Amanda The Adventurer 2 Review - You Can Read!

Modern indie horror games owe a lot to kids’ media. If it’s not super viral horror sensations being based around cuddly kids characters, it’s a game based around a cute kids' adventure game set on an apple farm. Amanda the Adventurer 2 is no stranger to that trend, with the original title taking the premise of an old Dora the Explorer-style show hosted by a possibly possessed little girl called Amanda. After the success of the first game, can the sequel continue the story and expand the gameplay?

What is Amanda The Adventurer 2?

Amanda the Adventurer 2 is a first-person atmospheric horror puzzle game set in your friendly local library. After escaping the attic location of the previous release, you’re now in a fresh location with another bundle of tapes to watch through. You’ll once again need to deal with the demonic little girl, piece together various clues, and eventually escape from the monster that is haunting you.

If you’re into the theorizing aspect of these games, then you won’t be disappointed either. As you explore your surroundings and watch through the tapes, there are plenty of hints and snatches of information for you to decipher the meta-narrative that ties the whole thing together. If you want. As with many such stories, you’ll get out of it what you put into it. 

It’s All Available At Your Local Library!

While Amanda The Adventurer's original setting of a spooky attic full of forgotten children’s VHS tapes was a bit more “classic horror”, there’s something more than a little unsettling and liminal about an empty library. Even when starting the game, before anything expressly creepy has even happened, it’s a bit strange to wander around somewhere so quiet when you’re locked in alone at night. Even before Amanda and her low-poly animation starts menacing you on your first VHS tape.

Before you even get started with any of those analog horror shenanigans you have to wrestle with the real core of the game: logic puzzles.

Starting out, you can explore to find a VHS player, but no tapes lying out in the open. You’ll have to unlock the librarian’s cupboard with a 4-digit code to progress and to do that, you’ll have to actually explore and interact with the library to progress further. 

A Gameplay Loop for the Ages

In many ways, the gameplay loop of Amanda the Adventurer 2 is very similar to the first game. You have to solve a logic puzzle to either gain a new tape or further the progress on your current tape. Instead of having a few random items in your attic this time, there’s a whole library full of books and constantly changing equipment for you to puzzle your way through, and wow there were a lot of puzzles.

I’m not sure if the volume of puzzles is actually any higher than last time, but they were really satisfying here. Most of them derived from pretty logical starting points, making them enjoyable to solve, even when they were being tougher to piece together. Most of the time, you really just have to rely on good observation skills to gather the information you need to proceed, but there’s also the added bonus of the library’s copy machines acting as hint generators which helped to ease the mental burden at times. 

Spooky, Scary, Or Spoopy?

An important question with any horror game, analog or otherwise, is whether or not it counts as scary, and as always, that’s a tough question to answer. I have to admit that at no point during my playthrough did I feel particularly terrified or inclined to jump out of my skin, but there was plenty of tense atmosphere and creepiness to provide the right atmosphere for this sort of story and general theme. 

Obviously, the monster you’re dealing with here isn’t particularly scary, mostly because it spends a lot of the time in this game just standing right out in the open in front of you for extended periods. That said, Amanda herself and some of the contents of the tapes that you end up watching can be downright unsettling, and the VHS effects combined with the old-school TV show animation gives it a little extra dose of immersion to have you on edge.

Extras, Extras

As I said before, you’ll get out of Amanda the Adventurer 2 as much as you put into it. There are a lot of fun puzzles and a tense and creepy atmosphere on offer, making this a perfect game for Halloween. More than that, there’s the tangential storyline about what happened to create Amanda, and what exactly the company Hamelin are and where they came from. You can even gain a lot of extra information about the story by finding all of the secrets and revisiting the game after you’re done. 

However, a lot of that extra detail is only going to be found if you go digging for it. There’s a fun game to play and if you only want to run through puzzles you can play it and then move on after a handful of hours. If you intend to dig deeper, you could be playing for a long time. Then again, if you’re anything like me, you’ll get stuck on the last puzzle and run up your playtime artificiality while you’re banging your head into a brick wall. 

Amanda The Adventurer 2 Review | Final Thoughts

Amanda the Adventurer 2 feels like a fitting expansion to the original game. The plot is bigger, the puzzles are a bit more varied and interesting, and the new setting gives you more room to move around in, literally. The meta-narrative surrounding the Amanda character and what brought her into existence is still interesting, and even those who only stick around for the puzzles will still have an interesting time. Just don’t expect to go to bed with bad dreams unless you get frightened really easily.

Amanda The Adventurer 2 was reviewed on PC Via Steam with a copy provided by the Developer over the course of 6 hours of gameplay - all screenshots were taken during the process of review.