I tried to play both the original and this game without a guide, in the first one, I did maybe the last 20% with a guide, because at that point all you can do is go around all the areas repeatedly to find something new, which is excruciating and not fun. This time, I did not even finish half the game before having to look at a guide, despite taking the time to take extensive notes and screenshots of the map. The game could be a gem, but any enjoyment is ruined for me, by forcing me to follow a guide for some of the more obscure puzzles. The game could offer increasingly specific hints to help the user, but it chose to do no such thing. Most of the time there will be a hint somewhere in the game, but good luck associating the right hint with the right puzzle, understanding its meaning perfectly, and executing what the devs had in mind precisely.

Another terrible design element is the "software" the game gives you a laptop, and you gather software to install. You have limited space on your laptop so you have to choose which ones you keep installed. This really just results in having to go to the menu several time to reactivate some software you need at a certain time. Some software is just a slap in the face. for example a software allows you to record texts you find in the ruins. Great idea! ... but you are limited to 10 entries. And it takes some of your precious software space. 10 is nowhere near enough. So you either will read a guide, or note them manually and ignore the software. Really, how hard would it have been to make it record ALL text, so it can alleviate the tediousness of the game? Other software are just named with previous Nigoro games. You have no clue what they do, and they only take effect if you combine them. Again, not a fun mechanic at all. You just end up reading a guide to find the combinations, because you don'T have all day to test combinations and try to figure out if it changed something.

Hitboxes are impossible to judge, sometimes you can move several pixels on top of an enemy's sprite, sometimes you get hit by the air around them. Bosses are especially frustrating for that.

The game does not offer the proper guidance to the user. It is not as bad as the first one, thankfully, but a lot of the time you will get an item and go ok how do I use that. Followed by how was I supposed to know it did that? A good design would be for example when you find bombs, you need to blow up a wall to exit the room. So now you understand ok, bombs are used to blow up walls and walls that can be destroyed look like this. I don't want to try to bomb every wall in the universe to figure out what can be destroyed with bombs. Again, not fun.

It's truly a shame because this game could be one of my favourites, but like its predecessor, the game design ruins the fun of the game.

Black borders for 16:10

La-Mulana 2 is a sequel to La-Mulana, a side-scrolling exploration and puzzle solving platformer, and is in the same vein as it's predecessor.

The game requires the player to locate and solve a variety of secrets within a sprawling ruins, only sometimes through cryptic clues given through text written on tablets scattered around the ruins. All the while, the player must fight through swarms of monsters as they travel from room to room, and occasionally face off against tougher foes in order to gain additional clues or items vital to the player's success.

This game, just like it's prequel, creates a hostile and repulsive experience for just about any player in a way that can easily make the game impossible for them.

Most importantly, the game doesn't give the player an expectation for the types of puzzles they will have to solve. There are some secret walls, some floor switches, but the exact approach to solving some of the puzzles in the game have absolutely no introduction, or uselessly poor hints to them. This makes it so that, no matter how long one plays the game, they may never beat it, ever, as it would be impossible to guarantee that a player explores every possible puzzle solution that the developers could program into the game. One's intuition when solving a puzzle could lead them astray in potentially dozens of different ways even if every clue was placed in front of them.

Even beyond that, many hints were poor, or deliberately difficult to access, which is not enjoyable. Even La-Mulana had a more focused set of puzzles, with only a couple notable instances violating reasonability, whereas in La-Mulana 2, the game often refuses to meet you halfway, requiring you to interact with the invisible or impossibly obscure by perfectly deciphering easily misconstrued hints. It goes without saying that this game is light years more difficult than it's prequel, La-Mulana, as a complete start-to-finish playthrough without any hints, due it's eccentric range of puzzle abstraction.

That is to say nothing of the combat, which through the increased fluidity of movement, both of the player and enemy, only succeeded in becoming more manic. Enemy density, attack speed, and attack flexibility only increased, while the duration of invulnerability the player gets after being hit was significantly reduced. The player's movement was improved, particularly movement while in the air, but it was a small change in comparison to the vast increase in franticness applied to just about every room in the game.

The graphics increased in resolution, a large variety of interesting characters to talk to were added, and a mostly new story premise was invented for La-Mulana 2, but for the most part, this game feels poorly tuned despite it's surface level polish. Though I hated La-Mulana as a whole, I respected it greatly in parts. I can say nothing of the sort for La-Mulana 2.

The puzzles are fine but the platforming goes beyond being challenging to being obnoxious instead.

Enemies, traps and platforms are designed and placed to waste your time and resources repeatedly until you can navigate multiple screens in a row perfectly. This would be fine if you only have to go through each obstacle course once, but the amount of backtracking required in this game means you have to go through the same annoyances again and again with increasing difficulty.

The frequency of instakills and the reduced i-frames makes it really obnoxious trying to explore due to progress constantly being lost to deaths.
It's a shame too, since the game has the potential to be really fun.
I highly recommend just sticking with the OG game though.

If you still want to play this game though, please don't play through hard mode on your first run. It's not like the OG game's hard mode; it's really bad.

install
spends over 15 minutes trying to find the first stage...
why not making a linear lobby?

I wish there were a way to have a mixed recommendation, but, as there isn't, this trends more towards the negative side.

Positives first:
+ a very interesting take on multiple separate mythologies.
+ the puzzles are very good, and not simple push over types of puzzles.
+ as any decent metroidvania, you'll be backtracking all over the place to find new things when you get new powers
+ amazing pixel work. the sprites are very fluid in their movements, and they just look great!
+ very good "other" art (i.e. everything that's not pixel work)

Neutral:
~ The fast travel system, whilst at times frustrating, does have a decent amount of nodes. Time between unlocking those nodes can be a bit long (and those nodes are also the only place to save).
~ the bosses are fairly difficult (as one would expect from a game with the "Souls-like" tag), but some of them are absolute push overs, if you find the right spot to stand/area to move around in; whereas others demand extreme precision to avoid attacks and be able to retaliate. Mostly, tough but fair, some do cross that line to "ok, this is no longer fair, this is straight up bull s**t."

Negatives:
- The movement is kinda jank. So many places that if you get looked at funny by an enemy, you get bounced down four to five screens, and have to *try* to claw your way back up. The control of your character in mid-air is slim to nil.
- It's VERY directionless. Like, once you're out of the first area, you're put into a "Right, here's the world, go find something to do".
- Whilst the puzzles are complex, there are quite a few of them that are VERY obtuse.
- OH HEY LOOK, IT'S AN INSTANT DEATH TRAP OUT OF NO WHERE WITH NO WARNING! Great. There's 20 minutes of platforming and exploration I'm going to have to do again.
- So, so many stupid traps that have no indicator. It's a "git gud" kind of play style, rather than "hey, you've been at this for 20 hours and have figured out the tells for the traps in this area, here's a bunch of other traps with either no tells or tells that you'll only find after the fact"

I did *kind of* enjoy my time with the game. At least enough to put in about 30 hours, but the frustrations I had overcame the joy I had. Rather than some games, where after I beat them, I'm excited for a second play through, or to find a randomizer of them, La-Mulana 2 is one that will go back in the shelf in my game library and likely not be pulled up again. I know there's post-game content, but I just did not enjoy my time enough to go back for it.

And note to people who think the movement in this game is fluid, go try Timespinner. *THAT* is fluid movement.

The sequel to La Mulana, a game that attempted to emulate a non-existent era of pathetically bad controls married to excellent presentation, mildly improves the controls but still leaves you randomly wandering a bunch of pointlessly convoluted corridors with platformer controls that were done better as early as the original Super Mario, if not before.

This is compounded by a world with sparse save points and instakill traps, because what I love more than anything is after spending half an hour trying to figure out what the developer was smoking during the design of a specific section, then having to redo it all again because a platform that looked a pixel off from another platform would instantly kill me.

Even when you're doing things right, it feels like you're exploiting edge cases in the game's atrocious air control and jumping(yes, bad jumping and air control, in a PLATFORMER) to accomplish anything at all, and extremely basic navigation options like "jumping off ladders" are gated behind ability progression later in the game.

La Mulana 1 and 2 are both excellent examples of everything that's wrong with retro gaming: mistaking technological design limitations and early game design mistakes, for wonderful concepts that should be replicated and carried into the future. Like I get it, you were traumatized by some bad games when you were a kid, but that doesn't mean you need to hurt others. You can let the trauma die and just make a good game instead.

Mind you, I wouldn't be half as upset by the game being as bad as it is if it wasn't presented wonderfully. So maybe just turn it on and have the soundtrack running in the background while you play a better platformer. Lord knows it isn't a challenge to find one.

There is alot to like with this game. And I there is alot I do like about the game. But ultimately I do not recommend it. Only stubborn pride has carried me through the last 8 hours and I am at my breaking point. This game is not for casual fun. This is not a test of skill or dexterity. It is a test of patience and endurance. And I feel it a damn shame that a game this pretty and vast, in a genre I love, only frustrates me.

As far as I can tell there seems to have been little to no change in mechanics from La Mulana 1. It is just bigger and more confusing and the first one was big and confusing to begin with.

Sprite work is gorgeous. The environments feel larger than life and there is a great sense of exploring. The controls are not the best but have certain quality that takes some getting used to. This feels like a labour of love by passionate people. It is grand and fantastic. But all the good things also come with fairly major problems. The graphics are so detailed that things that need to stand out are lost in the noise. Looking at you, pressure plates and tiny buttons. The large environments are easy to get lost in and there are dead ends and weird puzzles everywhere. And the initial sense of wonder at exploration is soon replaced with tedium because this game has no sense of flow or direction at all. It seems to actively delight in opening up areas that are too high level or that instantly reveal themselves to need a specific item or mantra or app or something.
And to get through this game without the aid of a walkthrough requires psychotic levels of patience and dedication. I took notes until my notes need to be structured and color coded because finding things in my own notes took more time than the game.

And this game is hard. Git Gud kind of Hard. Hard with hard R. And hard games can be fun. But this feels more like "I Wanna Be The Guy" than "Dark Souls". The vast, vast, vast majority of my deaths were due to instant death traps. The rest from being serial bodied and comboed into spikes repeatedly. No boss has taken more than 4 or 5 tries. And the harder "bosses" are more annoying than hard. There is no real test of skill. Just remember the patterns. You'll find a loop and then it just feels like cheesing. The glacial pace for killing the bosses without risking anything is another pain and brings no satisfaction because "Cool, now I get to be lost for another couple of hours while retreading every inch of the map." If the controls were tighter or more precise and you could control you jump better most of the frustration would be gone. But it is so easy to be hit and be flung down a pit into more enemies and spikes.

Which brings us to just navigating from screen to screen. No one room is seldom brutal though there are some. Even the somewhat clunky controls start to feel good once you get used to the. Each room CAN be navigated without even risking much damage. But it is boring. Most enemies have way more health than is needed. Clearing a room takes forever. And even then if you fail and fall out of the room there is a chance enemies will respawn. But it can still be fun.

The frustration starts to build because you have no idea where you are supposed to go and no indication of where to go in the sprawling maze rife with many very specific circuitous routes that span 8 different biomes. And because the Warp Points are so far apart you have to back track ALOT and chances are that when you finally find where you need to be you will be so damaged that you need to heal which means you have to go back to town and then do the treck again. Only to die to some instant death trap almost instantly.

The fun of exploration and combat is completely eclipsed by the tedium and frustration of navigation through the environments.

Which is sort of where I am at. Just frustrated. All the good will has been whittled away. Because if you are not constantly and highly vigilant at all times it is super easy to get hurt, get lost and sometimes even stuck, so you have to warp back and try again. And this wouldn't be a huge problem if the save points were just a little more frequent.

I can forgive the death traps, the back tracking and even the lack of some linear progression help. Even the clunky handling of the character is fine in the grand scheme. But many tiny annoyances have just drained the fun away. And when I got the slippery ice level I gave up. I may very well not return. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when in the progression I started to get fed up because I have no clue how far I have progressed. Since many of the seemingly Key Items never have been used.

But I think I can sum up the critical point:

When instant or near instant death becomes the rule and not the exception.


-Final thoughts

This game is not for everyone. Some may love it because it is so frustrating. I imagine I might finish it (with the aid of a guide) just to say that I did it. It is a thing to overcome and enjoy only in retrospect. For I am not having fun.

My greatest frustration is that all the things that I love about games is here in spades. Amazing pixelart with it's own unique style. Deep exploration and weird lore borrowed from a hundred different mythologies. A vastness that hints on alternate endings and super secrets. But it is crippled by oceans of boredom and frustration at being lost while battling the controls and mechanics.
----

Following is a list of personal grievances/suggestions for fixing most of the grating elements.

--- Better map! ----
Allow me to mark stuff. Would it have killed you to at least mark the Save point and Level Doors? Because right now the only use I ever had for the map was to help me make sense of the walkthrough. If I can't mark stuff myself then do it for me. The blank map is totally useless.

--- Mechanics! ---
- Please for the love of God give me a basic attack that can target upwards. Anything. Because alot of enemies swoop in from above or phase through the walls and you are helpless against projectiles unless the come at you from either side. And sub weapons suck and are expensive.
- And for a game with a whip to have no grappling points and no mechanics related to traversal can be nothing but intentional.
- The apps. Would it kill you to just auto-equip the apps? And if memory is a limiting factor (which it has never been for me)...maybe tell me when it becomes an issue. At which point I can remove unneeded apps (of which there seems to be many).

--- Items! ---
The f*****g Gale Fibula can **** my ****. Who thought this was a good idea? Just give me a sprint button. It is busted to weeping hysteria. You run like a bat out of hell only to crash into a wall, rebound and fall into a pit.
Some form of consumable healing item would not have gone amiss. I assume the only reason there isn't one is due to elitism.

---Are we there yet?---
This game might has well have been called Backtracking the game. Which is par for the course with most metroidvanias but this is the Olympic gold of backtracking. Stuff happens all the time and when you make progress you feel it. The sounds and fanfare are great. But many times what has changed is not immediately apparent. Because you couldn't see what changed. It happened somewhere else. The folding boat being a prime example.

---Alerts for scannable surfaces!---
Again could have been mitigated with a map that was less than useless. And scanning surfaces is vital for progression (I think).

--- More save points!---
If not more than better (healing/restocking some consumables). And if not better than give me a healing item! Trecking back to town for a bath SUCKS.

This game has so many good things going for it. The pixel art is amazing, and the in-game sprites are amazing. It has a lot of charm to it. The level design is complex but fun, the enemies are diverse with different patterns to learn, the music has that nice tonality, that makes every area unique, It has a deep and complex lore, and it feels like every single decision you make matters. How many of an item are you going to buy, do you really want to break that wall, are you really going to read that tablet for the second time? SO many decisions and a nonlinear map that feels like you are in Metroidvania Heaven...

So why the negative review? Simple, The Movement is straight up bad. The character feels stiff. It's excessively limited. You can't move in the air unless you jump, changing direction in the air is far too sensitive, but at the same time, limited. Attacking isn't any better, you can only attack what's infront of you, no upward, downward, let alone diagonal attacks. It's such a shame because I really want to continue exploring the game and all the things it has to offer, but subjecting myself to such a slow and annoying movement is so off-putting on an otherwise amazing game.

The other issue I've found are the boss fights themselves, They've offered almost no challenge, they're dull and drawn out, and are just, overall, not very fun. Then again, these issues are made worse by how bad the movement is.

Overall, I can only recommend this game if you like great metroidvanias that handle like a bad arcade game.

Final Rating:4.5/10