Teslagrad 2 is a sequel to the well-received PS4 title, Teslagrad, developed by Rain Games. It is a three to five hour Metroidvania-style 2D puzzle platformer in which you play as a young girl, Lumina. While out training to become a teslamancer, she crashes her airship in Wyrmheim, stranding her in this treacherously foreign land to the north of her hometown, Teslagrad. Using her various electrifying and magnetic abilities you must solve puzzles, avoid dangers, and explore your surroundings to locate a safe route to return home.

Teslagrad 2’s puzzles focus heavily on its terrific traversal with many of the unlockable abilities enhancing your swift movements. You acquire both an electric dash and slide very early on, which makes for some extremely satisfying moments when chained together well; sliding down a slope and then dashing through an electricity beam avoiding death by a hair’s breadth is so thrilling. Combined with your magnetic ability of attracting or repelling yourself toward or away from platforms, you have the tools to build up quite the momentum to achieve some impressively high or long jumps.

As you progress and unlock more weapons and abilities, which have taken inspiration from Nordic mythology, the puzzles become more challenging, requiring more precise jumps or more accurate timing to avoid getting burnt to a crisp. This is to be expected but should you find yourself stuck on a puzzle or not knowing where to go to progress, there are no hints or guidance provided. We found ourselves on several occasions being completely stumped by what appeared to be dead-end rooms only to later figure out our new ability had a function the game didn’t even tell us about.

In between all the platforming you’ll be faced with a handful of challenging boss battles. These being too difficult was a major criticism of the original game and it seems that feedback has been taken on board. Before entering every boss area, you’re presented with a new shield ability, allowing you to take an extra hit before death. This has helped hugely in balancing out the steep difficulty, although we still found a couple of encounters particularly unfair. We're talking about you, moose.

Ultimately, Teslagrad 2 is an agreeable successor with satisfying traversal and enjoyably challenging puzzles and boss fights. But with a short runtime and a lack of hints and guidance it fails to really improve upon its predecessor. If you enjoyed Teslagrad and are looking for more of the same, this sequel will suffice.