Let’s start with the bad this time. As others have said, the game is temperamental. Narrative progression rests on your responsibility to click on every. single. thing. It’s moreso an issue because the game regularly presents you with spreads of items all stacked on one another, with no indication that you are supposed to gingerly comb your curser over every last bit of the screen so you can get a glimpse of all nineteen of Lillian’s anger management notes. I swear I had to sneak back into Dwayne Powers’ office at least seven times because I’d forgotten to click on the fortune cookie and the French love letter dictionary (lol what) and god knows how many inane newspapers. In the walkthrough I had to use, one of the instructions actually said to carefully click on a piece of paper because it was so well concealed, and you know what? It took me three tries to successfully click it.

Similar to the previous game in the series, STFD sometimes suffers from frustrating level design and controls. Nancy has not yet leveled up her ability to turn a complete 360 degrees, so you’re gonna spend a lot of your sleuthing walking backwards down hallways and stairs. If you want to turn left at the casting director’s door, sorry bucko. You’re gonna have to spin right allll the way around.

However, there are good things here! We have a brilliantly dotty cast of fun and fresh characters. Bless Millie Strathorn—I hope someday I too can spend my days holed up in a closet full of actual garbage writing bad fanfiction and writing secret coded messages to…myself? Haven’t we all left office at the end of the day and thought, “Maybe I should take the fucking doorknob off to make sure nobody goes snooping through my things?”

The mystery itself rests on some real rising tension. The game starts with barbie humanoid Mattie Jensen casually describing some toxic fan letters her costar has been getting, and things ramp up until Nancy is later breaking into buildings and disarming bombs. The setting of WWB has a personality to it, rather than just being some generic tv studio. The bits with the voiceover taxi drivers could’ve maybe used some variety (and also yikes! at that wAcKy Indian driver voice), but the bit didn’t get annoying in the way you’d expect. Hearing some imposter voicing your boyfriend was a bit jarring, but the phone conversations are a step up from the previous game.

There’s a lot to like here. I feel like if you’ve already played it and know the gist with the puzzles and progression, it would be a cozy little play. I would replay this—and I have really pretty much zero interest in replaying SCK ever again, so that’s something.