Have you ever wondered what would happen if Myst mated with a sadistic math professor and gave birth to an abomination? Mysterious Journey 2 answers this question, delivering a first person puzzle-ridden nightmare of a game with a lot of wasted visual flash. The game leaves you find your way through strangely disconnected environments and solve puzzles with no clues with no more motivation than to hear the next bit of the painfully clich?d sci-fi story. With high system requirements and punishingly difficult gameplay, Mysterious Journey 2 is a game with no clear audience.

You start the game on board a dilapidated space station as a young man that looks suspiciously like Moby. A hologram awakens you to inform you that you are Sen, a traitor who has been sentenced to die by being left on board the station in cryostatis for 200 or so years until the station was ready to fall out of orbit and crash into the planet. The hologram whines a bit about how you destroyed the planet except for one small valley but the recording is destroyed before he can go into exactly what you did. Being a plucky little traitor, you quickly don your hilarious and distressingly tight Renaissance Faire garb and set out to explore the space station. A couple of puzzles later you find out that the single inhabited valley left is in the middle of a war, with the technology-loving group and the tree-huggers fighting with colored lights and bad costumes. Will you find out what you did that destroyed most of the planet? Can you heal this rift in the two remaining groups of humanity? Do you even care?

After the first couple of puzzles the answer to the last question will probably be no. Taking its lead from Myst, Mysterious Journey 2 drops you in alien environments with strange gadgets with no obvious clues as to how you are meant to manipulate them to progress. Unlike Myst the puzzles in this game do not fit seamlessly with the environment, instead they just throw any old environment that suits whatever sadistic puzzle they have in mind with no thought to visual consistency. Early in the game your cold, hard space station suddenly turns alien and organic just so you can have a giant room of alien pods to direct lasers through. Even in the environments on the planet you find strange things that seem to be there only because someone thought it would be cool, rather than because it made sense. Adding to the problem of form over function, several areas are designed poorly, allowing you to get hung up on walls and corners when you're just trying to walk around. The overall impression is that of an annoying mishmash of disconnected ideas loosely held together by a few strings of plot.

The real problem with Mysterious Journey 2 is the difficulty level of the puzzles. It is hard to imagine any but the most self-loathing math major attempting to complete the game without the help of a walk-through, and most people will simply quit before getting to the end. The puzzles come in variations of the same basic forms. There are puzzles where you push a button, go to an area to see what it did, and go back to push more buttons. There are puzzles that are games played against the computer, such as making plants grow the right number of segments so you can use them as a bridge. And there's the math puzzles, the worst of which being a couple of alien symbols that represent base 4 numbers and which have to be converted to base 10 to progress. All without hints or clues, just expecting you to patiently press the buttons again and again until you come up with the right solution.

Who is the audience for this game? Most rabid adventure game fans don't have rigs beefy enough to play Mysterious Journey 2, which uses the same graphics engine as No One Lives Forever 2. Twitch-based gamers who do have the latest and greatest graphics cards won't have the patience for the punishing puzzles, and those who play games for story will find themselves rolling their eyes until they fall out of their sockets at the clich?s and the horrible dialog. Playing this game feels like divine punishment for every minor wrong-doing you've ever committed. Unless you feel like atonement through bad video games avoid Mysterious Journey 2.