Somehow this game manages to be worse than the previous one despite showing evolution. Unfortunately, it evolved in all but the right ways. See my review of the first game for more details.
Everything that made the charm of the first game is essentially thrown away, I'll just list some comparisons:
The minimalistic story is replaced with a much more involved narrative. Unfortunately it only serves to show how poor the writing is, whereas it didn't matter in the previous game because the story is relatively unimportant. The abundance of mini-cutscenes is also quite frustrating, the game taking control away from you for usually no good reason. Every so often you have to watch your character agitating the lamp in multiple directions as if surprised by a sound or something, instead of experiencing it yourself. It's the same for multiple scares, which don't work because the game takes control away from you at that point. Not only does it break immersion but it's simply frustrating because of how often this happens are and they really break the flow.
I must admit however that the story has a good surprise toward the end, but that's about it.
Where the previous game could have benefited from being more open ended, this one is even more linear than before. Almost every single location is locked in a precise way by those giant monsters or barricades that magically disappear when it's convenient for the plot, requiring you to take the path the game wants. The directions are also clearer but in a way that only emphasizes the linearity. The annoying dog appears every 10 meters to tell you where to go and it is extremely immersion breaking.
The chases are replaced by mostly awful boss battles that require you to die multiple times and go through the same ordeal to solve them. The biggest problem with them is that they're extremely tedious to redo and require a lot of waiting every single time. This is a very intentional design in many segment of the game where it's obvious that the developers intended for the player to die and it's just infuriating, especially when you consider that they did not put checkpoints and require you to backtrack in many cases. Oftentimes, the boss is just a matter of evading attacks for a few minutes before you can do anything that matters and this is where you die if you do not have the solution, forcing you to restart a sequence of waiting for minutes before trying again.
The biggest change by far : the environmental sound design is much tamer and ordinary. What made the first game stand out was how powerful the environment was, the strong sound of cicadas or the wind in the rice fields. This created a truly unique and captivating atmosphere. This time around, the town is mostly silent and you'll only hear your footsteps. What's worse, the monsters are much more aggressive and most of them have very annoying and violent sounds that completely shatter any peacefulness. Even the dog seems completely out of the loop, why put such an annoying sounding pomeranian? A much lower pitched dog would have done the job better, like in the first game.
Adding onto that, the monsters themselves are rather boring. In the first game, you explore a town where most monsters can easily be avoided and are almost harmless. This helped to create this mystical atmosphere which is not just horror. In this game, you walk through a desolate town where at every corner there's a white ghost looking to chase you for 100 meters while spamming the same annoying scream and death traps are also much more common. There are also less ways to interact with enemies such as throwing rocks so that the ghosts would not pursue you any more. Therefore the appeal of exploration is reduced and there are more chases through areas instead.
All of this just shows that the developers did not grasp what made the first game so interesting and instead invested into much cheaper directions, making a game which keeps the flaws but doesn't have any of the pros of the previous one. I would not recommend to play this game at all and it's pretty terrible in my opinion. The first game is also much shorter, it doesn't help that this one is double the length when it has nothing to show.
Everything that made the charm of the first game is essentially thrown away, I'll just list some comparisons:
The minimalistic story is replaced with a much more involved narrative. Unfortunately it only serves to show how poor the writing is, whereas it didn't matter in the previous game because the story is relatively unimportant. The abundance of mini-cutscenes is also quite frustrating, the game taking control away from you for usually no good reason. Every so often you have to watch your character agitating the lamp in multiple directions as if surprised by a sound or something, instead of experiencing it yourself. It's the same for multiple scares, which don't work because the game takes control away from you at that point. Not only does it break immersion but it's simply frustrating because of how often this happens are and they really break the flow.
I must admit however that the story has a good surprise toward the end, but that's about it.
Where the previous game could have benefited from being more open ended, this one is even more linear than before. Almost every single location is locked in a precise way by those giant monsters or barricades that magically disappear when it's convenient for the plot, requiring you to take the path the game wants. The directions are also clearer but in a way that only emphasizes the linearity. The annoying dog appears every 10 meters to tell you where to go and it is extremely immersion breaking.
The chases are replaced by mostly awful boss battles that require you to die multiple times and go through the same ordeal to solve them. The biggest problem with them is that they're extremely tedious to redo and require a lot of waiting every single time. This is a very intentional design in many segment of the game where it's obvious that the developers intended for the player to die and it's just infuriating, especially when you consider that they did not put checkpoints and require you to backtrack in many cases. Oftentimes, the boss is just a matter of evading attacks for a few minutes before you can do anything that matters and this is where you die if you do not have the solution, forcing you to restart a sequence of waiting for minutes before trying again.
The biggest change by far : the environmental sound design is much tamer and ordinary. What made the first game stand out was how powerful the environment was, the strong sound of cicadas or the wind in the rice fields. This created a truly unique and captivating atmosphere. This time around, the town is mostly silent and you'll only hear your footsteps. What's worse, the monsters are much more aggressive and most of them have very annoying and violent sounds that completely shatter any peacefulness. Even the dog seems completely out of the loop, why put such an annoying sounding pomeranian? A much lower pitched dog would have done the job better, like in the first game.
Adding onto that, the monsters themselves are rather boring. In the first game, you explore a town where most monsters can easily be avoided and are almost harmless. This helped to create this mystical atmosphere which is not just horror. In this game, you walk through a desolate town where at every corner there's a white ghost looking to chase you for 100 meters while spamming the same annoying scream and death traps are also much more common. There are also less ways to interact with enemies such as throwing rocks so that the ghosts would not pursue you any more. Therefore the appeal of exploration is reduced and there are more chases through areas instead.
All of this just shows that the developers did not grasp what made the first game so interesting and instead invested into much cheaper directions, making a game which keeps the flaws but doesn't have any of the pros of the previous one. I would not recommend to play this game at all and it's pretty terrible in my opinion. The first game is also much shorter, it doesn't help that this one is double the length when it has nothing to show.