The Angel’s Devil Tail – One More Question 2 (PC)

The Angel’s Devil Tail – One More Question 2 is a collection of what it refers to as “soup” puzzles. Named for the most famous instance of them where you need to figure out why a man who ate turtle soup at a restaurant then inexplicably went home and took his own life, this puzzle format is also known as a lateral thinking or situation puzzle as you need to ask someone questions to actually get the context required to solve them. Essentially a mix of a riddle and a game of 20 questions, you get the surprise of something initially strange and then the satisfaction of uncovering the secret twist behind the tale, The Angel’s Devil Tail – One More Question 2 designed to let you do all the questioning while still playing a single player experience.

 

The Angel’s Devil Tail – One More Question 2 provides 64 soup puzzles to solve with a wide range of subjects and a good mix of difficulty as you gradually work your way through them. Each one begins first with a piece of ominous art to back up its short and deliberately deceptive story, the art often playing into leading you astray with how you first interpret the riddle. A very common format for a soup puzzle is someone behaving with no clear reason behind their actions, like suddenly striking someone dead or having a strange emotional reaction to something that should have made them sad or happy. An easy example is one where a woman digs up a treasure chest full of life-changing riches but finding it makes her cry with sadness instead, the player then moving from the introductory screen to the questioning process.

While the real life version of these usually just has you talking with the question asker, The Angel’s Devil Tail – One More Question 2 makes it a solo experience by laying out a list of topics with pre-set questions you get to ask. There are a lot of potential questions to ask per puzzle so going through every option one by one is often not worth the effort, the player given the incentive to pick them carefully even though there is no punishment for asking literally every question available. Among more reasonable questions there will be more humorous or off the wall choices you might ask just for kicks, although since many of these stories can have huge twists, you might be surprised to suddenly learn a straightforward tale has suddenly shifted to horror territory with dismembered limbs and heinous crimes. In fact, a good deal of the soup puzzles are about uncovering some sordid or morbid underbelly to the tale, although it also uses this to good effect to have short stories that invert that growing expectation instead where the reveal is how mundane the situation actually was.

 

All of the questions you ask are yes or no questions, although the game will also notify you if it was an irrelevant question. Despite this keeping things simple, the host, a white-haired lady named Eve, will sometimes contribute details unprompted after saying yes or no. This usually helps with speeding things along, like how if you ask if there are other people present in the tale she might give you the exact number rather than there being unnecessary time spent trying to narrow down the number. Her willingness to comment can prove pretty important but also deceptive at times too, mostly since a fair few questions include references to other media. The Angel’s Devil Tail – One More Question 2 has a lot of fun making very specific allusions to anime, games, and the other material without directly acknowledging it, making it sometimes a little confusing when Eve will keep the reference going a little longer in a way that might seem like it is conveying information but is actually an inside joke of sorts. The game does have a few stumbles in its English translation that thankfully won’t impede the puzzle solving, but in its efforts to provide a glut of questions to avoid just using a slow process of elimination, it might have gotten a little too playful for its own good.

 

The Angel’s Devil Tail – One More Question 2 is at least good at cooking up a lot of situation puzzles that make good use of its format, only a few really feeling like you can solve them right out of the gate and the question asking may still be important to confirming the truth. Certain subjects only become available after asking the right question and it can be satisfying to solve the puzzle earlier without having to plumb all the options for gaining information. Answering a soup puzzle isn’t always as straightforward as knowing the general truth though, this helping with the question asking format. You always have to answer three questions accurately about the story to succeed, selecting from up to eight choices for each question where the answers are often a bit vague or conversely overly specific. It’s clearly written to test to see if you actually figured out the truth rather than maybe looking at the available answers and trying to guess your way through it, and there are enough stories where the details can get very granular to make it so you can never be certain how straightforward a puzzle will be. There’s actually a punishment for getting the three answers wrong as well. To unlock collectibles and lore items tied to the story you’ll need to spend clovers, solving a soup puzzle always giving you a few but if you get it right first try, you’ll get more leaves to build up extra clovers. Each wrong attempt will tell you that you gave incorrect answers but not which ones were wrong while diminishing the clover leaf payout, a player still able to get a small reward if they take multiple tries to get it. It doesn’t feel like a harsh penalty but makes getting the correct answer immediately a possible point of pride, the only other area really showing how well you’ve done being the general stats on things like how many questions you’ve asked in total.

The 64 main soup puzzles on offer do provide hours of interesting puzzles to solve with their format making it so you’re still going to need to interpret information to reveal the truth rather than just slowly uncovering all the facts through questioning. However, The Angel’s Devil Tail – One More Question 2 also offers the option to make your own puzzles and share them online, the tools allowing you to make ones that look just like the ones in the main story save for the need to contribute your own art if you don’t like the basic template. Making your own soup puzzle is pretty easy once you figure out where to click in the menus, and while the online offerings at the time of writing feature fairly few English uploads thanks to the game having a mostly Chinese audience, there is still room for a bit more fun after completing the story’s batch.

 

Speaking of the story, The Angel’s Devil Tail – One More Question 2 is technically a follow-up to the creator’s previous title One More Question, but its narrative doesn’t require any familiarity with that previous bundle of soup puzzles. This game can definitely be enjoyed just on the strength of its situation puzzles, but if you do pay attention to the plot, you can get a somewhat uneven but fairly cute tale. You awaken as a girl wrapped head to toe in bandages, dressed in a schoolgirl uniform and wearing a piece of paper over your face that can be surprisingly expressive with its drawn on features. You find yourself in the attic of the mysterious yet angelic Eve, but at night, you encounter a woman with the same name and appearance but a different personality and memories. You also have amnesia as Bandages, but as you solve soup puzzles and get your brain working again, you start to realize a bit more about yourself and your hosts, all while the batches of puzzles are separated by flashbacks to a more humble set of school day events that tease at the forgotten connections.

 

You could almost say the narrative is a bit of a soup puzzle itself as you wonder why your character is burned so badly they’re wrapped up like a mummy and a matter of having your sins weighed makes you curious about a clear supernatural side to these girls who share a name. However, in the scenes where Bandages and Eve talk, the plot can often be quite ridiculous and focused a lot more on goofy humor. This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, allowing for some cute moments or little laughs, and it does at least make it a little more believable this game may have a romantic side like was promised on its Steam store page, but Bandages is actually a pretty rough protagonist to find yourself as. She is a very sour individual, and while her bad attitude is eventually justified, it leads to a lot of the plot scenes up until near the end focused on Bandages being rude or bickering with Eve rather than working towards the emotions and deeper meanings that emerge near the story’s end. The unlockable lore can also find itself distracted with attempts at humor and even the main narrative joins the questions in sometimes being bogged down by unclear references to other media, but while the story never connects to any of the soup short stories, it can have a few cute moments to justify its presence if not always its direction or tone.

THE VERDICT: The Angel’s Devil Tail – One More Question 2 has a good selection of 64 creative situation puzzles that make good use of its single-player question-asking format. You aren’t just going through the motions as you interpret the pre-picked questions and actually providing the right answers requires truly understanding what you’ve been told, the many eerie, humorous, and surprising twists in the puzzle selection making them an effective range of puzzles before you even factor in an easy to use puzzle maker. They are a bit hampered by having a little too much fun with references sometimes, something the story also shares which takes a bit long to find an emotional hook thanks to a sour protagonist and irreverent comedy. The questioning isn’t truly harmed by the silly side though and there are some cute story elements, so just like some occasionally spotty parts of the English translation, it’s not too hard to look past the quirks to find a good collection of soup puzzles.

 

And so, I give The Angel’s Devil Tail – One More Question 2 for PC…

A GOOD rating. The story of The Angel’s Devil Tail – One More Question 2 isn’t a complete write-off because of how well things come together near the end, even if the road there might make you not care too much about Bandages before it focuses in and starts showing its hand. The character art can be cute, silly, or beautiful though and it has some endearing quirks like how everyone in the game seems to view jabs to the belly as a potent threat they’d wish to avoid. However, it’s not truly the reason to seek out the game. You can, if you please, just dive into the situation puzzles without much impediment save having to do a few in each batch to unlock the next one, and since the rewards for doing them well are mostly related to optional unlocks tied to things like your own puzzle creator profile, it’s not too disheartening to get an answer wrong and miss out on some clovers. Most situation puzzles don’t take too long to complete even if you ask a lot of the questions provided and there is some fun to be found in gradually revealing the truth of a tale, especially when you can confirm your suspicions or hit on a surprise detail that takes it in a wild new direction. Enough of them do have surprising violent sides or dark undertones you might want to be mentally prepared for, but it also doesn’t drift into truly uncomfortable subject matter. Murders and dismemberment might be happening in these deceptively told tales, but nothing too grim or lewd that you might squirm reading them. At the same time, the fact there are enough of them with a horror twist helps to make it fun when the tale is more mundane or practically a gag, soup puzzles coming in a range of topics and themes so you don’t start to predict the outcomes too easily.

 

While the title’s a bit of jumble of words, even the Angel’s Devil Tail part not likely to make sense until the epilogue after completing every puzzle, if you would ask me if I recommend The Angel’s Devil Tail – On More Question 2, I’d say yes. I’d also say yes if asked if there was room for improvement, mostly on the narrative side and maybe mark the jokey references a bit better so it can have its silly fun without being occasionally confusing. I’ve certainly qualified my answers far more than Eve ever does though, so for now, I send you off more simply by saying if you like the idea of uncovering the truth of a shocking riddle, The Angel’s Devil Tail – On More Question 2 gives you an enjoyable bundle of them to solve.