Figment 2: Creed Valley
This was an improvement over the first game. The controls feel better, I didn't get snagged on the environment when moving around as much, the difficulty was more consistent, and overall it felt more polished. The graphics are still cute, and I like the art style, plus the songs are fun but very forgettable.
I have no idea who this is for, though. The main characters, Dusty and Piper, feel like they're from a children's TV show. Especially Piper's voice acting, which really starts to grate on me, precisely because it's that high pitched, adult female acting young but still teaching voice. The art style of the environment loosely fits children's show, but the thoughts in the mind often address psychology from a more adult perspective. There's two plots going on in the game, the plot in the mind-scape that Dusty and Piper are moving through, and the "real world" plot, but this isn't Inside Out. Dusty and Piper seem mostly ignorant of the outside world, which is about an adult man who is neglecting his family to work extra hours to afford a house. The two worlds only connect very loosely. (Though, there is more interconnection than there was in the first game.) Almost nothing happens in the "real world", just some really short cut scenes that barely tell a story, and the big events in the mindscape often don't have any sort of real world event corresponding with them.
The environmental puzzles are okay. Some are fun, and others kinda meh, but I didn't especially dislike any.
The combat works okay, but I was hoping that I'd gain a new ability or something at some point. You can attack, dodge, dodge into a power attack, and attack until you combo into a spin attack. That's it. No blocking, no upgrades, no secondary weapons. Any variations to combat come from the enemies or the environment. There are some nice surprises in how fights play out, but it's mostly dodge until you have a chance to hit, or dodge until you have a chance to solve an environmental puzzle. The controls are a joystick and four face buttons. The triggers and bumpers go completely unused.
It just doesn't really mesh together. It's like it's trying to go for a Pixar thing, a game for all ages, but the themes just don't connect. The main characters act too much like they're in a children's show, to the point that they don't seem to even understand that they're supposed to be in an adult mind. The first game had this problem, too.
Overall it's just kinda meh.