I played the first one last weekend, so I figured I might as well wrap up the second while I'm here.
Apart from general bad temper, I'm not sure I get the vocal-minority hatred here for Mirror Mysteries 2: Forgotten Kingdoms. It's true that it commits the scarlet sin of not being exactly the same as the first game in the series, although it's actually pretty close. It's a short, easy, slightly silly excursion into a few realms in the lands the malevolent Magic Mirror, which once again has no sense of humor and intends to take over the world and destroy everyone muahaha. If that sounds a little like the original, well, yeah.
The first had an easier forward-pressing pace, which this one trades for vaguer goals set in more fantastical worlds. The core mechanic of assembling sets of hidden-object items to move from one location to the next is pretty much the same, as is the enraged mirror that taunts you through the settings. This time, instead of playing Tommy and Charlotte's hero mom, you're a detective sent by adult Charlotte to track her grown-up brother Tommy, who has disappeared after chasing down an unusual mirror, because he has dim memories of another mirror when he was a child, and so forth, la la la.
Artwork here is more ambitious - I especially liked the future city in the clouds, which is a little bit steampunk, a little bit Rapture, and a little bit Syberia. Gameplay doesn't throw any unexpected curves, and once again I ran the game in two and a half hours, so mere mortals should get through it in around two. As you put together the pieces to resolve each environment you'll collect mirror shards along the way to get the next portal working, and these are pretty clearly indicated.
Voicing is minimal and not quite as good as the first, but the art is much more interesting, though sometimes the goals aren't as clear as they could be. This time, playing as a detective and not a mother, there isn't any call to tidy up, sew, or do any of the household tasks that plagued the original: here it's all putting machines under power, making the train run, restoring water and flowers to the peaceful glade. Hmph.
