Amanda the Adventurer 2 (2024)

Amanda the Adventurer 2 is a unique horror experience that brilliantly flips beloved kids’ show tropes into unsettling territory. Its puzzles are occasionally too challenging, and the bugs need attention, but the overall experience is refreshingly creepy. Whether you’re here for the nostalgia, the horror, or the puzzles, Amanda’s adventure will leave a lasting impression. If you’re up for a test of patience and bravery, give it a go. For its bold concept, atmosphere, and nostalgia-tinged horror, Amanda the Adventurer 2 deserves a nod, bugs and all. And so I award it the Thumb Culture Gold Award.

Amanda the Adventurer 2 is an enjoyable sequel that maintains the eerie charm of the original game, even if some puzzles could be frustrating to solve. It’s bigger in scope, it offers more puzzles, and it maintains the clever sense of creativity from the first game, whilst I found myself more invested in both Riley’s investigation and the unsettling origins of the show with each new revelation revealed. It’s just a shame that there are a couple of frustrating puzzles in the mix, with the game giving a bad first impression with its first cryptic conundrum. When you get past that, though? Amanda the Adventurer 2 has plenty of creepy charm and is the perfect puzzler to play this Halloween season.

Amanda the Adventurer 2 is a fun adventure title that delivers solid puzzles, great performances and a nice mixture of dread and humor, but a few sloppy decisions and a lack of anything substantial in either the gameplay or story areas hold it back. Still, if you can get past those issues (and the first puzzle), there's a nice, quick romp through an eerie library here that's worth checking out. If nothing else, at least the true ending will leave fans properly hooked for more games to come.

Amanda the Adventurer 2 is a great horror puzzle game to continue the series. Dripping with atmosphere if a little light on actual scares.