Yendorian Tales: A Map of the World

To be fair, it's not really the entire island. I almost always hate the second entry of any game that I blog about. It exhausts me just thinking about it. More than once during the past week, I launched Yendorian Tales and just sat there, looking at the screen, feeling the energy drain from me. The first entry practically writes itself, as I cover the history, the manual, the opening cinematic, character creation, and first impressions. By the third, I've achieved a certain momentum, and I generally understand the game by then (although there have been some notable exceptions, like the recent Star Trail, where it took me until at least the fifth entry to hit any kind of stride). For the second entry, though, there's nothing to do but to play an unfamiliar, alien title and try to make sense of it. I've learned to watch for the turning point, and for Yendorian Tales, it came at about the four-hour mark, when I was exploring the Athaneum (I'll sic it this once so no one posts a…