Shivers Two: Harvest of Souls

Shivers 2 takes place in an abandoned town as opposed to the first Shivers' abandoned museum. As a result, it feels more open since the whole town is explorable immediately, but finding hidden passages, twisting hallways and wondering just how big this museum is, is a feeling missing from the sequel. Not that there aren't still plenty of locked doors.

One great thing about the Shivers games as opposed to other Myst-clones is their extreme non-linearity. By allowing most of the game's puzzles to be solved in almost any order, it means the player is able to make a lot of progress in the game without getting immediately stuck. Some of the puzzles are self-contained brainteasers, and most of these are challenging but not ridiculously so (with the exception of one sliding ball puzzle which I barely managed to solve after hours). Then there are puzzles where you take information from one part of the game or an item from one part of the game to solve something else.

I'm not really a fan of item puzzles in adventure games, and most of the places I got stuck were because of this (What is this red pile of stuff? Oh, you have to use that to cover the blinking light on the TVs because of a vague hint ghost lady said. Alright, y'all couldn't have made it duct tape? And why not have a book in the library explaining how a blinking light can hypnotize people to walk to a canyon?
You'd think it would make more sense for the video and audio to induce people to follow commands, so I feel like since this is so counter-intuitive you might want some other information in some other part of the game to explain it.). Also, the clickable hotspots can sometimes be small, vague, or finicky (I spent a long time looking for a windowsill that the game was hinting at, going into every location and looking for what they showed in the video, but it turns out the actual windowsill looked nothing like it and even after I went to a guide and it told me where it was, it still took me some time to find. Actually the puzzle that made me go to a guide in the first place was the music box puzzle. I managed to somehow make it into Max's cave without the encryption cylinder, and I knew I had to place a music box somewhere in there -- I just assumed it was behind the locked door since I couldn't find the place to put it down. Actually, you had to zoom in on the computer, and place it in a small spot next to the keyboard, which would weirdly disappear when I clicked on it the first time.). The game commits the most annoying sin of adventure games: items, puzzles, and events will change in areas you previously visited based arbitrarily on your progression (Even if you find the fake rock outside Max's cave, the key doesn't appear until after you find 8 of the 12 prayer sticks. An air pressure valve isn't usable until after you watch a video and apparently not until you solve the chess puzzle either. And all the main puzzles in the game don't appear until after you deliver the first prayer stick.).

Anyway, I liked it up until I got very stuck. Obviously, the acting and production of the FMVs is absolutely abysmal (standard for a 90s Myst-clone), but luckily the entire town is deserted so it doesn't get in your way that often. The story itself is told through documents, phone messages, and various items all throughout town, but understanding all the character motiviations, who did what and why, is not something I ever fully comprehended.