Lovecraft's Untold Stories 2

My first hour with Lovecraft's Untold Stories 2 felt like opening a beautifully illustrated book only to find half the pages missing. The comic-book art direction is genuinely striking, thick black lines, fog-drenched graveyards, sickly asylum corridors, and the cutscene style carries a Mignola-ish weight that I wanted to love. But atmosphere alone cannot hold up a game, and the gap between how this one looks and how it plays is wider than anything the Great Old Ones could summon. At its structural core, LUS2 is a twin-stick action roguelite set across procedurally generated areas. You pick from three initial characters (the Detective, the Witch, or the Professor, all returning from the first game) and work toward unlocking three new faces: the Veteran, the Medium, and the Alienist. Each class has distinct weapons and abilities, the Detective runs a double-barrel shotgun and a dodge roll, the Witch can zip across rooms with a teleport linked to her skull staff, and on paper the character variety sounds appealing. The problem is that those distinct playstyles crash against movement that feels sluggish, hitboxes that clip on invisible geometry, and enemy mob density that punishes positioning errors you had no real way to anticipate. Status effects like poison and bleed linger long enough to feel less like a design challenge and more like the game quietly deciding it dislikes you. The crafting system sits at the center of the sequel's ambitions and its failures simultaneously. Gathering cotton rags, bones, amulets, and Cthulhu-adjacent components to forge gear and consumables sounds thematically rich. In practice, you spend significant time opening every drawer and cabinet in every room, filling a constrained inventory with materials whose purpose the game never bothers to explain, then backtracking to a hub base to actually craft anything because you cannot do it mid-run. The loot loop crowds out the horror loop. There should be dread here, cosmic weight, that specific Lovecraftian wrongness creeping in at the edges. Instead there is inventory tetris and a sanity meter that the game introduces and then abandons without consequence. For players who push through the first two hours of friction, and a few reviewers do report the gameplay opening up once momentum builds, the run structure does reward persistence. Retained items carry between deaths, so you gradually become more capable across sessions rather than resetting to zero each time. The boss designs pull from the Cthulhu Mythos with some visual flair, and a handful of encounters in stranger locations do briefly deliver what the whole package promised. But the first game offered five separate character campaigns woven into a single overarching story; LUS2 replaced all of that narrative architecture with one thin throughline and a crafting workbench. The co-op mode that was promoted during development was quietly removed before launch without any public announcement, which left a sour taste in the community that the rest of the game never quite overcomes. Steam users sit at roughly 37% positive, and the critical consensus across outlets lands in the 56-63 range, not a hidden gem waiting to be discovered, but a rough sequel that got away from a team that clearly knew better the first time around. If you played and loved the original, approach this one as a curiosity rather than a continuation. If you are new to the series, the first game is the one that earned the goodwill. LUS2 is for patient Lovecraft completionists only, ideally at a significant discount, and even then keep your expectations pointed at the art and nowhere else.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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