That Psychonauts 2 exists whatsoever is a weird little miracle. We're referring to a sequel to some 16-year-old platformer that was, upon release, a monumental flop. The original publisher, Microsoft, dropped the sport before it even launched. The new publisher, Majesco, lost millions thanks to dismal sales numbers, prompting the immediate resignation of their CEO and a rethink of their entire business plan.
But Psychonauts was good-great, even-and after developer Double Fine Productions reacquired the rights, strong word of mouth and sales on new platforms reminted the game as a cult classic. This latter-day buzz sparked an admirer campaign for any sequel, which led to a crowdfunding campaign, which resulted in a publishing deal with Starbreeze, a business that nosedived into its own (unrelated) financial troubles shortly thereafter. Eventually Microsoft reentered the storyline, acquired Double Fine and the publishing rights, and finally, at long last, here i am.
All this is to say, you'd expect Psychonauts 2 to hold lots of baggage. What's so remarkable is it doesn't. (Well, aside from the type you collect.) Apart from the modern gameplay refinements and improved graphics, this feels exactly like the sequel Double Fine might've made in the late '00s, in certain alternate universe where Psychonauts became an immediate hit. I'd believe you if you said writer-director Tim Schafer had the script for this game relaxing in his desk for more than a decade, for all the smart, cohesive connection between the two games. Threads introduced in Psychonauts unravel to great effect here, breadcrumbs resulting in mysteries resulting in satisfying answers. It's as though those years in between, and also the drama that filled them, never actually happened.
In fact, as far as the narrative is worried, virtually no time has passed. The storyline picks up in the immediate aftermath from the 2023 VR spin-off Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin, which in turn picked up soon after the first Psychonauts. (If you skipped either game, don't fret: There's an intro video which will catch you up to date on everything important.)
Razputin, our preteen hero, has foiled a plot for world domination at the Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp by understanding how to hone his abilities and infiltrate the mental worlds of friend and foe alike. He's been offered membership in the Psychonauts-a spy-ish agency tasked with defusing psychic threats and exploring the frontiers from the human mind-and whisked away on a mission to rescue the organization's Grand Head (and his pyromaniac maybe-girlfriend's father), Truman Zanotto. Now, as the game kicks off, Raz is arriving back at Psychonauts HQ for the first time, only to find out that his membership is really more like an internship.
Soon, Raz is obsessed with a brand new mystery. Who was behind the plot to kidnap Truman? What is the mole inside the Psychonauts? And just how does Maligula, a powerful hydrokinetic psychic killed years back inside a struggle with the initial founders from the Psychonauts, factor into all this? The storyline that unfolds during the period of the following few dozen hours-this is a bigger game than the first in every sense-has all of the charm, wit, and quirk from the original. More to the point, her same heart.
Schafer and returning co-writer Erik Wolpaw have crafted a story that never loses tabs on its character relationships behind big plot beats. Even at its weirdest, the stakes are personal and grounded within an abiding sense of humanity. The humor sprinkled throughout is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but it's always charming, by having an underlying component of truth. Looking back, the very first Psychonauts clearly deserves credit as an early pioneer of media that's accessible to kids while presenting a far more mature, clear-eyed, and sincere look at the world. (Think Adventure Time.) That approach continues within fine form. Nobody Raz meets is irredeemable, neither is anyone pure good. At the end of your day, we are all just stuck within our own heads, trying to get by in the world outside.
If, for you, the main attraction of Psychonauts 2 is spending more time with these characters in their zany world, you won't be disappointed. If you're for gameplay, though, the reply is a little more complicated.
As in the first game, you'll split your time and effort between two main activities: platforming (with a fair bit of exploration and collectible hunting thrown in), and combat. The first half of that equation is definitely an absolute delight. Platforming and also the light puzzle solving that accompany it sport that polish that feels entirely modern, but the emphasis on collecting dozens to hundreds of items in each mental world is pure throwback. If you love, when i do, the chill factor of dipping right into a level and finding secrets hidden around just about every corner, you'll have a wonderful time here. (One potential downside, depending on your tastes, is that backtracking is required, not optional. Some merchandise is locked off until you get a new psychic power or level up a current one, so you won't get everything in one go.)
Better still, the problem of this side of the game is just about as perfectly balanced as you could hope for. Nothing here approaches the controller-smashing frustration from the Meat Circus in the end of the first game. Several collectibles are maddeningly well-hidden, however i could reach 100 % completion, totally unaided, which talks to the clarity of the level design language. The greater you play, the greater you increase your feeling of where something might be and how to think it is.
Combat, though? This is a different story. While it isn't outright bad, it never really rises over the level of “serviceable,” and that is a shame, given how often you find yourself in a fight. As in the first game, the enemy types are imaginative riffs on aspects of your brain: Censors that want to stamp you out of trouble of existence for intruding into someone else's mindscape; Judgment, that takes the form of an actual judge, complete with a big honking gavel; Doubts, which ooze out goop that slows you down. So that as within the first game, you've got a sizable arsenal of psychic powers-some returning, some brand new-with which to do battle.
In theory, this will permit you a lot of room to improvise and mix your tactics, but that's never truly the case. Some enemies are only weak, or primarily weak, to 1 kind of attack, which restricts your possibilities. You're also constantly butting facing each ability's cooldown timer. Aside from melee, which is the same simplistic combo repeated over and over again, you will never attack with one ability repeatedly and expect to do well. But, counterintuitively, you're simultaneously being asked to use specific abilities on specific enemies. As a result, the pacing is off, and each fight involves far too much holding out. It's not a total slog, not quite, but way too often I discovered myself wishing for combat to end and so i could get to the next cutscene or return to platforming, instead of actively enjoying myself in the moment.
An equal annoyance is that the control scheme only allows you to equip four of your powers at the same time. Whenever a fight begins, you'll usually have to pause to remap abilities to buttons to match the lineup of baddies. If your new enemy type turns up in a later wave, you may have to change your layout all over again. Since there aren't any defined slots, you may forget what attack is on which bumper or what trigger. A great combat system should become more and much more invisible the greater experience you acquire by using it, eventually dissolving into expressive gameplay. The combat in Psychonauts 2 is always visible-more , always demanding you look at it.
Boss fights, though not frequent, only serve to amplify these problems. The earlier boss bottles are much more constrained than standard combat in the best way to approach them, forcing you to definitely wait out attack patterns before you can do one specific thing to inflict damage. Later bosses tend to be more open-ended, but suffer from the same problems as fighting normal enemies.
I'll admit, you could level many of these complaints against the combat within the original Psychonauts, but this is an area in which the chronilogical age of the underlying design shows. Double Fine has been doing far less to enhance the core competency from the sequel here, opting instead to expand on top of an average base. Yes, your attacks gain levels more meaningfully with time, there are patches you can purchase and equip to enhance and tweak your abilities for deeper customization, but that is just more when the game needed better.
The most unnecessary frustration, though, may be that the game does eventually fully open its combat to you, however in the worst way I know. Should you reach max level, you can buy a perk that removes all your ability cooldowns. Trouble is, you can only get to max level by finishing literally every task hanging around. At that time, the only method to try out your spiffy new combat abilities is as simple as heading back to old levels to fight the enemies that spawn in. At that time, though, there aren’t any collectibles to find-you've already found them all-or whatever reason to be back in old levels at all. Absent future DLC that contributes in a New Game+ mode or perhaps a wave-based survival mode, it's just pointless.
If there's one other facet of Psychonauts 2 that seems like a bit of a letdown-and Personally i think just like a monster for even writing this-it's the game can't quite live up to the wild creativity of their predecessor. Maybe, following the better a part of two decades, this is the rose-tint of nostalgia speaking, however i have no idea if any of the mental worlds in Psychonauts 2 compare to the best ones within the original.
To be clear, they're all still wonderful and wacky variations on their own central themes, not only thematically however in the gameplay twists they employ. A hospital-casino where medical implements are gambling? Like it! A Little Prince -style microplanet dotted with islands you sail between on the door-raft? Amazing! A reality-TV-style cooking competition in which the food begs you to definitely chop and fry it? Disturbing! Good, though!
Still, I am not sure any of these concepts, endearingly bonkers though they're, will embed themselves in my brain the way in which some of the worlds within the original Psychonauts have. Nothing can match the sheer weirdness from the Milkman Conspiracy, a riff on mid-century suburbia filled with secret agents and delicious milk. There's no real equivalent to the bizarre fish-city kaiju fight. I'd even say I prefer the visual ambition of the black-velvet-painting-inspired level within the first game to the closest parallel in Psychonauts 2, a psychedelic world full of colors as well as Jack Black. There's a greater insightful content in the sequel, delivered with much greater consistency, however i think the peaks fall short of the initial at its best.
Is that unfair? Shall we be held applying an impossible standard by holding a memory as much as the present? Would Personally i think exactly the same basically hadn't been waiting more than a decade to play Psychonauts 2? I honestly do not have those answers.
The inherent curse of making a sequel, especially one so feverishly anticipated for so long, is that you've lost the component of surprise. You can't step into exactly the same river twice, and all sorts of that depressing Greek stuff. The very reason Psychonauts 2 may even come into being, after all this time, would be that the first game was so unexpected, so memorable, so different.
For 16 years, you can honestly say there was little else like Psychonauts. We've lost that now, but we've gained quite a great game in the process.
