Sometimes it pays off getting games late. Figment: Journey into the Mind, the game that came before this one, arrived on the Xbox in late 2022, a full five years after it arrived on PC and Switch. At the time, we regretted that the Xbox was often the runt when it came to releases. But in this case, it means we get the first game a few months before the sequel. For someone who fell under the first game’s spell, it’s a great feeling. We get more adventures with Dusty and Pips, barely after putting the controller down on the last one.
Boy does it look and sound as good as before. Figment 2: Creed Valley crawls out of a box of oil paints, tooting on its trumpet and shaking its ass. It’s a wonderful mix of painterly, surrealist structures and a cacophony of sound, as you pass by trees and plants as they parp, sing and whistle. If anything, it looks better than before, with the colours crisper and the darks much darker. As you plunge into some of the lower reaches of the Mind, you will find a few more colours added to the palette.
Figment 2: Creed Valley clearly looks and sounds much better than before, but the story will be familiar for those who have recently emerged from the first game. Dusty, as the Mind’s courage, and Piper, as the mind’s optimism, are on the hunt for nightmares. This time, their mark is ‘The Jester’, a twin-headed galoof who mostly wants to party. But it’s tearing the Mind apart to do it, stealing the four cornerstones of the Moral Compass, sending it spinning. So, you’re gathering mental horcruxes like the last game, in an effort to finally confront The Jester and send him packing.
While it is undoubtedly, well, the same story, Figment 2: Creed Valley does try to update things by taking the viewpoint outside of the body. Comic-like cutscenes appear occasionally, showing what consequences are occurring thanks to the Jester breaking the compass. The middle-aged man that Dusty lives in is spending less and less time with his family and more time looking for a house to buy. Clearly, for a game as fun-loving and imaginative as Figment 2: Creed Valley, that is a Very Bad Thing. The Jester must be stopped at all costs.
These jaunts outside of the body were hinted at with the ending of Figment: Journey into the Mind, but are fully embraced here and they are… okay, we suppose. They don’t have anywhere near the emotional heft of the first game’s killer ending, and the narrative’s momentum goes precisely in the direction where you think it will. It doesn’t help that, while undoubtedly attractive, these motion comics are pretty static, and we found our attention elsewhere after a while. We wanted to get back to solving puzzles.
If you haven’t played a Figment game before, then prepare for some TUNIC-like adventuring alongside some hack-and-slashing, but dialled down to a fraction of that game’s difficulty. For some reason, a more mature Skylanders pops into the head. This is a breezy adventure romp that is about one third puzzling, one third combat, and another third interacting with the game’s Opinions, the citizens of the Mind. Those proportions are slightly different from the first game, which was probably sixty-forty, puzzling versus combat. We’d argue that the proportions were better in the first game.
If we think back to Figment, we think of the sprawling, innovative puzzles: the ball-switches, the train, the robots that you’d whack with your sword and use as a shield. Those are the elements that stuck with us, alongside the bizarre ramifications of getting the puzzle right. But few puzzles lodge in our memory after Figment 2: Creed Valley. They’re more sparse, and ask much less of the player, mostly acting as switches to hit. Dare we say it, this is a more accessible game: at least in the puzzle department.
The only exception to this rule is the Ethics Maze, squatting in the first act of the game. But it’s less an interesting puzzle on its own, and more a compendium of lesser puzzles. You move from one to the other in a kind of chain, and the Crystal Maze-like gauntlet sticks in the mind because of how long-winded it is, rather than how befuddling it is.
It does highlight something that Figment 2: Creed Valley improves, though. It has a much better sense of place. The first game faltered because it was slightly too abstract: you couldn’t get a sense that this was a living, breathing place that returned to normality as soon as you turned the Xbox off. It was more a Dali-esque landscape that you bumbled around in, tooting on the odd horn, and flying on the odd book.
In Figment 2: Creed Valley, you begin to build a map. There’s a fantastic sequence at the bottom of the Ethics Maze, which we won’t spoil too deeply, but it gets you talking and combining items in something like a graphic adventure. Another sequence has you solving a murder mystery. While these two are handheld to the extreme – again, that word accessibility creeps in – they are a new tool that Figment 2: Creed Valley draws on readily, and does a rather fantastic job with. We loved these changes of pace, and though we would have liked to do them without stabilisers rattling around behind us, they became the most memorable moments of Figment 2: Creed Valley.
‘Tis a shame, then, that Figment 2: Creed Valley puts so much emphasis on its combat. Because a much greater amount of time is spent whacking spinning tops, cannonballs and mini-Jesters than in the first game. Doubling-down on combat seems an odd choice, as we found it to be the most vanilla and uninspiring element of the first game, but we were willing to give it a chance. But Figment 2: Creed Valley can’t find a role for it. The enemies repeat far more often than they should, with a roster that is about half as big as it needed to be for this kind of game. And there are large chunks of the game where all you are doing is whacking things, and we felt the brow start to furrow.
As we approached the (much shorter) end, when a strong – but not as strong – revelation arrived, we couldn’t shake the sense that we were experiencing a lesser game. Figment 2: Creed Valley is more beautiful, there is absolutely no denying that: it’s an absolute feast for the eyeballs and ears. But when we looked back and ticked off the wonderful moments, we didn’t get off our first hand. In Figment: Journey into the Mind, we could barely fit them on our fingers and toes. A stand-out game has become merely a very good one.
Still, while Figment 2: Creed Valley represents a bit of a wobble for a potential and future game series, it’s far from a bad one. Just rewind back to the start of the series if you fancy jumping in.
You can buy Figment 2: Creed Valley from the Xbox Store
