Deja Vu II: MacVenture Series (PC) Review

Déjà Vu II is a nearly unassailable game to modern gamer audiences. The entire premise is based on pure trial and error, save scumming, and generally pushing patience to the limit in unintuitive gameplay. Essentially, the player is given a crude picture, and can click or interact on various objects on the screen; there is no clue to what is important or what is useless beyond clicking on everything. From there, users must go to various other screens to figure out the story and what to do. The actual game can be beat very rapidly, often under an hour if the player knows what to do, but because they don't, the bad user interface and general directionless nature means the game lasts much longer, thus where a fake game length comes from.

The problem is not that Déjà Vu II is dated (there are a fair amount of dated games that are good); it is that it has many bad conventions as gameplay, such as completely random events that have to go the player's way. For example, gambling is necessary to make money to advance, but the random number generator is nowhere close to fair, so this means the player bets, loses and reloads until they win, save, repeat. This is NOT a recipe for a successful or fun game experience. It'd be easy to continue criticising, but the reality is the game is not recommended at all.