Baobabs Mausoleum Ep.2: 1313 Barnabas Dead End Drive

I have a soft spot for games that feel like they escaped from a fever dream someone had after watching too much Twin Peaks with a Zelda cartridge jammed under their pillow. This second episode in Celery Emblem's Baobabs Mausoleum series is exactly that kind of thing, and I mean it as genuine praise when I say almost nothing about it should work on paper. The setup picks up directly where Episode 1 left off. Watracio Walpurgis, a vampire eggplant FBI agent with the swagger of a man who has absolutely nothing to lose, wakes up in a hotel room in Flamingo's Creek and immediately blackmails the mayor for pocket money. From there the investigation spirals outward into a missing persons case that asks you to, among other things, wake a giant avocado dinosaur from its slumber, coax sardines out of a tree, infiltrate the local police station, and jam with what amounts to a pixel-art Ramones tribute band. The writing carries the translated-from-Spanish roughness of something like an old LucasArts localization that got slightly too close to a microwave, and honestly the broken idioms and accidental poetry are most of the charm. The town of Flamingo's Creek has a real day-and-night cycle synced to your system clock, and certain characters, items, and side threads only appear at specific hours. You can sleep at the hotel to advance time, which sounds minor but gives the open town structure a gentle pulse it badly needs. Compared to Episode 1, this chapter commits fully to a top-down adventure format rather than shifting between styles. That focus is both a strength and a small loss. The first episode had the unhinged energy of a game that didn't know what it was yet, hopping between first-person exploration, RPG combat, and point-and-click puzzling almost at random. Episode 2 strips most of that back and leans into inventory-based puzzle solving across an open map. The puzzles themselves are mostly light, though the logic follows the internal rules of a world that has its own surrealist consistency rather than any real-world one. At roughly two hours of play, the game knows its own length and mostly respects your time, though that cliffhanger ending will either feel earned or cruel depending on your patience for episodic structure. The cracks in the foundation are real, though. Collision detection is unreliable in spots, some interactive objects get buried in visual clutter, and at least one puzzle apparently required a code from the developer's own site (which went offline, though the Steam community preserved it). The final boss has been described by multiple players as a poorly-tuned slog, and certain areas feel genuinely empty rather than atmospherically sparse. These are not small issues in a two-hour game. The soundtrack, however, is the kind of low-budget psychedelic surf-horror composition that I want to listen to with headphones in a dark room, and the pixel art has genuine craft behind it, garish and intentional in equal measure. If you have not played Episode 1, do that first. This chapter assumes you know the world and its residents, and jumping in cold means a lot of the contextual jokes and callbacks land flat. For returning players who loved the strange atmosphere and can forgive a technically rough package, Episode 2 is a slightly more confident, slightly larger, and slightly more broken version of the thing you already liked. That is a fair trade for what it is.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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