Knights of Pen and Paper 2

I've been Steam-ing more than XBox-ing lately.  I like the variety of games available.  Yesterday I finished the base game of Knights of Pen and Paper 2.  The credits inform me it's a Finnish game.  That, or it was produced by a small pocket of people in northern Minnesota.  See...here they are.  The whole cast of characters at Kyy studios.  Probably hiding out north of Two Harbors in Finland, MN, drinking pine beer and eating cabbage rolls while they code.

Wikipedia says I won't enjoy the game much because it's so similar to the first game.  Eryn and I broke their critique by never playing the first game.  That's a bit of a habit lately.  There are enough games about that I can't get through one in the series, let alone a whole series, so the most recent one is the target.  I will admit, it's not particularly hard because you can overclock your characters in levels and gear, and once you start stunning whole groups they don't fight back much. But I found I was mostly playing it for the story and the humor.

There's some third wall action.  Ghost buster jokes.  2001 A Space Odyssey jokes.  And a bunch I didn't get but Eryn did because I'm old and she's not and she's much more familiar with video games post 1995 (that was the year Hexen came out, right?)

Here's the Monolith offering to increase the intelligence of the cavemen I was fighting so they'll quit fighting and give me the artifact I'm after.  It informs me at one point it's definitely a Ms. and not a Mr.  I suspect the lack of balls is a hint.

They lean heavily on typical RPG tropes.  Here's the usual flying ship.  Which mostly takes you to places you could already get to by foot.  They riff on time travel as well.  A bit of a given with the monolith.

Enjoyable.  You can finish it in a day if you're aggressive, but I slowed way down to enjoy the writing so it took a few days.  I did find myself being involved enough for a while to lose time.  That's the sign of something I really enjoy.