Grabstein Prison. Home to the worst of the worst. Killers. Fiends. Thieves. The unrepentant enemies of the state, crown and church are kept here, far from civilized society, where they can harm no one.
Deep in the bowels of the prison, is a thief, a simple burglar. Skilled in his art, he is kept seperate from the other prisoners for some mysterious reason. What does he know, why was he kept in isolation, and what does it have to do with the mysterious plague of madness that has swept through the prison?
Black Home 2 is a direct sequel to the Warfare Studios game Black Home. Made in RPG Maker, it, like its predecessor, is a horror/adventure/rpg, where players must find and use tools from the environment to solve puzzles and navigate the maps. It deals with the direct aftermath of the events of the first game, despite taking place well over a century after, keeping the atmosphere of a single location cut off from the rest of the world and teeming with enemies and mysteries.
The game contains examples of:
- Antagonistic Offspring: Galant Coy, son of Lecia and Lesnar Coy from the first game is the big bad this time around.
- Alien Geometries: Pandemonium, the last area of the prison before the final showdown, is a large map room made of chunks of the prison, all welded together somehow and floating in an endless void.
- Artifact of Doom: The Diadem, a crown imbued with the soul of Lecia Coy, crafted by her own son, and the source of the plague of madness that sweeps the prison.
- It's even worse if you try to destroy it, as it could apparently 'wipe out eight city blocks.'
- A Rare Sentence: If Dunn investigates a bloody warning to 'GET OUT' on the wall of the surgical theater:Dunn:I never thought I'd say this to a wall while I was sober, but that's damned good advice.
- Ax-Crazy: What the plague does to the inmates and prison staff. Only four people remain sane through the whole ordeal.
- Bedlam House: Not technically a mental institution, but given how chaotic the prison becomes after the Diadem wakes up, it counts.
- Cloud Cuckoo Lander: The Medical Staff. Joy rambles on in a rhyming cadence and calls dibs on Roman's leg, offering to let Moll 'hold his hand, and the other nurses offer to "help" the party go insane.
- Couldn't Find a Pen: Bloody messages are scrawled on the walls and floors, usually prodding the party in a certain direction, or warning them of impending danger. It seems Enigma was leaving them behind.
- Deadpan Snarker: So, the captain of the guard needs someone to find the key so he can get out of the corridor he's trapped in? Well Dunn needs a Cloak of Invisibility, a set of Master Lockpicks, and the floorplan to a rich man's vault, and yet oddly enough, life seems content to deny him these things.
- The Determinator: The Executioner, filling much the same role as the Shape from the first game. Only this time, he's never fought, and is only finally dispatched with poison.
- The Dog Was the Mastermind: Finding all ten Hidden Letters reveals that it wasn't the doctor who brought all of Galant Coy's alchemical artifacts into the prison and started the plague that killed everyone - it was Moll, the party's team healer. And she did it all on purpose.
- Driven to Suicide: The Warden, driven to despair that he failed in his duty to watch over the prisoners, and utterly out of his mind, blows up his office.
- Happy Ending Override: At the end of the first Black Home, in the good ending at least, Lecia saves her husband and they go home to raise their prospective son together, leaving the cursed monastery behind forever. In Black Home 2, we learn that simply being in the monastery corrupted their unborn child, who grew up to be a creepy and morose alchemist who would kill his own mother and trap her soul inside his Diadem, then come back decades later as an insane ghost bent on spreading chaos.
- He Knows Too Much: Dunn. He was hired by the Warden to find Galant Coy's notes, but when he figured out what they could do, he hid them, and the Warden had him thrown into a pit beneath the prison until he spilled the beans. It was all for nothing, as the notes were eventually found and brought to the prison anyway.
- This is also why Dunn chooses to kill himself in the Golden Ending. If he's the only one who knows where the Diadem is, and he's too dead to tell anyone, then the world will finally be safe from it's influence.
- Hellhole Prison: Even without the supernatural elements and the staff and inmated going utterly insane, Grabstein Prison is hardly a warm and welcoming place. The Warden is corrupt, the doctor is amoral, and there's an oubliette at the bottom where random prisoners are tossed, and the only way out is freaking teleportation!
- Heroic Sacrifice: In the Golden Ending, Dunn realizes that both he and the Diadem are too dangerous to exist, so he tricks the true mastermind into following him into a rigged cave, then blows it all to hell, destroying himself, the Diadem, and the mastermind.
- Hospital Hottie: All of the nurses are quite attractive, at least until the plague hits and they start to go mad.
- Locked in the Dungeon: It might seem redundant, but master burglar Dunn is not only in an utter hellhole like Grabstein Prison, but he's even tossed into a random cave underneath the actual prison, just so he super-can't escape.
- MacGyvering: You can cobble together grappling hooks from rope and candle braziers, and somehow it works. You can also make lethal poison from cave mushrooms and a waterskin.
- Meaningful Name: Grabstein Prison. Or translated from the German, Gravestone Prison.
- Multiple Endings: Like the first game, there are multiple endings based on the choices you make at the end.
- The Worst Ending - Destroy the Diadem. This results in the prison shaking apart and killing the part, except for Enigma, who is sort of dead to begin with.
- The Sad Ending - Abandon the Diadem. Just leave it and the prison behind, and Enigma will stand guard over it for decades, going so far as to even kill trespassers in rather twisted and bloody ways.
- The Normal Ending - Take the Diadem. With Enigma's permission, Roman puts the Diadem into government storage, where it will never again see the light of day.
- The Good Ending - Hide the Diadem. Dunn will take the Diadem and hide it in a cave so far from civilization, nobody will ever find it.
- The Golden Ending - Only reached if all the Hidden Letters are found, and the option to hide the Diadem is taken. This time, Dunn will hide the Diadem in a cave, only this time he's rigged it to explode, taking both himself and the true mastermind of the plague with it.
- Non-Standard Game Over: A truly hilarious one. If you drink from the wineskin after you've poisoned it, you'll get a long speech calling you out for itWell that was stupid. You just drank from the wineskin. You know, the poisoned wineskin. The wineskin with poison in it? Yeah, that one. You drank it. Why would you even do that, it's clearly labelled, "poison?" You poisoned it! What made you think drinking it was a smart idea? Well I hope you saved recently, 'cause this is what they call a 'non-standard game over.'Maybe next time, we resist the urge to suck down the toxic goo you made to poison the giant monster, what do you say? Sound good?
- The Nothing After Death: We know that there is an afterlife in the Black Homeiverse, it's called the Bright Place, and at the end of the first game, both Lesnar (in the bad ending) and Aelysia go there. However, Lecia doesn't; instead her soul gets trapped in a Diadem by her own son, and she experiences a timeless void until she's released again centuries later.
- Offing the Offspring: What Enigma does to Galant at the end.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: Only Galant is actually a ghost. Enigma is merely the memories of Lecia Coy, given life and stored inside the Diadem.
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Running the Asylum: In a roundabout way. The actual inmates never take over the prison, but rather the people who do run the prison join the inmates in utter madness. - Sanity Slippage: A staple for a horror game. We never see the prisoners before they go mad, and we barely spend any time with the staff, but what we do see suggests that they were at least friendly with one another.
- The Hidden Letters reveal that Moll struggled to make sense of her mother's murder, slowly becoming darker and more morose as time passed, until she became obsessed with punishing cirminals, and eventually until she arranged for the Diadem to be brought to the prison.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Galant Coy's ghost, trapped inside the Diadem for decades.
- Sealed Good in a Can: Enigma, the memories of Lecia Coy, also trapped in the Diadem.
- Shirtless Captives: None of the prisoners wear shirts. Even Dunn goes topless, until he can find his "leathers" again.
- Shout-Out: The ending where Roman turns the Diadem over to the government has one to Raiders of the Lost Ark.Roman: So, what are we doing with the Diadem, if we can't destroy it?Major D'Ivoire: Standard hazardous object protocol. We have our top men looking into it.Roman: What? Who?Major D'Ivoire: Our TOP men.
- The Abandon Ending is one to slasher/horror/ghost movies like The Ring, where unwary trespassers are picked off one by one by a vengeful spirit. In this case, Enigma.
- Suicide Attack: When the party corners Nurse Joy in the Crawlspace, she's so broken she tries to kill them all with a blasting cap. Only Roman's quick thinking saves them, but Joy isn't so lucky.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Roman and Dunn make no secret their dislike for each other, being a prison guard and a prisoner respectively.
- Theme Naming: The Nurses, Charity, Harmony, Truth, and Joy.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: As with the first game, the events of this one can all be traced back to one lone serving girl stealing a bauble used by a demonic cult and hiding it. If Aelysia hadn't done that, neither the events at the monastery nor the prison would have happened.
- Wardens Are Evil: Or at least corrupt. And then murderously insane.
- Vigilante Man: Moll's motive for spreading the plague throughout the prison. Her mother was murdered by a mugger, and so she decided that all criminals had to die.
