It wasn't the leprechaun who lured my party to their deaths in a spiky trap that made me realize I loved The Legend of Grimrock 2; it wasn't even the bog monster who yanked our weapons from our hands, forcing us to punch it to death to get them back. Grimrock 2’s excellent lasting impression instead came from the way it alternates its clever tricks and unpredictable combat with demanding puzzles that recall the heyday of Myst. Even more so than its 2012 predecessor, it’s achieved a synthesis of two favorite styles from the early '90s that holds up well today.

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Despite what the title might lead you to believe, Grimrock 2’s story isn't exactly the stuff of legend. You and three companions shipwreck on the island of Nex and slaughter the menagerie of monsters who call it home, all the while trying to find out who keeps leaving you smug little letters on stone altars and in rotting crates. Gilgamesh this is not.It's perhaps better appreciated as a lightweight metaphor for Grimrock 2’s stylistic shift: the four warriors break out of the boxy cage that confined them on the shore in the opening scene and step into the open air and beauty of the island of Nex, immediately contrasting against the first, entirely underground game. It was a liberating moment, both for my characters and for me. This is the series moving out into the world and finding itself, although it wisely continues the tradition of letting us discover its rules for ourselves rather than force-feeding them with tutorials.It's a wobbly transition at first, true, not least because developer Almost Human chose to stick with a rigidly grid-based, four-direction movement system. It feels slightly out of place in these handsome surroundings, which seem like they’d be better paired with a free-roaming movement system. Even having played the original Grimrock two years ago, learning to move this way again felt a little like finding my land legs after a long voyage – holding down A or D for too long sometimes found me careening into traps I might otherwise have avoided. But much as in this year's drabber Might & Magic X: Legacy, it's not an insurmountable transition, and finding your feet reveals a land crammed with forests, beaches, and yes, even several old-style dungeons.Such visual diversity extends to the adventurers themselves. There's a satisfying crop of character portraits to choose from this time around, for one, and the new ratling race makes a good addition to Grimrock's decidedly non-standard race roster of insectoids, lizardman, minotaurs, and the like. I found the new ratling race particularly useful, both for its helpful innate immunity to Grimrock 2's many diseases and because his penchant for hoarding meant he could carry more than his companions.Grimrock 2 further shakes up the expectations of traditional fantasy with its new Farmer class, who earns his XP not by swatting wolves or mushroom creatures but rather by munching on food. That's rarely a problem, though; keep the munching coming, and the adventuresome aggie hacks and slashes as well as the more predictable barbarians and knights. As before, the hacking and slashing itself takes place in real time, in stark contrast to the turn-based combat other recent dungeon crawlers created in the vein of 1991's Eye of the Beholder. The shift allows Grimrock 2 to maintain an energetic pace. More than that, it allows strategies for evasion unheard of in battles from 20 years ago that hinged on merely watching if your blows hit or missed. That was true in the 2012 original as well, but the enemies are smarter and faster now, such as the leprechaun (my arch nemesis!) who danced about the screen and made landing hits an ordeal, even with the (admittedly weak) new guns that add to Grimrock 2's ranged arsenal. Fewer, too, are the lazy strafe-and-smack battles that made some of the biggest fights in the first Grimrock such a joke.But Grimrock 2 has little patience for fighters who'd rather just smash their way through life. If you want to make it through this school of hard knocks (and occasional sword slashes), you'll have to fancy yourself a bit of a scholar as well. Puzzles seem as common as enemies here, and their solutions are sometimes harder than the stones on Nex. Some are as simple as placing the items in your inventory on pressure tiles in the shape of an "X" (as hinted by a nearby runestone reading "X marks the spot"), while others involve gadgetry, such as teleports, for skillful executions. Other elements, such as two large weights suspended by chains in a tunnel, seem to exist only only to fool you into thinking they're attached to a puzzle. Sometimes, I guess, a weight is just a weight.One issue is that the wide-open world means that the solutions to puzzles aren't always as readily available as they were in the dungeons of 2012. All too often, the hunt for the metaphorical key led me to wander off to unexplored areas for clues that might get me past the latest roadblock. The design prodded me to explore, yes, and it's true that clues for almost every puzzle I encountered waited somewhere out in the world. It's just a question of where. In Grimrock 2's weakest moments, this uncertainty resulted in discouraging downtimes as I blindly searched for help. I once jaunted off for hours just to search for a clue to one of the many puzzles that stumped me, only to find that the hint had been nearby the entire time. After that, doubt gnawed at me on all future forays into the wild.But many more adventures — and arguably better ones — could await us in the future. The Legend of Grimrock 2 comes with its own dungeon editor for those wishing to create worlds aside from Nex, and it's simple enough that I figured out the basics within seconds. Using a bird's-eye-view map as a guide, I pulled assets such as castle gates, broken colossal statues, angry wargs, and a dusky sky and cobbled them together into the setting of a ruined temple on the edge of a forest. Within five minutes, I'd made a world I wanted to visit, and I marvel to think I what others could accomplish with the tool if they give it some serious thought. The built-in dungeon browser's currently empty, unfortunately, but I'm hoping that will change as more players finish the campaign in the coming days.