Figment 2

Figment 2 is about a figment of the mind of some guy. The figment is Dusty, the man’s courage, and his job is to defeat nightmares, which the mind fears. He is accompanied by Piper, a Navi-esque bird sidekick and what exactly she’s supposed to represent psychologically is not clear to me. I could take some guesses based on her personality, but I don’t think anything is ever nailed down in dialogue. She’s also pretty new around here. Both of these characters were also in the first game, according to Google, and that game was set in a teenage girl’s mind, with Dusty fighting against fear and depression. We’re clearly in a completely different person’s mind here, so I guess everyone has a Dusty and Piper floating around.

The game opens with Dusty fighting a giant evil pig representing fear of the dark, but the main plot is about fighting the Jester, the man’s lost sense of fun, who’s been crushed under adult responsibilities and is now going rogue and attempting to tear the Moral Compass apart in order to be heard again. Brief illustrated cut scenes of the outside world make it pretty clear the strain that all the extra work is putting on the relationships of the unnamed man Dusty and Piper are knocking around in, but it’s never clear what dangerously irresponsible things he’s considering doing under the Jester’s influence. The game’s ultimate message is that the Jester is good and the man should listen, but there’s also an implication that the Jester will wreck the man’s life if they keep taking desperate action, so the character arc for Dusty is about learning to trust and work with the Jester rather than fighting to the death, so it makes sense to focus on the damage done by the Jester’s absence over what they’ll do if they win by defeating Dusty. Still would’ve been nice to see, though.

The game is a hack-y slash-y roll-y around-y sort of game with frequent but only mildly challenging puzzles. We aren’t at full Lego Star Wars mindless puzzle levels, but it’s, like, one notch up from that. The game’s major selling point is its emphasis on music. Certain enemies attack in time with the combat music, although most do not, and bosses will sing songs at you while you fight them. This is a neat idea, but it suffers from the problem that all the songs are really forgettable. On the one hand, if you want a musical action-adventure game, you aren’t getting one anywhere else, and Figment 2 (and, I assume, the first Figment) are musical action-adventure games. I’ve given Assassin’s Creed games passing marks for historical tourism to eras I otherwise don’t get to interact with much in other video games, like the French Revolution, even when they’re mediocre in basically every other way, and objectively that’s the category Figment 2 falls into: Flawed, but it does deliver on its core premise.

But Figment 2 is flawed. Its story is that of the overworked husband and father who needs to spend more time with his family. Serviceable but rote, not a bad thing, but not a redeeming quality either. The gameplay is the same, a half-dozen different enemies and your standard roll-and-attack third person melee gameplay that’s been the norm for something like a decade now. It’s hard enough you can’t sleep through it but easy enough that I don’t get stuck on it, which is good, because it’s pretty forgettable so drawing attention to itself would be bad. The thing where the music is diegetic and enemies attack you in rhythm with it is new, but the music itself is the same serviceable-but-not-a-selling-point tier as everything else.

If you love the idea of this game’s core premise, then nothing about is bad enough to be disqualifying. Unfortunately, I’m not super into its core premise. I was willing to give it a chance because it was under 5 hours (about 3 hours and 20 minutes for my playthrough), but having tried it out, yeah, this series is not aimed nearly directly at me enough to overshadow its flaws.