![]() The best parts of each stage are the puzzle elements. It just makes it serviceable, and in a market with great platformers like Crash 4 and Super Mario Odyssey, I’m looking for a lot more than serviceable. That doesn’t really make platforming feel any better. Since you can’t really judge your distance well you’ll always be using your double-jump to reposition yourself before you land. In fact, the double jump is really used as a crutch here. His jump feels loose and his double jump just doesn’t feel like it traverses enough distance. Raz moves too slow, even when using his levitation ability to speed along on a thought bubble. It’s just traversing them is supposed to be fun and, to be honest, it isn’t. Once again, the levels themselves are genius. Unfortunately, the platforming also doesn’t get high scores. Plus, it’s hard to judge your melee attack’s range and equally hard to tell when you are making contact with an enemy, making it all feel kind of lose and chaotic. The fact that most of these encounters are staged horde battles, where you have to defeat wave after wave of enemies in a locked room, and not organic encounters with enemies strewn about a level naturally, only makes it worse. The spamming attack will get you through every normal encounter, making them feel more like time-wasting roadblocks than an integral part of the game. Sure, you can jump, dodge, and use a bunch of different psychic abilities, but there’s no need. Nearly every enemy in the game can be handled this way with the exception of bosses and the “bad mood” which requires the use of your clairvoyance ability. All you do is mash the attack button… that’s it. The enemy design, much like the character design, is brilliant.īut actually fighting them is really dry. From censors trying to stamp out bad thoughts, regrets trying to literally weigh you down by dropping weights on you doubts holding you back by getting you stuck in puddles of goo, terrifying panic attacks that move too fast and overwhelm you, and much more. Action scenesĪs before, you’ll have to combat all manner of psychic manifestations in the mindscapes you travel. Why? Because the two worst parts of the game are the action and the platforming. While I might call Psychonauts 2 a good game, I would call it a fairly bad action-platformer. Yes, even after 16 years, Double Fine couldn’t quite seem to shake the jank off. Surely many of these developers were inspired by the original Psychonauts.īut more importantly, the prevalence of similar games in the indie-sphere has also made me less charitable to Psychonauts 2’s flaws. It’s not as unique as it once was, which admittedly is its own fault. Indie developers love delving into the psyche, grappling with mental illness, focusing on comedy, and creating bizarre non-Euclidian mindscape levels all the things that the original was known for. It did not ignite the same sparks of wonder that the original did, because times have changed. I binged it in a little over a day, which is certainly enough to call it a quality game. Its cast of characters was as delightfully bizarre as ever. Its stage design was incredibly creative. The Psychonauts fan base, including myself, was delighted to see them apply all their design experience to a new, modern-day iteration of the franchise.Īnd yet, now that it’s all over I can say I’m of two minds about Psychonauts 2. Double Fine is a much bigger studio now, having worked with celebrities like Jack Black, launching several successful crowdfunding campaigns, and while they still solidly land in the increasingly small circle that is AA development, they are big enough to have made some of the more memorable quirky titles of gaming history. Lots of people have a lot invested in this game, literally since it partially raised funds for development via Kickstarter. It’s been 16 years since then and its sequel, Psychonauts 2, has finally been released. We were willing to put up with just about anything to hear the next joke and explore the next mental world. It’s just that we didn’t care about the flaws. There were even platforming segments that were positively rage-inducing, including the final Meat Circus. Its psychic powers were clunky to switch between. While we might look back on Psychonauts with rose-colored glasses these days, it’s easy to forget that it had a lot of jank. There was nothing quite like it at the time.īut it wasn’t perfect. It puts you in the shoes of a psychic circus performer, Raz, and exploring the inner psyches of a delightful cast of cartoony characters. It blew our minds at the time, combining Double Fine’s quirky comedic writing, a bizarre, exaggerated, and somewhat grotesque animation style, and incredibly creative level design. Psychonauts, a brilliant little PS2-era game by Double Fine, is largely regarded as one of the last great platformers of its generation. ![]()
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