Only Up! Parkour 2 is an extreme sports platformer from the Only Up! series that features anime-style animation. As with the first installment, the boy wears casual street clothes, a red ball cap, a backpack and glasses. The player directs him to use parkour moves and other actions to ascend objects as high as he can into the sky.
The game begins in a seaside community. Although multiple starting points exist throughout the neighborhood, the game prompts the player to direct the boy to use a bed positioned at the base of two stacked, red, metal shipping containers like a spring platform to jump.
From there, the player directs the boy to use whatever objects are available to go "only up." Common objects include wooden pallets, roofs, chimneys, carnival tents, railroad ties, sand boxes, tables, pieces of siding, building wall frames, wood crates and even flying saucers. If the boy falls back to the ground, the player can use other objects to start the ascent, including a green hedgerow, a fallen telephone pole as a ramp to a roof, and a blue shipping container.
Only Up! Parkour 2 uses deception mechanics to make gameplay more difficult. For example, the anime art style makes it hard to gauge the true positions of objects. As a result, the player might direct the boy to jump toward the center of a floating object, but instead, he falls off an edge and down to a roof or the ground.
