Terror Trip 2: The Nightmare Revisited
Terror Trip 2: The Nightmare Revisited is a horror/adventure title developed by Pyramid Games and published by Psygnosis. It's the direct sequel to 2012's indie sensation Terror Trip, and much of the same team behind that game also worked on this game, including the two directors, brother and sister team Alex and Ariel Hirsch. As such, the game shares some plot and character elements with OTL's cartoon Gravity Falls, though TTL's game is somewhat scarier and more mature. Like the previous game, Terror Trip 2 shares a lot of gameplay elements with OTL titles such as Alan Wake and Until Dawn (and TTL titles like Pocatello), focusing more on exploration and mystery solving rather than combat, and allowing players to discover secrets and learn the game's lore at their own place, while also featuring plenty of story sequences and character development. Teenage twins Dirt and Claudia return as the game's primary protagonists, along with their friends Kim, Jesús, Jules, Rickon, and Alma, and a few new teenage characters who are introduced as friends of the protagonists, while also bringing in a few new adult characters (including a character who's a lot like OTL's Grunkle Stan) as well. Terror Trip 2 is an indie, but with a large budget for an indie, comparable to that of games like OTL's Senua's Sacrifice, with graphics and content rivaling that of some AAA titles. With much of the profits from the original Terror Trip going into this game's production, Terror Trip 2 has probably the largest budget of any indie game to date (while Psygnosis has the game positioned as its largest project apart from Cyberwar 5, putting more promotion into the game than even their upcoming Wipeout title). Even with the larger budget, Alex and Ariel have had pretty much free reign to do whatever they want with the game, loading it full of quirky humor, wacky thrills, and the occasional pop culture reference. Though the game plays much like the original, there are some new gameplay elements added, including some extreme sports and arcade-style minigames to help players pass the time, some improved character interaction features that include branching dialogue paths and characters that "remember" certain choices and statements made by the player, and some Talos Principle/Myst-inspired puzzle solving, while the world itself has been expanded outside of Willamette Falls (the setting for the original game, which returns for this one with some changes), and is about 2 to 2 1/2 times larger than the world of the original Terror Trip. The original game's voice cast returns to reprise their roles in this title, and Alex Hirsch voices some of the new characters, including the Grunkle Stan expy. One of the game's most prominent new characters is a girl named Luz, named after OTL cartoon animator Luz Batista, who works for Pyramid ITTL as a character designer. This reflects the influence of Dana Terrace, who created the Owl House cartoon IOTL, but who works as a writer and game designer for Pyramid ITTL. TTL's Luz is significantly different from her OTL counterpart (apart from being Dominican-American like her namesake), TTL's Luz is 18 and is much more laid back than the OTL character, and also has longer hair. She's one of Claudia's new friends, and probably the game's most prominent new character. There's also Sage, a young man that the characters meet in their return trip to Willamette Falls, who becomes a love interest for Claudia and another of the game's most significant new characters.
Terror Trip 2 sees Dirt, Claudia, and their friends returning to Willamette Falls, not on a school trip, but instead, after being called there by a mysterious voice in their nightmares. Since their trip to the town a few months back, a lot of things have changed. A shady businessman named Parks (the Grunkle Stan expy) has begun buying up a lot of property in Willamette Falls to capitalize on the terrifying events of several months before, and becomes a sort of secondary antagonist as he tries to obstruct or scam the teens at every turn. Indeed, more mysterious things have been happening, and Dirt and Claudia start investigating almost right away, while the others (save for Kim, who leaps right into the investigation) mostly want to distract themselves from all the scary happenings. Jules has been somewhat depressed since she and Will broke up, while Claudia's friend Luz, who decided to tag along after being jealous that she didn't get to experience all the scary stuff before, seems somewhat bored with everything that's been going on. Claudia soon meets with Sage, who has more information on everything that's been happening, and Dirt goes off with Kim more than he does Claudia, as Claudia is distracted by Sage and by her own fears of the unknown. We also learn that Dirt and Claudia have been having a lot of tension between them, since they plan to leave for different universities in a few months (somewhat reflecting the conflict between Dipper and Mabel at the end of season two of Gravity Falls). This conflict will ultimately play a major role in the events of the game, as Eidolon, the strange eldritch force behind the events of the previous Terror Trip, is once again working behind the scenes to cause trouble and claim human souls. Eidolon takes on a Bill Cipher-esque role in the game, though it's played somewhat more seriously, and instead of being voiced by Alex Hirsch, Eidolon is voiced by Kyle MacLachlan, who uses a much more menacing tone. It's revealed that most of the strange events occurring in Willamette Falls are due to the wandering spirits of several teenagers who mysteriously disappeared 50 years before. Each of these teenagers has a "counterpart" amongst the current era teens (except for one, which comes into play later on), and as we play through the game, we begin to learn more about who they were and how they disappeared. The wandering spirits cause more and more trouble in Willamette Falls as the game progresses, and their own struggles and the circumstances of their deaths mirror those of their current era counterpart. We learn that these spirit teenagers called Dirt, Claudia, and their friends to Willamette Falls, and that they intend to "replace" them in the real world by causing them to have a desire to disappear, by causing conflict and despair amongst them. One by one, the spirit teens make their move, and Dirt or Claudia have to help their friends overcome these conflicts, while also helping the spirit find peace and move on. Most of these conflicts are resolved fairly easily, but some are more troubling: for example, Luz has a crush on Jules, while Jules wants to reciprocate but can't move on from Will and from her own shame about her sexual identity, while the teenage spirit girls haunting them reflect this conflict because they were tricked into committing suicide during the 1960s because they were never able to express their own sexuality. The scene where Claudia helps Luz and Jules realize their own feelings while also helping the spirit girls make peace with what happened to them is not only a landmark LGBT scene in a video game, but also one of the most poignant scenes in the entire series. However, even as Dirt and Claudia are helping their friends, they're being driven further and further apart by their own conflict, and this causes Claudia to make a pact with Eidolon that causes her to lose her own soul, allowing her replacement, a young woman named Eliza, to manifest in the real world. Meanwhile, it's revealed that Sage is one of the spirit teenagers as well, the only one without a counterpart, as he's the only one of them who willingly made a pact with Eidolon, helping Eidolon kill the others in return for power. At the same time that Eidolon tears away Claudia's soul, Parks has managed to buy out the whole town, and is bringing in a team to tear down some of the old landmarks, which would jeopardize any chance Dirt has of bringing peace to the wayward teenagers' souls (which Eidolon has managed to imprison even after Dirt and Claudia were able to make peace with most of them). While Dirt, Kim, and Eliza (who Dirt eventually convinces to leave Sage and Eidolon's side and help them rescue Claudia) go to battle Eidolon and Sage, the others, led by Luz and Jules, must prevent Parks' plan to bulldoze half the town, by sabotaging his business deal (even while Eidolon's activities cause all sorts of havoc in the town). In a heartfelt scene, Dirt is able to get through to Claudia, and the two agree that even though they'll be going to separate colleges, they'll always be family, and the two are able to use their combined wits and skills to take down Eidolon, condemning him back to the dark spirit realm (and he drags Sage with him). The others save the town, forcing Parks to pack up and take his shady business dealings elsewhere. The teenage spirits from the past are able to go to the afterlife in peace, and Willamette Falls is saved.
Terror Trip 2 is released in November 2016 for the Reality, Nexus, Virtua, Connect, Gemini, PC, and Macintosh, with a mobile version released in 2017 for high-end devices. The game is received quite well by critics, who praise its characters and storyline, though they do consider the gameplay to be a bit dated, and the plot itself isn't quite as memorable as the original game, so reviews average only in the low to mid 8s. Sales are quite strong, making it one of the most successful indie titles of the year alongside Laser Star and Stardew Valley, and overall, the game is considered a big success for Pyramid, though not a surprise success like the original. Surprisingly, this would be the last Terror Trip game: much like OTL's Gravity Falls, the series would go out on a high note even if it could've gone on a bit longer. The Hirsch twins cite a desire to move on from the series, they don't want to do another "big" game with this IP, though the story would continue in the form of smaller, mobile games, chapter-based periodic titles, and ancillary materials such as webcomics and novels. The company has been producing lots of other games in the meantime, most of them cheaper mobile titles, RPGs, dungeon crawlers, and puzzlers, and Pyramid wants to continue with those, while putting more of this game's profits into expanding the company and increasing the amount of games they're able to put out in a year. Terror Trip 2 wouldn't be the last major game from Pyramid, though... indeed, work on the company's next major project would begin even before Terror Trip 2's release, and would take on a somewhat different feel from the two Terror Trip titles, while allowing some of the company's new staff to flex their creative muscles. Indeed, the idea for this next game wouldn't come from Alex or Ariel, but from someone who'd played a major role in the development of Terror Trip 2, and who now had an idea of her own for the next great RPG...
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Next Big Pyramid Project Won't Be Terror Trip 3: Hirsch Twins Tease "Isekai" RPG Concept
Pyramid Games just launched Terror Trip 2: The Nightmare Revisited, the long-awaited sequel to its 2012 hit mystery/horror game. Sales figures haven't yet been released, but the game is currently #3 on Nintendo's online store, behind Super Mario Adventure and Call Of Duty: Altered Warfare, and #2 on the Nexus store behind only Miraculous Ladybug 2. In a recent interview on G4's X-Play, the game's directors Alex and Ariel Hirsch discussed not only their thoughts about the game, but also their plans for the future, and their new game concept is quite different from anything the company has produced before.
Most surprisingly, Alex Hirsch stated that the company was probably "done" making any more big Terror Trip titles, citing a bit of burnout with the latest game toward the end of production, and also that there was "nowhere else to go" with the concept, at least in video game form. While this may come as a shock and a disappointment to fans of the games, Hirsch said that fans shouldn't be too worried, as there would be at least one more "small" game set in the Terror Trip world, and that it would likely be a chapter-based mobile game, a more low tech approach that wouldn't take up too much of the company's resources. He then said that he and Ariel would be stepping back from the company's next big project, serving in more of an advisory and supervisory role while a team of new writers took on their upcoming game, said to be an RPG based around the "isekai" concept, in which the player is teleported from one world to another, and must find a way to adapt to their new surroundings while getting back home. Japanese games are no stranger to this trope (the name Isekai itself is Japanese for "other world"), and the upcoming Scalebound will feature a version of this trope for its protagonist Drew. However, the idea of the player getting to create their own isekai character is a bit more novel.
Ariel Hirsch expanded on the upcoming game when asked by X-Play host Elisa Melendez. Though she didn't give a lot of information, she did say that the game's world was one of magic and mystery, and that the player would need to befriend denizens of this world and learn spells in order to make progress. She also said that the game's world would be "huge and epic", comparable to games such as Fallout 3 and Necrocracy. She then said that the game is still very early in development and would take a "few more years" to complete, and that in the meantime, Pyramid would be focusing on smaller titles as they did during the production of Terror Trip 2. Alex added that it probably wouldn't be until 2018 that the first footage of the game itself would be available, but that smaller things such as concept drawings might be released before, depending on how much progress the team was making on the game.
-from a November 12, 2016 article on Games Over Matter