The Initiate 2: The First Interviews

I went in hoping the sequel would do what good sequels do: take the tight, unsettling escape-room logic of the first Initiate and deepen the mythology around it. Instead, I got a game that trades exploration for a cramped basement and three protagonists for the price of one, without quite figuring out what to do with any of them. The setup puts you in control of three captives held by a shadowy organisation: Samantha Blake, a mother carrying grief from a lost child; Benjamin Clarke, an alcoholic unravelling after his wife's death in a car accident; and Stephen Parfitt, a burned-out college professor. Each is confined to an adjoining section of cellar, and you rotate between them via a keystroke. The cooperative hook is real in places: clues scatter across all three zones, so you will position Samantha in front of a periodic-table reference in her area and then jump to Stephen to solve a maths challenge that depends on it. When that cross-character logic clicks, the game earns its premise. Items transfer between characters through a rotating column of masonry, which is a small but pleasingly tactile detail. The trouble is that the spatial world shrinks dramatically compared to the first game. Where the original spread its puzzles across an entire two-story house with a cellar and outdoor areas to re-examine as new doors opened, here you have seen every room within the first hour. Most of what remains is opening additional chests and lockers. The puzzles themselves are not bad, ranging from code sequences and symbol matching to a late-game multi-statue choreography that requires careful item-ferrying across all three character zones, but they lack the physical presence of the contraptions that defined the original. Forced character switches also arrive at inopportune moments and occasionally stall momentum without purpose. The story, which had a chance to finally make the mysterious organisation feel sinister and layered, instead delivers a handful of scattered texts, a twist that lands with a thud, and multiple endings gated behind a single lever choice near the finale. If you delete your save and replay for alternate endings, the game makes you grind through already-solved puzzles from scratch, which is a strange choice for a title built on the satisfaction of logical deduction. The captor's voice work, handled by Daman Mills, is the one atmospheric constant that holds, but the three captive protagonists sound oddly flat, which drains tension from what should be a suffocating setup. Steam user reception sits around 92% positive from a small sample, suggesting the existing fanbase found enough to like, though most critical voices agree the original outpaces it in nearly every dimension. For pure puzzle fans who have not played the first game, there is a few hours of competent, atmosphere-adjacent escape-room solving here. For anyone who loved the original and wants the story to finally go somewhere, the disappointment is real. Come for the cross-character clue mechanics; stay cautious about expecting much else.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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