Developed by Lexis Numérique, Red Johnson’s Chronicles 2: One Against All (RJC2) is the sequel to a Playstation Network point and click adventure. You play as Red Johnson; a detective who has all but went into hiding after discovering there’s a $150,000 bounty on his head due to the events carried out in the previous iteration. You start off in a dive bar ordering a beer from what we’re told is a French waitress, only to quickly find out through a series of button mashing combinations that the beer you’ve ordered is not only poisoned but contains a severed finger. Upon taking said finger home and running it through your amazing analyze anything and everything machine you learn it is the finger of your brother, Brown Johnson (that’s right) and so begins your quest.
Although well rendered and generally aesthetically pleasing, the environments of RJC2 remind me of a cheap Sin City wrapped into a world where nothing exactly makes sense. As you point and click your way through the various areas you’ll be required to solve puzzles and make decisions based on the evidence you’ve acquired. The puzzles you encounter are cumbersome, clumsy and completely irrelevant to your current task or that of a detective. Sudoku puzzles on walls that spell out a radio station frequency that for some reason is constantly broadcasting a reversed message that is only meant for you. I’m all for fiction but let’s keep it in the realm of reality here.
With typical jigsaw-like and facial reconstruction puzzles, RJC2 does nothing the genre hasn’t already been doing for a number of years, providing players with an experience that just has nothing to really do with the story being told. As I trudged through 10 hours of gameplay with a plethora of puzzles and quick-time button tapping events, I found myself praying for the end instead of admiring the tale. In a world where The Walking Dead series has pretty much set the standard for creating interactive stories, RJC2 deviates from the path of what we expect from this genre.
