"Not Tonight 2" has one of the bleakest opening scenes in video game history. A crowd of black and brown 20-somethings are protesting in front of a Seattle bar when a masked police car appears and a modern-day American Gestapo throws one of them into the back of a van. Your friends are imprisoned in a Miami "gulag," and you and your friends set out on a rescue mission.

From there, I expected "Not Tonight 2" to take a dangerous journey across a violent, white nationalist landscape. Instead, the first stop was North Dakota, where the eternal Renaissance Faire resides in the shadow of Mount Rushmore. (The president was replaced by a wizard.) Tensions were instantly released. While "Not Tonight 2" draws heavily from political currents, it is more a colorful and crude pastiche than a transcendental satire.

Like the first film in the series, Not Tonight 2 borrows almost entirely mechanical features from Lucas Pope's 2013 classic, Papers, Please. You are a bouncer, and the only way to earn enough gas money to make it to Miami in time is to work in every club left in this battered country. In terms of gameplay, that means you pull into a depraved part of America, find a gig, check your ID for change, then pull into the next station and move on to the next chapter of your linear story.

Bureaucratic duties are supposed to feel like a drag, but "Not Tonight 2" offers enough variation to keep you from being completely consumed by boredom. At first, you're just making sure customers are over 21 and don't have an expired driver's license, but before long you're scanning biometrics, confiscating contraband, and kicking anti-mask people out of line. At one memorable pit stop, I had to check my "musical ticket" and was asked to pass a simple rhythm game while making sure all other paperwork was in order. Elsewhere, we had to check for viruses (read covid) before passing a potential patient through the velvet rope. Frankly, in 2022, when all bartenders will be forced to line up vaccination cards and photo IDs, perhaps "Not Tonight 2" will evoke sympathy for the daunting chore of authentication. The release could not have come at a better time.

The highlight of "Not Tonight 2" is its vivid portrayal of the United States after multiple chains of crises. The South has seceded again and the border has been split in two. Climate change has submerged New York City. Some unnamed pandemic has spiraled out of control, and much of the Midwest is in a constant state of pestilence. (Also, the air is unbreathable in Los Angeles, but that's no surprise.) There isn't much to explore inside these cities, as the characters are basically just standing in front of a static panorama with a clipboard, but the images themselves are gorgeously rendered. Not Tonight 2 uses modern processing power to capture the vintage pixel art of the SCUMM era, evoking the lush landscapes found in the "Monkey Island" series. In San Antonio, for example, there was a rodeo with a red-eyed monolithic cowboy towering in the background, a sinister version of the famous Big Tex. America may be on the verge of a downfall, but the developers of Panic Barn enjoyed portraying the decline.

What can be said from the above is that Not Tonight 2 is not a particularly sensitive video game. A trip out to the southern border revealed that Trump did indeed build a wall, but ironically, these days it is used more to keep Americans inside than to keep foreigners out. Neoliberal big business billionaires promised me bailouts in Raleigh. At one point I found myself in a chicken slaughterhouse... There I used the same bouncer-like apparatus to decide which chickens to send to slaughter. I think there are moments in "Panic Burn" that are genuinely caught in poignant commentary, but the overall mood is so silly and relies so heavily on uncommon clichés that the tone seems a bit unfocused, a composite of gray, shapeless takes on Twitter. In other words, the fire in this story is very familiar. We live in a country where innocent people are being conspicuously detained for questions about their heritage. Perhaps I just want that to be treated with a little more gravity and a little more anger.

This shift in focus carries over into the more incidental design choices of "Not Tonight 2": when you're not checking your ID, you're staring at a map book, moving from town to town, managing your strength and morale meters. When either reaches zero, a game over screen appears. The problem is that the way these pools are fed is mostly random. At the end of each chapter, there are a few vague, secret goals to replenish your strength, and over time, you can reliably achieve them. More frustrating, however, is that much of the plot of "Not Tonight 2" is told through a series of selective adventure text boxes, which are full of early "King's Quest"-style punitive bullshit that abruptly terminates the run Sometimes, the wrong dialog is selected. If you choose the wrong dialog, burn, your stamina is reduced by 10. All I can say is that I was unlucky. At one point I was forced to reload an earlier save and replay the entire chapter. This is the kind of development philosophy I thought I had abandoned in 1992, right around the time "Zork" made the jump to 3D.

I generally enjoyed my time visiting the fallen America of "Not Tonight 2," and I even developed a fondness for the heuristics of scrutinizing documents and awakening the dour DMV fantasy in me. But again, it's a game of checking papers, and that's all you do over the course of eight hours. I enjoyed "Papers, Please," but I think that's because of the game's hermetically sealed aesthetic. You're a border agent between two heavily populated, newly independent countries in the Eastern Bloc, whose brutally monotonous existence has you pummeled into a pumpernickel by the time you see the credits. In Not Tonight 2, I wasn't convinced that the bouncer had the best perspective for exploring this fascinating world. Handing out tickets was fun, but I wanted to see the party with my own eyes.