The first Discworld game Perfect Entertainment developed was a charming albeit overly difficult affair. A game with great production values but marred by extremely hard puzzles and very few clues on what you should be doing. In some ways, the sequel feels almost like a polar opposite to that, at least as far as the puzzle difficulty and in-game clues go.
Things begin to go worse after Rincewind and the Librarian, after a night of drinking, stumble upon a wagon bomb. The hard-luck wizard decides to do the drunkenly sensible thing and disable the explosive device, which in turn leads into the blast knocking down Death himself. The citizens of Ankh-Morpork are about to find out how much trouble the dead can really be when they aren't going where they ought to go after kicking the proverbial bucket.
At the funeral party of the old Windle Poons, the wizards of the Unseen University notice the problem at hand in person, when Windle isn't showing the usual properties of a recently deceased wizard. Still talkative and not at all stiff ex-wizard points out that Death hasn't come to keep his appointment, so a rite of Askh-Ente is needed to see what the ol' bone is up to. Rincewind is the obvious choice to get all the needed tidbits so it can be performed.
After Rincewind has managed to gather all the needed stuff, the wizards find out that Death is on holiday, enjoying drinks with umbrellas in them. The Reaper of Souls feels like his work is not appreciated, so it's now up to Rincewind to find a way to make him more popular. This is done with the help of the newly formed entertainment industry known as clickies. You know, movies. And if you are familiar with the Discworld books, you know that joke.
This plan works out even better than Rincewind dared to hope, as Death becomes a huge star, pushing his responsibilities on the bony shoulders of the wizard. Now, as the newly appointed Grim Reaper, Rincewind has to find his groove in the realm of Death. There are problems though: he doesn't want to be Death, but the more like Death he becomes, the more like a regular mortal the original occupant of the profession becomes.
As it happens, just about when Deaths hourglass of life is about to run out, he becomes a victim of a bombing. While he doesn't die, he does talk a lot about the famous bright lights and all that. Rincewind, wanting to drop his new career short, has to put Death together again and re-fill the hourglass. And then there is the final, perhaps the most nonsensical bit of the whole thing in the end with the 50-foot Elven Queen, who kidnaps the Librarian. The less said about that, the better.
Discworld 2 is something of a strange beast. In many ways, it is an improvement from the first game, especially as far as the puzzle design is concerned. There is a bigger variation in the difficulty in the many puzzles of the tale, making the gameplay more enjoyable, but at the same time, it also lacks some of the charms of the first game. This is largely down to writing, as the story feels more disjointed and the acts don't really knit into a coherent whole. There is a constant feeling that something is missing.
The art and the animation are presented in higher resolution as well from the first game. As Rincewind jokingly puts it during the intro movie, they've blasted the whole animation budget there, but it is way above anything from the previous game. This kind of 4th wall breaking joke are quite common, Rincewind even points out how much more actual clues the discussions now have. But, again, to me, the animation doesn't quite click in the same way as it did in the first game. Somehow, it feels like there was something lost in translation to the higher resolution and better quality animation. The background art is fantastic though.
As for voices, the cast is again led by Eric Idle as Rincewind. He even sings a couple of songs. As Idle is well known from Monty Python, some of the jokes are direct references to it. The rest of the rather large cast is voiced by Rob Brydon, Kate Robbins and Nigel Planer. At times, it does shine through, that the voice pool is rather shallow, but for the most part, it works. Though it needs to be said, that some of the dialogue is caricatured a bit too much, which was a problem with the first game as well.
But is it a better game than the first Discworld adventure? Definitely so. As a game, it is more easily approachable and more fun to play, because you now actually have a clue what you should be doing. And while a couple of the puzzles do need some really out of the box thinking, like a certain puzzle revolving around getting sticks, it is overall more forgiving than the first game was even on its easiest.
The biggest success of Discworld 2 really does come from the toned-down difficulty. I feel I can't emphasise enough how insanely difficult the first game is. Discworld 2 is a game I have an easier time recommending to people, even for those Discworld fans who are not into playing games. It's just a shame, you can't easily buy it from anywhere at the moment.
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