Oh hi, SteamGAF. Did you say you wanted my impressions for Time Mysteries 2: The Ancient Spectres? No? Tough.
The story: You play Esther Ambrose, member of a family that has mastered (more or less) time travel. You start in 1830 London, but obviously hop around later. Your Aunt Helen gives you a package and sends you to the Ambrose mansion that you've been coincidentally dreaming about. After screwing around with magic seals and a magic crystal that you had no business touching, you let loose these creepy fire butterflies - which are apparently the ancient spectres? But the game never fully explains WHAT they are - and some part of the spirit of Viviana, the bitch who imprisoned your ancestor Merlin in a tree. So you have to stop her.
...Wait a minute! Objection! In the first game, the protagonist's name was Vivien (or possibly Vivienne.) Are you trying to tell me they named an Ambrose after their family's nemesis? Because Vivien and Viviana are way too close to be a coincidence. UNLESS the Vivien from the first game snaps, goes back in time, and fucks over the head of the family...that would be a cool twist, but I'm just conjecturing now and haven't played the third game.
In the bonus chapter, you play Miss Charlotte, Esther's ... nanny? Governess? Something like that, and you see a fire in the mansion, leading to your having to save Esther both as a baby and an adult at the same time, because wibbly wobbly timey-wimey... stuff.
ANYWAY, long story short, for a hidden object game it's a decent storyline, marred only by the cliffhanger ending (or in the case of the bonus chapter, the Men in Black ending,) and the slight lack of exposition regarding those fire butterflies.
The puzzles and gameplay: A huge improvement over Time Mysteries 1. Rather than the stupid room with all the doors in mid-air, and having to load the machine with objects from the destination era, there's now a much handier portable time device that lets you flip time and space with the touch of a button. The hidden-object scenes are nicely challenging and can be quite tricky at times. The game, however, seems tailor made to "regular mode." The "expert mode" shows off its one flaw: mainly, finding the next place to go, the next hidden-object scene, follows no logical order. The next scene could be pretty much anywhere randomly, so you just go from screen to screen checking them.
The dialogue and audio: Not that much dialogue, but what little there is is alright. There was one glaring bit where a character's dialogue was completely unvoiced and everyone else's was. The music is just average.
The graphics:Not bad for a hidden-object game of its time. It's what you come to expect from Artifex Mundi, and thank goodness that creepy facial-distortion thing they did to animate faces for speaking is gone.
The length: 5.5 hours for main game and bonus chapter. Not a bad length at all.
The verdict: After playing Time Mysteries Inheritance, one of Artifex Mundi's worst games, I was pleasantly surprised to find the sequel is in fact one of their best (at least from a puzzling perspective.) It's worth your time.
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