Mystery Dorm 2 is a loose sequel to the original Mystery Dorm. It uses different characters, and takes place in a (nominally) different setting, and the only connection it has to the “original” is a book that recounts the entire plot of the first game in five sentences. It also develops in quite a few areas, but sadly, I would struggle to call the result a genuine improvement.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)



Audio-wise, I should note that there is now more then one kind of footstep sound: you get a “wet” one, as if you are wading through the water, whenever you are in the toilets, and you also have a squelching sound if you walk into blood. The music is a little different, though it’s probably still the various freely available tracks. Graphically, you have the same kind of character busts, while the map graphics are still entirely MV RTP. Now, however, it tries to get more mileage out of it and includes a much wider range of tiles. This means that there are considerably more reasonably atmospheric maps like the above, and considerably fewer “2 beds, 2 wardrobes, 2 drawers” kind of rooms. The latter still make up the bulk of what you find, though, with the ratio seemingly being more “60-40” now, instead of the “85-15” for the original. I am also pretty sure at least a few maps were copy-pasted directly from the previous game, with only a change in the floor tiles at most. For instance, there’s a room separated in half by a bookshelf, where a ghost patrols the other side and you need to get an item from there. Not only does this room looks practically identical to a room in the original where a rat fulfilled the ghost’s function, but the same bookshelf even has the same book with the same encyclopedia description of a rat, even though the sequel no longer has any!

Storyline

This game actually includes a summary of the entirety of the first game’s plot inside “a book”. It fits inside five sentences, the fifth of which was “I’m not sure if it was a dream or not”, which should tell you all you need to know about the quality of its writing. Anyway, you have a female protagonist now, named Yuki Mizuha, and she’s also older, being a student of the I-Tech College. While the game also starts with a quick glimpse of protagonist’s college life, here it establishes a tiny bit more. In the first game, Zul simply wanted to complete an assignment in the study room and while there was one letter telling us his room-mate and a friend briefly left school to visit his aunt to celebrate addition to the family, you learnt nothing else whatsoever. Here, we have a final year project, which the protagonist does alone due to being a bullied and unpopular girl. Like in the original, the cutscene ends in the study room… but instead of falling asleep there and waking up to find everyone gone, you actually do something much stupider: the protagonist finds it too noisy and so chooses to go and study in an abandoned dorm nearby, whose walls are riddled with cracks and which is clearly unsafe. It’s locked for safety reasons too, obviously, but she gets a key from a stranger who disappears into the thin air as soon as he does so – which still does not dissuade Mizuha from going there.

Having thus established that our protagonist is an idiot (so no wander you fail the project in one of the endings), we are then suddenly thrown to the upper floor, because plot, and it also scatters the pages of Mizuha’s project, so she wants to collect them before leaving as well. The weird thing is that she’s supposedly a programming student, so it makes no sense why a) she went to study in a place that does not even have electricity until you mess with the switchboard b) why those pages are handwritten and c) why, if they are not handwritten, she didn’t simply have a digital copy. Anyway, you also encounter another character too, who is a transfer student named Hikaru who got lost on his way and so entered that place, and was wounded, with Mizuha healing him, after which they wander together. Relative to the previous game, this means that the characters now actually react to the events that happen throughout the game (Zul didn’t even do that) and some recognizable human relationship develops between them, which leads to comparatively better-written endings (though they are still unnotable at best.) The ghosts around the place have a tiny bit more context, too, though with tiny being a key word: nearly all of them are unnamed and clearly have nothing to them but their involvement in whichever puzzle is nearest to them. Any comparison between them and the spectral characters from, say, Immortal, is utterly laughable. Still, these are improvements, even if the writing is just as riddled with typos: pretty much all the classic errors from the original, like “There are somethings behind this box”, “Hammer to smash a things” or indeed, the ever-present “It lock”/”It locked”/“Door is lock” are to be found in here.



The most we ever find out about the other character.

However, I could’ve lived with that if the game didn’t feel the need to concurrently extend its runtime with some of the most arbitrary and annoying puzzle/busywork shit, sometimes as a direct example of the protagonists’ nonsensical choices. Two examples in a row happen early on: first, Mizuha practically faints and Hikaru leaves her to rest in a bed while he searches for food. If I were in his shoes, I would’ve been at least a little more concerned that a hostile ghost (which the characters have already seen by that point) might come across her while she’s defenseless, but fine, I can understand that choice. What I cannot quite understand is the way he finds rice and carrots (a whole MV RTP crate full of them in fact), but then decides eating that on its own is not enough, and so wants to cook it on a stove, and go fetch a lighter and a gas canister to do so! Just doing that in an old building where electricity barely works and on old stove is already highly questionable and risks an explosion. The fact that the gas canister is located in the room full of skeletons you can see above, and Hikaru is not afraid of them coming alive, when they have already been nearly crushed to death by a moving statue recently, just adds an extra spice to the proceedings. Once Mizuha wakes up and he feeds her, she then decides she needs to go to the toilet and so Hikaru chooses to stand outside the room (even though they already know there are ghosts around and besides, there are a ton of cubicles there with normal closed doors to take care of privacy anyway). When she obviously falls through into an area below, you first have to flush two specific toilets to make a wall collapse (!) and be able to go after her, and then there a bunch of other puzzle stuff involved too.

After that, though, you get the worst example by far, where your characters decide to follow a shadow, somehow knowing it’s not going to turn around and kill them like the other ghosts would. They eventually find a room with vending machines that way. Just as you insert a coin, the shadow reappears, snatches it, and disappears again. Your characters chase after him to a toilet on that floor (a different one from the previous example) and he drops the coin down one of them. They then decide to search the place until you find a magnet key, attach it to a rope, fish the coin out like that, wash it (and the game does not tell when it’s considered washed), then insert it again only to find out the machine does not work anyway and you smash it with a hammer – a hammer you had with you all along!

Gameplay



How would you know, when the drawer is pressed against the wall?

Unfortunately, though, there are many puzzles which are not directly connected to the plot, but which are just as bad, if not worse. In general, they take the worst property of the first game – the need to run around a lot to find which key matches which room, etc. and amplify it immensely. The first game, at least, often labeled keys by room, so you could immediately tell where to go. Here, you pull a switch in a room, hear some sound, but get no indication what it’s done (or even that this particular puzzle is over and the other remaining options are insta-kills), and 5 or so locked rooms that might’ve been unlocked by that. Or, you get a “Maze Key” and about 4 doors on the floor that it could possibly match. Even better: how about an “Underground Key” that you get on the ground floor, but which actually works on a room in the first floor, seemingly contradicting its own name? Still, what about the time when you find a paper saying “X=4” on a second floor? If you still want to play the game somehow, write it down: I foolishly assumed that the puzzle relevant to it would be nearby, and didn’t bother. Instead, that puzzle appeared about half an hour later, and on the first floor, by which point I’ve forgotten of its existence, ultimately just substituting its value on the second try. Still, you can foresee that: how about a fireplace in the ground floor room? Characters ask why it’s still burning and say nothing else: from that, you are supposed to work out you need to go all the way up to a second floor to grab a bucket (and since it’s such a unique and memorable part of the environment, you must immediately recognize it was that certain room on the second floor, right?), then fill it on the ground floor to extinguish that.

To be fair, most actual puzzles (as opposed to “work out which thing needs to brought here, and from which room exactly”) are quite decent, though I’ve seen practically all of them before: the aforementioned puzzle with the switch and the insta-kills is the whole “truthful and lying guard” riddle, which I encountered recently in SIN, while a “mirror-image” puzzle where you needed to make half of one room match another is similar to one from The Maid of Fairewell Heights. I kinda liked the one where you were given 6 altars, and a storybook where each story’s title was a hint to the corresponding altar’s item. It was generally really easy, but the first room, where instead of having a choice between the right item and two clearly wrong ones, you just had a blue teddy bear on a table in front, and an unnotable vat of purple paint in the back, did make me smile. The one with a “replica key” was also fun (though I still don’t get why I couldn’t just open the door with that replica in the first place.)

One problem, though, is that none of these puzzles are scary in any way, or have much in common with each other. It just feels like arbitrary things you do to get the game finished, and so there is no real atmosphere: there are unexplained creepy dolls/teddy bears giving instructions sometimes (and which neither protagonist is surprised by at all) but it takes a lot more then that. I know neither this game or its predecessor is technically tagged on here as a “Horror” but it clearly takes many trappings from that genre regardless, and it certainly has far more in common with horrors then it does with RPGs (which is basically nothing, besides using an engine called RPGMaker). In order to attempt to maintain its horror-like atmosphere, it also includes a lot of instakills (and removing the original’s health mechanic, wisely recognizing it was pointless), but they are typically far too random to actually scare. Most of them will come from falling through the floor: the original had a few cracked floor tiles which would collapse and kill the protagonist when walked over, but here they are nearly everywhere, presumably to discourage you moving through the areas too quickly (which is also why “click tile to move” MV option no longer works, like it did in the original). Sometimes they do not collapse, sure, but you certainly don’t want to take a risk. Either way, it’s quite dubious at first, and gets particularly ridiculous later, as the game has three or more instances where they manage to step away from the crack in time, an instance where a floor tile breaking simply injures the leg, like you would normally expect it to, and even two scripted instances when the characters do fall through the floor but receive absolutely no injuries, thus making complete mockery of this bullshit mechanic, especially when perfectly fine-looking stone floor collapses and kills you whenever developer feels like they need to have a maze and make its dead ends more “interesting.”



Good luck figuring out which one of these won't collapse on your first try.

Most ludicrously, pulling the wrong electricity switch at the very beginning of the game, when nothing supernatural has happened yet, will also cause the floor to collapse underneath Mizuha and kill her (instead of a more plausible way to do so, like, say, electrocution). It’s not quite as hilarious as getting insta-killed by a rat in the original game, but it's close.

Conclusion

Mystery Dorm 2 manages to be far more frustrating then its predecessor, and while it does improve on a few areas of the original, it’s still not enough to genuinely recommend it over many other, far superior horror options on RMN.