This is one of those cases where I'd post a "mixed" review if I could. Dread Weight isn't a terrible game. I don't even know if I'd necessarily call it a bad game. It is simply exceedingly "meh", failing to learn the right lessons from its predecessor and, ironically, lacking the emotional weight it would have needed to succeed. In many ways, it feels like a visual novel that really wishes it were a 1st person survival horror game instead.
So, let's be specific: Given that I did like the previous game, what's different about this one?
Cooking Companions followed a simple formula: You get to know and care about a (largely) close-knit cast of characters in a relaxed setting, tension begins to build, you watch them suffer and change. It's basic, but effective. Dread Weight, in attempting to get to the scares faster, pretty much skips the first phase, which significantly reduces the effectiveness of the later ones. And what's worse, the characters don't really care about each other either. In the whole game, there is exactly one character who gets sad about exactly one other character's death, and we don't even get to see all that much of it. Actually, we don't get to see much of what the characters go through in general. A significant part of what little even happens in the plot happens off screen and we mostly just end up with the protagonist looking for various items in the dark, alone, in service of ultimately pointless quests while occasionally being told about what happened to the other characters in brief one-on-one conversations. Those three factors - lack of downtime, lack of emotional connection, and the prevalence of telling over showing - combined to leave me utterly unimpressed with any of the supposed tragedies the story revolves around.
So what about the scares these sacrifices were made for, then, are those any good at least? I'd say that Dread Weight is scarier than Cooking Companions, but still not that scary overall, and still very heavily reliant on basic jumpscares. The little animations for the ghosts are fun, I just ultimately found them more annoying than frightening. They were fancy little timers to keep you from spending too much time thinking or reading lore. And once again, there's so little "normal" built up at the start of the game that there can be no perversion of normalcy either.
Had this been a first person survival horror, it would have been fine, a focus on finding items and retroactively learning things through logs is normal in that genre, but a horror visual novel primarily relies on its writing to be scary and Dread Weight's extremely basic plot, loose structure, and cast of calm intellectuals and solitary badasses do not serve it well in that regard. Despite its best efforts, it's still more "mildly spooky" than it is "scary".
Ultimately, it's not like Dread Weight has nothing to offer - on their own, all the characters are decently interesting, and since I own it anyway, I will still be getting all the endings to see the probably pretty decent lore. But there are games on this platform, including horror visual novels, that have greater heights to offer than "pretty decent", that can genuinely make you sad or frighten you, that have things to say, or innovative gameplay that complements their story, or even just tell a fun, spooky, complete little story rather than just leaving you with a sense of "well, I guess I didn't hate it. But I also won't remember any of it in a couple months." Including the first game in this very series. I think it's better spend your money on those instead.
