Breathedge 2: a comedy sequel has a problem no other sequel has

An action sequel has a simple problem: do the same thing better. A comedy sequel has a problem nobody else has.

Humour runs on surprise. A sequel is the opposite of a surprise. That is the question Breathedge 2 poses, and the answer is not the one I expected.

Do you need to have played the first one?

No, and the studio says so in a way that sets the tone immediately: everything will be equally confusing to Breathedge veterans and complete newcomers alike.

A refresher helps measure what is at stake here, though.

The first Breathedge, released in 2021, put you in the boots of an ordinary man tasked with delivering his grandfather's ashes to a galactic funeral. The space hearse exploded, and you found yourself surviving in a field of debris, coffins and dead passengers. You crafted more or less everything out of duct tape, and you dragged along an immortal chicken whose immortality the game exploited shamelessly.

It was Subnautica in the void, with a narrator who never shut up.

It did rather well: 17,818 reviews, 81 per cent positive. Which also means nearly one player in five could not stand it. A review at the time summed the problem up in its headline by saying the game was both very good and very bad. That was exactly right, and the fault line ran through the humour.

A useful note for anyone wanting to try first: the original currently sells for 2.49 euros. At that price the question does not arise.

What has changed in the story

The Breathedge Corporation has started a galaxy-wide war and built an army of Coffinbots.

Take a second to appreciate that. The first game took place in a funeral convoy full of coffins. The second pits you against robots made of coffins. It is the kind of idiotic, perfectly constructed continuity that tells you how seriously these people treat their own stupidity.

The Man and his companion, an AI living inside his spacesuit, accidentally derailed the takeover plan. So they became target number one, and they barely survive before being attacked by their own allies.

The studio poses the game's questions itself, and I quote them because they are the programme: who attacked whom, who is Babe, why does the Man need a Chicken, where were we even going, and what are we supposed to do with all this duct tape.

The survival layer, which is solid

Underneath the joke there is a real survival game, and it does not cheat.

You watch oxygen and temperature, plus a series of small details capable of ending the adventure early. In the void, those two gauges are enough to create permanent tension: every excursion is a calculation of distance and return.

You learn blueprints, craft, upgrade. Tools, equipment, and above all the spacesuit, which is your real progression bar. You repair and dismantle machinery, gather materials, find ways into inaccessible places.

And you explore. Abandoned stations, ruined settlements, shipwrecks. The studio promises places no reasonable person would ever think of entering, which is a decent description of this genre generally.

There is combat, but it stays secondary. The studio says you will occasionally have to fight, often run, and shove aside the bodies of less fortunate astronauts. That last phrase is representative of the tone: macabre, dispatched quickly, and not entirely a joke.

The humour, and the real question

So, does it land a second time?

Partly, and that is already better than I feared.

What works is that the comedy is not a coat of varnish over the game, it is in its construction. The Coffinbots are funny because they extend an idea from the first game. The duct tape is funny because it genuinely is the base material of your progression. The suit that talks to you is funny because it is the thing giving you vital information.

You cannot ignore the jokes, they are in the systems.

What works less well is the density. The voice never stops, and there are moments, generally while you are focused on a falling oxygen gauge, when you would like ten seconds of silence. The first game had that flaw, the second has not fixed it, and I suspect that is deliberate.

The good news is that the studio writes exactly like its game. Its announcements are digressive and self-deprecating, and one opens on a mock request to a chatbot for a respectable press release, so nobody realises it was written by a graphomaniac chicken. That may be the best guarantee available: this voice is not a marketing strategy, it is simply how these people talk.

What early access actually contains

This is the point not to get wrong, and the studio is honest, so it is worth relaying.

The early access starting today includes the first major story chapter, a large area to explore, and the core gameplay systems.

And it specifies what is missing: the story is not complete, parts of the world remain inaccessible, and some systems will keep evolving.

The planned updates are meant to continue the narrative and add areas, mechanics, characters and items.

In other words, you are buying a beginning. For a survival game that is workable, because the loop stands on its own. For a game whose main argument is a funny story it is trickier: you are being sold the first act of a comedy.

So my advice is simple. If you want the complete narrative, wait. If you want the survival loop, the crafting and the tone, you can go now, provided you know the ending does not exist yet.

Two more reservations

It is single-player only. No co-op mode, which is coherent for a narrative game but noticeable in a genre where surviving as a pair has become the norm.

And the first game took three years to leave early access. That is not a complaint, it is calendar information. RedRuins Softworks is a small studio, and its record suggests the complete version of Breathedge 2 will not be here in six months.

What I make of it

There are two ways to botch a comedy sequel. Repeat the same jokes, or drop them and start taking yourself seriously.

Breathedge 2 avoids both, and it does so by the only method that works: building the humour into the mechanics rather than on top of them. A coffin robot is not a gag recited by a character, it is an enemy you fight and a logical consequence of the first game. Duct tape is not a joke about improvisation, it is your production chain.

That said, what I have in my hands is a first chapter. A comedy is judged on its punchline, and the punchline is not written.

What I can say is that the vacuum remains an excellent setting for a survival game, that oxygen tension does not wear out, and that a studio capable of calling its robots Coffinbots after making an entire game about a hearse deserves to be allowed to finish its sentence.

How long did you last against the narrator? Come and confess on the InsertCoins Discord.