Foreign Creature 2

Sequels usually start you back at zero. Foreign Creature 2 starts you at the end of a plan that has almost worked. You are a clone of a king from another world, sent to Earth years ago to study how to be genuinely ruthless and to raise a force capable of retaking your home planet. Both objectives are nearly complete. What remains is the part nobody thinks about until it is due: getting rid of the evidence.

A Mission Almost Finished

That framing changes the shape of the whole game. The first Foreign Creature was about breaking out of somewhere — you were contained, you were weak, and you were improvising. Here you are the one who has been in control, and the problem is administrative. Traces of your presence are scattered across the places you have operated, and humanity finding any of them would undo everything.

So the puzzles are cleanup puzzles. You are working backwards through the consequences of a long campaign, closing loops, removing things, and making sure nothing you leave behind can be read by the people who come after. It is an unusually cold premise for a browser adventure and Belugerin Games plays it fairly straight, with the same dry, dark humour that ran through the first game but a colder motive underneath it.

Reading a Belugerin Scene

Mechanically this is a hotspot adventure, and the discipline it asks for is patience with a cursor. A scene is a static illustration containing a handful of things that respond to a click and a great many that do not, and the game is not going to highlight them for you. Progress comes from sweeping the pointer methodically across the frame, noting what reacts, and then working out the order.

Order is the whole difficulty. Individual actions are rarely hard to think of; the challenge is that they only work in one sequence, and performing a correct action too early can spoil a later one. Objects picked up in one place come into play somewhere else entirely, sometimes several scenes further on, and there is nothing telling you which items still matter.

Controls

A single click handles examining, collecting, and using. Inventory items are selected and then applied to the scene with the same button.

How It Differs From the First Game

• Scope. The original spends much of its length inside one facility. The sequel moves you through a wider set of locations, reflecting how far the operation has spread.
• Objective. Escape versus concealment. Getting out of a room and making sure a room never gets examined are different problems, and the second one is more deliberate.
• Inventory weight. More of the puzzle load here sits on objects and combinations rather than on the body-hopping that defined the first game.
• Tone. The alien in the first game is a curiosity out of its depth. This one is a functionary completing a job, and the writing treats that with a flatness that makes the jokes land harder.

Playing It Without Getting Stuck

The game is happy to let you strand yourself, so a little caution goes a long way. Sweep the entire scene before you act on any part of it — knowing all your options is worth more than being first to try one. Pick up everything that will let itself be picked up, because storage is free and backtracking is not. When something does not work, resist the urge to try it repeatedly; in a game this tightly sequenced, a rejected action almost always means a prerequisite is missing rather than that you have the wrong idea.

And if a scene has gone quiet for ten minutes, restart it. You will move through the parts you already solved in under a minute, and a fresh state is far more useful than continuing to poke at a broken one. Foreign Creature 2 is short by design; the time you spend on it should be spent thinking, not clicking.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who am I playing as? A clone of an alien king, created and sent to Earth to learn how to operate without mercy and to build an army for retaking his home planet.

What is the actual goal of the game? To erase every trace of your presence on Earth before the mission concludes, so that no evidence of the operation survives for humans to find.

Do I need to play the first Foreign Creature first? Not strictly. The story stands on its own, but the first game establishes the alien's arrival and the tone of the series, and the two read better in order.

Why does nothing happen when I click? Most of a scene is scenery. Only a small number of hotspots are active, and many of those stay inert until an earlier step has been completed.

Can I make the game unwinnable? Yes. Actions are sequence-dependent and there is no undo, so doing the right thing at the wrong moment can leave a scene without a solution.

Who developed it? Belugerin Games, the same studio behind the original Foreign Creature and a run of other Flash point-and-click adventures.