Four and a half years after Kickstarter, La Mulana 2 has finally seen its official release. For those unfamiliar with the series, La mulana is a metroidvania with a style entirely based on environmental puzzles and with a peculiar exploratory theme that aims to make you feel like a modern Indiana Jones. The first chapter was known for its huge amount of environmental puzzles and its crypticity, as well as its quirky yet personality-filled gameplay.
Will this sequel be able to carry the legacy of the progenitor? Let's venture into this review together and find out.
The beginning of an epic
La Mulana 2 takes place around the same village that players from the first game in the series have become familiar with, but things have changed in recent years. After the episodes of the first chapter of the series, the old sage transformed the place into a tourist attraction and made the ruins of La Mulana safe by turning them more into a museum than a dangerous temple full of traps and mysteries.
After some time, however, monsters and dark forces are resurfacing in the depths of the ruins and the old man sends a request for help which, although apparently ignored by the protagonist of the first game, is caught by his daughter Lumisa Kosugi who is looking to do the her great debut as an archaeologist.
Once he discovered that under the current ruins there were actually even more ancient ruins, which hide something terrible, Lumisa can only take the opportunity and try to turn them around like a glove in search of mysteries to be solved.
A Metroidvania?
The gameplay of La Mulana 2 heavily follows that of the first chapter of the series. The ruins are divided into interconnected areas and their exploration is littered with "things to do next". From this point of view, backtracking is an integral part of the experience much more than in other metroidvania. Here the skills and unlockables are really dozens and dozen, and some areas that we think we have completed actually still hide many secrets and passages invisible to our eyes.
The movements of the protagonist are reminiscent of those of her father and, from a technical point of view, we have a rigidity closer to the very first Castlevania compared to a fluidity typical of modern titles in the category. While it's not a major problem, after all the game is calibrated to that rigidity even in level design, controlling Lumisa may not be as smooth as a metroidvania player might expect. Don't expect Dead Cells, in order to understand each other.
Enemies and combat is often experienced as an additional "obstacle" to exploration, rather than the main activity: many enemies will fall after a hit or two, but their positioning is part of the complexity of the challenge. Climbing a ladder may be the simplest thing in the world, but can you do it with half a dozen bats?
On another level is the clash with bosses and sub-bosses of the game. Even more than in the first chapter of the series, La Mulana 2 it is indeed littered with "unique enemies" that will require a particular effort before being defeated once and for all. Many sub-bosses will test your skills in confined or hostile environments. An example above all, one of the encounters will take place in a room whose ceiling covered with nails will slowly fall: will you be able to defeat the sub-boss who blocks your passage and escape the room before it's too late?
The bosses, called Guardians, are encounters on another scale, often within ad-hoc areas and which combine the manual skill of the player in controlling the protagonist with the ability to read the patterns of the boss on duty in order to defeat him. . These encounters are one of the most distinctive points of the game and combine in a bizarre, but certainly full of personality, combat and problem solving way.
A puzzle adventure?
Talking about La Mulana 2 focusing the review on gameplay in fights and boss encounters would, however, be a disservice. The strong point of the game, the real spearhead of the experience, are the puzzles that saturate the experience. A metroidvania that wants you to experience the explorer, from Indiana Jones to Lara Croft, would be completely unsuccessful if it did not combine adrenaline-charged phases with moments of investigation and exploration. In this game the puzzles are layered and present throughout the adventure.
The first puzzles that jump to the eye, the most immediate, concern the rooms of the ruins. many of them contain chests that can be opened and it is up to us to understand how. Brute force is almost never the solution and you can go from the classic “placing a weight on a pedestal” that made the activity of archaeologist famous in the mass media, to activating hidden levers or passages. Some chests won't open until you get certain items, but even in those cases, how to use the item is king.
But where the game really shows its potential and greatness is in puzzles that focus on the lore and span entire areas. Before facing a Guardian, for example, we need to find a way to make him appear. La Mulana 2 it even has a couple of mega-puzzles covering all areas of the game that will take you dozens of hours on your own to solve.
Important clues about the puzzles are obtained from stone tablets scattered around the areas which, in the form of excerpts of Lore or cryptic indications, will provide us with the elements with which to solve the various puzzles we will encounter. In rare cases, we will be able to talk to some folkloristic and mythological characters who have decided to live in the ruins: talking to them can provide us with clues about what is happening in the ruins or make us obtain new objects necessary for solving some puzzles.
A colossal experience
Before writing this review, I got to the ending of the game. All this took 68 hours and in the last stages I resorted to the help of the official game community within its channel Discord. Think about it: 68 hours to get to the end of a game despite help in the later stages.
La Mulana 2 gives you the constant impression of being colossal, gigantic, gargantuan. After twenty hours of play, I felt like I was at the beginning of a great adventure. At the tenth gigantic explorable area it seemed impossible to me the game still had it, but the areas and mysteries sprouted like mushrooms.
Its open-world nature makes you feel constantly overwhelmed by puzzles and you will find yourself solving one to start two others most of the time.
If taking notes on a physical notebook doesn't scare you and the idea of being surrounded by puzzles appeals to you, this is the game for you. If you like to savor that feeling of success after achieving something difficult, complex, and cryptic, this is the game for you.
This review cannot do this game justice, and I preferred not to spoil some of the juiciest and most suggestive parts to respect the intentions of the developer: let you enter a mysterious world and leave you the possibility to reveal it one step at a time.
Have a good exploration.
