Glass Masquerade 2: Illusions (2019)

Like its predecessor, it's just simple puzzle bliss at a great price. Great challenge & stained glass presentation. The atmosphere gives you the illusion you're doing more than jigsaw puzzles!

Is Coulrophobia still irrational after the recent creepy clown phenomenon?

I needn't labour over this review, for the Glass Masquerade games are really wonderfully simple. Want to do some literal drag and drop puzzles? Want to do them in style? With absolute polish?

The sequel brings back its stained glass jigsaw approach with a more sinister Wonderland theme. The new designs might be divisive on a few fronts. They don't have the same whimsical appeal of the former's whistle-stop tour of the globe's countries. They're not very readable either - sometimes not even when finished! This affects gameplay in making your completion reliant on discerning shapes more than anything else. An upside, potentially, if you're looking for a challenge, but maybe frustrating for others. That they're gorgeously done is still incontestable. The often philosophical musings that inform each design are also neat. They're something a bit more than an accompanying country name.

This is a cabbage eating worms. Don't ask me.

Alongside the incredible presentation, the soundtrack by Nikita Sevalnev is also suitably excellent, but with few tracks, there's a lot of reuse over thirty puzzles, and they can all sound very similar at times regardless. Still, for setting an atmosphere when little else is available to do so, they make for excellent background listening. Earning keys with the ever-eerie soundtrack makes the game feel so much grander than the usual genre trappings.

On the subject of difficulty, they sure have a proposition for you. New to the sequel is a hard mode, demanding as it does free-rotation of each piece! The horror! Given the high difficulty already present on normal - the aforementioned low readability of designs, all pieces are at different rotations than when you select them and have their colour/pattern misted over, pieces are all wildly different and subtle shapes, not all pieces can be immediately seen without scrolling through, etc, etc - this was more than enough for me! The mode is a very welcome addition, though. Even though it strikes me as an unforgiving puzzle experience, I don't bemoan the lack of a hint system. Completion is always only a matter of time and barreling through seems to me to be missing the point. The closest to capitulation on this front is the option to have starter pieces on the border coloured red so you at least have a jumping off point.

I'll admit, if I was doing whatever this puzzle is, then I had no idea what I was doing.

If I were to fire any real criticisms at it, they seem to stick to circular stained glass designs, unlike the original. Just slightly less variation in that way. Otherwise, whilst scrolling through jigsaw pieces in the two circular borders with the mouse wheel feels natural, there's a serious design flaw wherein a whole circle moving gives the illusion that its contiguous and shares all the same pieces. The reality is that the two sides of both circles are compartmentalised and yet scrolling on one side moves both. Might be a source of confusion that will stall players who don't realise this. Maybe a compromise design decision.

Glass Masquerade 2: Illusions like its predecessor is just simple puzzle bliss at a great price. It provides a massive challenge for those seeking it and a great challenge for the rest of us. It sits high atop its genre alongside its predecessor with its amazing presentation. For newcomers like myself, the sheer atmosphere it builds gives the illusion you're doing so much more than a jigsaw. Niggles aside, provided you love the slow, thoughtful process of literal puzzles, you just can't do better.