It seems forever ago now that I’ve first played and fell in love with the original (technically, the remake) La-Mulana, even though it’s only been 5 years. The original “Archaeological Ruin Exploration Action Game” was a very unique, even for today, approach to exploration-focused platformer titles, borrowing heavily from unknown in the west The Maze of Galious. Despite having a lot of similarities to the “metroidvania” games, it focused much more heavily on puzzles that could go from covering just the room you are in to the entire game world and required you to pay close attention to the details you see. It had a lot of unique and fun elements to it, but it was also often infuriatingly obtuse with puzzle design, sometimes requiring you to not just think outside the box, but realize that you might be in the box, visualize it on paper, then translate it into some invented language and then find a way how to think outside of it.
When the Kickstarter project for La-Mulana 2 appeared in 2014 one of the biggest promises was to keep all the excitement of the exploration, puzzles, challenge and sense of adventure intact, but also improve on those frustrating elements, that were originally intentionally done in such an annoying manner to emulate the design of games from the MSX. After throwing my money at the screen and waiting for 4 years, I’ve decided to wait a few more months until the first few patches were released to iron out most of the issues. And finally, I was able to get into La-Mulana 2. 42 hours later…
