True Fear: Forsaken Souls Part 2

My girlfriend and i love the series! Now we are looking forward to part 3. It's a blast haha!

Amazing puzzle game! Part one was very good but part 2 blows it out of the water. Looking forward to part 3!

Super Awesome! keep them coming! Wheres number 3??

TL;DR at the end ;)
Games like this make me really lament the absence of a "Maybe" answer to the "Recommend" question.
I played the first game some years ago on Big Fish Games, when it was first released. For those of you who haven't played it, I won't put in any spoilers, but it had a solid story, it was spooky and very intriguing, and it finished with one heck of a twist and cliffhanger.
Years passed. Years in which I moved to the other side of the planet, graduated tech college, got married and bought a house. I'd just about given up on finding out the truth about the spooky girl, the chain in the bedroom and the connection between all that and Dark Falls Asylum.
I've just finished the second game and...I'm still none the wiser.
1. There's a part of the trailer at the end of the first game where one character says, "You seem disappointed. Did you really think that I was your sister?" Okay, great! Intrigue; the events of Game 1 led me to believe that yes, this character WAS my sister. If she isn't, then who is she?
We never find out.
2. The game is too sprawling. Normally, lots of locations aren't a problem (and the designers not only included a map, they also marked locations where you could do things to save time and effort, which was much appreciated!) However, unlike the first game, there's no single plot thread tying all these things together. It got to the point where I was so bored waiting for a new plot development or new part of the story that I just used the hints and skipped most of the puzzles in the hopes that I'd understand more about what was going on.
3. You have a LOT of unrelated information. I thought I was going to look for my sister. Instead, my journal's full of notes about this new character, Jack, who burned down the asylum, but with no indication as to how my character found out about this. This makes it play more like a poorly-imagined third game as opposed to a second. We're not given any indication that our character did some background research. Game 1 ends with her leaving the house, determined to go to the Dark Falls Asylum, and Game 2 begins with her in the car on the way there.
Finding random information in the form of pages and cassettes was good, but the random order meant that there was no cohesive thread. We have a bunch of information about random people. Okay. Why do we care about these random people? To be fair, I didn't manage to find ALL the pages, so I'm missing some pieces of the puzzle, but still...
4. The flashbacks are very short and serve no purpose. We see something in the past through the eyes of another character, we complete their actions and that's it. With the exception of the security guard, every flashback left me thinking, "What was the point of that?"
5. There's an award about "Find out what happened to the journalist." I won it. However, in the game, we never find out what happened to the journalist; all we know from collecting his tapes/info is that it was something bad involving him bleeding a lot. Granted, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that he's gone to that Great Printing Press In The Sky, but some kind of confirmation would have been good. (Again, granted I didn't find everything in the game, but I DID get the award for finding out the journalist's fate, so either the game's problematic or the award is).
6. You will get no answers to most of the unresolved questions from Game 1. This is not how a good sequel works. I bought the sequel, expecting the game to expand upon the story and answer some questions outright, while developing others with new information (it does do this a little with Spooky Girl at the very end) and leaving me hungry for the final conclusion. Instead, I was left feeling baffled and frustrated by a poorly-designed sequel that lacked the compelling story of the first game.
"But JudasFm," I hear you all cry, "if you hated the sequel that much, why are you recommending it? Is it your intent to make us part with our money, only to hate the game and write bad reviews ourselves, thus punishing the game company that disappointed you? Foul fiend!"
Well...actually, no. This is what I mean when I say Steam really needs a, "Kind of," option when it comes to recommending games.
I think it's clear from this review that, in my opinion, this game sucks big-time as a sequel, especially when compared to its predecessor.
However, if Game 1 didn't exist and I was judging this as a standalone game in its own right, it's actually pretty good. The animation's reasonable, the voice acting is good when it happens (it's usually reserved for a few cutscenes, which is fair enough) the locations are beautiful and - in places like the basement - genuinely spooky. There are a few very mild jumpscares that most people will be able to predict (this is not a bad thing; I hate jumpscares with a passion, but I had no problem playing this game). The excessive amount of puzzles does get a little wearing. I would have liked a few more Hidden Object scenes - again, something I usually hate and something I never thought I'd want MORE of in a game - just to break up the monotony. The story problems I mentioned before still stand, but would be far less obvious if it hadn't been for Game 1.
TL;DR: Worth buying as its own game, but as sequels go, very poorly-designed. I'll be buying Game 3, but not because this game got me hyped up for it. I'll buy Game 3 in the hopes that I'll FINALLY get at least some of the answers I've been waiting for since the end of Game 1.

This game elevates the hidden object puzzles format by having avoiding the typical find random objects in a scene. I did feel like I was taken out of the action but being shown a completely random scene but the same environment I'm in and organically sifting through the debris.
Also what took me by surprise was the game length. Usually games like this can take about 2-3 hours to complete and I was surprised when I was getting close to the 6 hour mark and hadn't quite reached the end so make sure you got a good chunk of time if you are planing a one session play through.
One down side is that the game map is huge and has you back tracking a lot if you are like me and try to use items as soon as you find them rather than waiting for the right time. They do balance this out by allowing fast travel via your map which does save you a ton of time.
I recommend new players avoid the expert difficulty until their second play through, expert is for those who have already finished the game a few times.

Liked this game a lot. I can see that the game developers really put a lot of thoughts and passion into creating something that a true fan of the genre can enjoy. Good job!

The 2nd part of the game, well.
Pros:
+ More challenging than the 1st game since there are a lot of goes forward and backward between areas so it's harder to get all the achievement in 1 profiles. If ur don't want 2 getting some stress with it, maybe the game's not for u.
+ Visuals and gameplay is better and now with some audio recording clues.
Cons:
- I'm confused with the story now,
whether this is the prequel of the bonus chapter on 1st game or what . Sadly it looks like the 3rd (final) game won't come out? Don't like getting hanging out like this.
Edit: Apparently the 3rd & final game will be release sometime in the future (maybe Fall 2021), but I can wait until they really finished the game & hope it can satisfy the curiosity of me.