NIGORO’s La-Mulana earned a reputation as one of the most intellectually demanding games ever made, a metroidvania where the puzzles mattered more than the platforming and a notebook was as essential as a controller. La-Mulana 2, released in 2018, built on that foundation with clear mechanical improvements while keeping the design philosophy that made the original both beloved and deeply divisive.
The community around La-Mulana 2 is small but passionate. Praise tends to be emphatic, criticism tends to be specific, and nearly everyone acknowledges that this is a game built for a very particular audience. If you’re in that audience, few games deliver this kind of satisfaction.
Puzzles That Demand Your Full Attention
The puzzle design is the core of La-Mulana 2, and it delivers at an extraordinary level. Every room, every inscription, every environmental detail can be relevant. Players who engage with the puzzle layer find an experience that treats them as genuinely intelligent, with solutions that click together in ways that feel earned rather than arbitrary. The density of interconnected riddles across the game’s sprawling ruins creates a sense of discovery that’s hard to find elsewhere.
Movement and jump control received significant upgrades from the original. Where the first La-Mulana locked you into your jump arc once you left the ground, the sequel allows mid-air adjustment. This sounds like a minor change, but it transforms the feel of traversal. Platforming challenges become about skill and timing rather than memorization of fixed trajectories, and the improvement makes combat encounters more responsive.
The world design rewards thoroughness. Rooms that seem insignificant on first pass often contain critical information or hidden paths. The game trusts players to remember details encountered hours earlier and connect them to puzzles found much later. For the right player, this creates a remarkably cohesive experience where every piece of the world feels deliberately placed.
A Game That Won’t Help You
The difficulty curve isn’t really a curve. La-Mulana 2 starts hard and stays hard, with puzzles that can stall progress for hours if you miss a single clue. Players will accumulate pages of handwritten notes, and even with careful documentation, some solutions require leaps of logic that feel obtuse rather than clever. The line between brilliant puzzle design and frustrating obscurity is thin, and La-Mulana 2 crosses it in spots.
Quality-of-life features are minimal by modern standards. Important game mechanics are explained in the manual rather than through in-game tutorials, and several systems require external research to understand fully. This is deliberate design rather than oversight, but it creates an accessibility barrier that goes beyond difficulty.
Boss and guardian fights drew mixed reactions compared to the original. Some players found the encounter design weaker, with more reliance on instant-death traps and pattern memorization that feels less fair than the puzzle challenges surrounding them. The bosses aren’t bad, but they don’t match the highs of the game’s environmental puzzle design.
A patch-related issue that made certain sections unbeatable for an extended period damaged community trust. While eventually resolved, the slow developer response to a game-breaking bug left a mark on the game’s reputation during a critical window.
The Notebook Game
La-Mulana 2 belongs to a nearly extinct genre: games that assume you’ll bring tools beyond a controller. The pencil-and-paper requirement isn’t a gimmick. It’s fundamental to how the game works. Every inscription, every hint, every suspicious environmental detail feeds into a web of interconnected puzzles that can only be solved through documentation and lateral thinking. The game doesn’t track this for you, and that’s not a failing.
Should You Play La-Mulana 2?
If you’ve ever finished a game and wished it demanded more from you intellectually, La-Mulana 2 exists for you. Players who enjoy puzzle-heavy exploration, who find satisfaction in connecting clues across hours of play, and who don’t mind consulting their own notes will find one of the deepest metroidvanias available. Experience with the original helps but isn’t required.
Skip it if you want your progress to feel consistent and your puzzles to be self-contained. La-Mulana 2 will strand you, confuse you, and occasionally frustrate you by design. If that sounds like a waste of time rather than a challenge worth accepting, this isn’t your game.
The Verdict on La-Mulana 2
La-Mulana 2 is a demanding metroidvania that rewards the specific kind of player willing to take notes, think laterally, and accept that the game will never meet them halfway. Jump control and general movement are meaningfully improved over the original, and the puzzle design remains some of the most intricate in the genre. It’s a brilliant game that actively resists broad appeal, and that’s exactly the point.