Call of the Elder Gods
If you missed it back in 2020, Call of the Sea was a neat little adventure game. Taking place in the 1920's, our protagonist, Norah Everheart, has an unknown but terminal illness, and her husband plans an expedition to a remote island in the Pacific Ocean in search of a cure. When he doesn't return, Norah makes the trip herself in search of her missing husband - only to find (among other things) that the source of her "mysterious illness" is that she's actually descended from eldritch beings, and her final choice is whether she should go home and spend her last few years with her husband, or stay on the island where she "belongs". It's got some neat puzzles, and it's fun way to spend an afternoon or two if that sounded interesting at all.
Set 30 years later, the sequel follows two new characters: the now-widowed Harry Everheart, Dean of Archaeology at Miskatonic University in Boston, and Evangeline Drayton, a student of physics at MU. Evie is having weird dreams about ruins on an island that look suspiciously similar to the first game, and Harry has locked himself up in his manor ever since the death of his wife, seeing strange oily shadows on surfaces that should not be. Central to both the manor's mystery and Evie's dreams is a statuette with a strange black orb, and when it's found broken, the pair set off for a cave in Virginia in search of answers. And the whole thing is narrated by Norah (in an omniscient observer sense), which is a nice way to bring her back into the story, even if she doesn't get to be physically present for the actual events.
And look, you might be reading this and going "Wow, just casually dropping a plot synopsis of the first game in the very first paragraph?" and yeah! The game just kind of...does that. One of the first dialogue choices you get in Chapter 1 is the game literally going "so which ending of Call of the Sea did you go with?" Evie's dreams prominently feature Cthulhu-esque chanting, Norah tells us that Harry knows damn well that black orb is made out of an elder god's blood, Chapter 2 revolves around murals that depict alien-like creatures, and in-between Chapters 2 and 3, they just outright show you one of the damn things. Subtlety is not in this game's toolbox - I mean, hell, the game is literally called Call of the Elder Gods. For better or worse, it's clearly assuming you've played the first game and know the score, and if you don't, it's gonna make sure that you do pretty quickly.
This bigger, more bombastic storytelling extends to the game's structure as well. While Call of the Sea certainly featured a good variety of biomes, it was all under the purview of exploring a single island. Elder Gods takes a more "Indiana Jones" approach to its storytelling; as mentioned, the game starts in Boston where Evie meets up with Harry, before quickly shuffling you off to Virginia, DC, Norway, and more. Is the snowy area at the top of the mountain in Sea REALLY any different than Elder Gods calling a very similar environment "Norway"? I suppose not, but it does FEEL different. The globe-trotting version of these environments gives it a more of an ambitious feeling, like the characters are part of something larger than life - and to the developer's credit, the areas ARE more detailed and interesting than in the first game. I may have despised the central puzzle of Chapter 3, but the actual building it takes place in is gorgeous, with sculptures of Egyptian gods and a ton of starry motifs and decorations.
Speaking of the puzzles, Elder Gods does a pretty good job of keeping things interesting. Each of the game's six chapters usually has two major puzzles: a big, chapter spanning objective (break into Harry's basement, activate the elevator in the Starry Wisdom Society, etc) and a smaller, secondary puzzle that usually isn't directly related to your major objective, but you still have to solve along the way. There's actually a lot of variation on offer, ranging from codebreaking and Hard Logic Puzzles (in the formal sense - here's five people, based on a few statements figure out who goes where, what their animal is, etc) to more standard adventure game fare like assembling a statue or opening/closing doors to trap a hostile entity so that Evie can get by safely. The Enigma puzzles of Chapter 4 are probably my favorite in the game, while the Hard Logic Puzzle in Chapter 3 was far and away my least favorite, made worse by the fact that I did solve it and have all the details right, I just had the placement of two characters backwards.
And the characters! If I was being less generous, I would say something like "Elder Gods immediately gets a point up on Sea by virtue of having characters at all," which is not QUITE true, but is a lot truer than it probably should be. The game goes back and forth on whether Harry or Evie is the "main character" of the story, but regardless of who is leading any given section, the other character usually isn't far away, giving them someone to bounce off of regardless of the circumstances. The handful of scenes that are purely from one character's perspective are all among the weakest in the game, with a whole lot of "character talks to themselves in an attempt to fill the dead air" trying in vain to mask the absence of the other lead. It even (ostensibly) has a THIRD character in the form of its main antagonist, Caleb Bowen - though you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise considering he has two scenes in the entire game. Harry does a lot of telling about Bowen and his actions, beliefs, etc, but none of it is ever really substantiated beyond what you see of the Starry Wisdom Society building, and that's all you get until he shows up for the penultimate scene before the credits.
However, as much as all of the above are clear improvements over the first game, it does need to be said that Elder Gods has a little bit of a..."missing the point" kind of feel, I guess? While I wouldn't go so far as to say that it jumped the shark, there is a very real sense that all of this escalation was kind of unnecessary. Sea, regardless of its other faults, was a very tight and limited story about a woman searching for her missing husband and finding out a whole lot more than she bargained for. By comparison, the sequel is all over the place and is kind of a mess. You've got Harry looking for closure about his dead wife and her circumstances, Evie's dreams and how that connects with the aliens, Bowen and the Starry Wisdom Society cult, Nazis, time travel, spaceships, and more. Some of these plot threads come together and form something coherent, but I think the game would have been much stronger if it picked a couple of these to focus on and went with a more subdued storyline. It's not BAD, but it is stretched thin and arguably falls victim to the "less than the sum of its parts" verdict.
This feels doubly true when talking about Caleb Bowen and his role in the plot; it feels very odd to have a human antagonist when discussing a story that so prominently features aliens and elder gods. And yet, those same supernatural elements are also just kinda...there? That isn't to say they aren't important, but ultimately, they're just a means to an end. Funnily enough, the thing that Elder Gods ACTUALLY cares about when it's all said and done is time travel - or at least, an alien technology(?) that allows one to send their consciousness through time and space, which might as well be time travel. This is what the Nazis were researching, and Bowen is happy to pick up where they left off. I'm not saying that there isn't a world where this is a fascinating little offshoot of a larger "Elder Gods Universe" or whatever, but it's really weird that they made a game called Call of the Elder Gods that fundamentally does not have anything to do with the Elder Gods.
All in all, I liked Elder Gods more than I didn't, and I guess that counts for something. It probably should have either cut some of the plot branches to keep it more focused, or some had some more chapters in the middle to allow those elements to breathe, but what's there is fine and if you liked the first game, this one is absolutely worth your time as well. Should you rush out to buy it right this minute? I mean, probably not, but if you see it (and the first game) on sale for $10-15? I think you're gonna have a pretty good time.