Perhaps unsurprisingly, Retro Mystery Club Volume 2 almost precisely follows in the style and general vibe established by Volume 1. Obviously reveling in its very retro 8-bit feel, while that may not make it appealing for decidedly more modern gamers, those seeking out something a bit simpler and classic in feel may dig it. That said, if you were expecting more modern methods of interacting with the suspects and crime scenes you may end up being disappointed.

Throughout the game’s many episodes you’ll work on a progression of cases which will require you to methodically work through using your powers of deduction, and quite a bit of patience. The challenge, due to the game’s very retro-oriented interface, is that pretty well everything you can and will do is handled through a pretty simple text-driven menu. Working with very general starting points you’ll have the option to investigate the crime scene, talk to witnesses, and more, which means that early on part of the challenge will be understanding what sorts of actions can tend to be shoe-horned under what basic option. You do get used to the basic logic of things, but that doesn’t always make up for how unintuitive it can be at times.

That leads into the central challenge and frustration of the experience, and that’s the fact that almost everything you work through has to be accomplished in a very linear fashion. There’s no real room for leaps of faith and simply following your hunch, instead you’ll need to work through pretty well every detail in the sequence and pace that the game dictates. At times I found this to be quite aggravating, as I’d want to pursue a line of action and thought, only to find that in order to proceed I’d first have to complete some other task that wasn’t always on my mind. This tended to make progressing through the game feel very sloppily trial and error in places, and points out the title’s greatest weakness.

Putting it all together, what will really need to drive interest in the game will be the characters and the nature of the mysteries themselves, with more of a side of the act of solving them. Granted, you can choose to overlook the shortcomings of the process for solving the crimes, but with an abundance of modern examples where this is handled in a smarter and more open-ended way it’s hard to settle for this very static approach. It has absolutely charted a more classic path for itself, but I’m not sure that authenticity helps to fully compensate for how fragile it all feels playing it now.