Picking up exactly where Episode 1 of Season 2 left off, My Dearest Visitor continues the story of Dr Wakefield and his colleague Dr Kauffman as they search for Season 1’s hero Jeremiah Devitt. This time, the pair visits the home of an elderly professor suffering from Alzheimer’s disease in the hopes of uncovering clues about Jeremiah and the mysterious occult group that he discovered. Following a series of riddles, Wakefield must learn more about the past and discover the meaning of the Dearest Visitor.
The problem with Episode 2 is that not much actually happens. It suffers from middle episode syndrome where you tend to turn up more questions than answers. It’s significantly more puzzle heavy than other episodes in the series, requiring you to solve cryptic riddles to locate items around a large mansion — sometimes too cryptic. For many of the clues, I simply wandered around the house until stumbling across what I needed, rather than figuring it out. I must admit, however, that riddles are not a strength of mine. Still, the solutions to some puzzles, such as one that required you to flip switches around the house to alter statues, weren’t clearly hinted at enough. At other times, I wasn’t sure what to do next after solving the previous puzzle. My Dearest Visitor took me a few hours to complete — a fair while longer than other chapters in the series.
There’s quite a variety of locations to explore, too: the mansion, a small town, graveyard, cliffside, and dark subterranean labyrinth. For the most part it’s fun to wander around, examine objects, and learn more about the unsettling environments My Dearest Visitor takes place in. The town, complete with NPCs, is a particular highlight, though little actually needs to be done there to progress the story. On the other end, the dark maze beneath the earth is a bit of a nightmare; most rooms look very similar, Wakefield walks far slower in the dark, and the difficult feels entirely artificial.
Disappointingly, not much is learned about The Last Door’s overall story in my Dearest Visitor. Aside from a gripping cliffhanger moment at the end, it’s hard to work out, at least at this point, what is added to the greater plot. Perhaps this will become clear in Episode 3, but, for now, if you’re on a tight budget, I wouldn’t pick up My Dearest Visitor just yet. It’s still an enjoyable game to play with plenty of clever puzzles and solid writing, but it doesn’t reach the creepy heights of previous episodes.
