Not Tonight 2 Review (Atk)
An all around inferior sequel to Not Tonight that still manages to be engaging enough to be worth playing
A nice fresh cast of well-written characters with some contrived usage of old favourites from Not Tonight. The way the story is told works well, with the three story-arcs for each character each being interesting and unique. The ending gives you that warm fuzzy feeling from saving all your friends, but ultimately doesn't feel dramatic or impactful to me
The wide variety of mini-games kept the game feeling fresh all the way through, and made the game feel more varied than it was challenging (compared to say, Papers Please, where there's little variety but the level of challenge just keeps going up). I don't consider myself particularly good at this genre of game, but on the default medium difficulty I got bonus 2 every single night, and only got fined for mistakes once.
The main let-down of some of these mini-games was that they were entirely luck-based and counted against your performance for the night, and the side quests, which is a monumentally stupid design decision that fortunately doesn't matter unless you're trying to go for all achievements
Speaking of the side quests, they were a welcome addition, though to me it feels stupid that you're not told explicitly what you have to do for a given quest, then either have to redo a given area if you didn't accidentally get everything, or just try and luck out enough times to get the A grades necessary for the good ending of the game. Personally, I just used a guide to tell me what I needed to do to pass the quests, as I found it frustrating to be given low grades for making ambiguous dialogue choices or outfit decisions incorrectly
Following a guide also had the added benefit that I wouldn't mess up dialogue choices that could lead to a game over and repeating a night. As far as I can tell, the only way to work out the right choices is through trial and error in a couple of sections (e.g. picking which oxygen tanks to huff when Taelore confronts Mari)
I miss the money pressure of Not Tonight and the drug selling & bribing mechanics that you could opt into to get more money for the higher risk
So yeah, overall, an interesting twist on Not Tonight that I don't think worked out that well in the end, but I was still happy to support the devs and put in the relatively short number of hours required to beat this game