Psychonauts 2 Review

Nearly 16 years have passed since the first Psychonaut game, but not much time has passed between the protagonists Razputin (Raz) and Aquato. After his exploits in the first game, Raz begins as a psychic spy on the lower rungs of Psychonaut headquarters, as he is still a child.

The player controls Raz, a certified psychonaut with strong mental abilities, while penetrating the minds of others. The player can use Psi powers such as telekinesis, pyrokine ice, levitation and a combination of common platform game elements to explore the spiritual worlds of multiple non-player characters. A segment that is essentially identical to the E3 2019 preview teaches the skills Raz learned at the end of the original Psychonauts, juggling with a mix of typical platform fare (double jump, laser and mind) and looking at other races from perspective, grabbing and hurling objects using TeleKinesis.

Rhombus in Ruins is a publisher-funded virtual reality game for PlayStation VR, a small stand-alone chapter that serves as a bridge between the original game and Psychonauts 2, in which Raz and the other psychonauts rescue Truman Zanotto and build on the conclusion of the first game. Tim Schaefer, CEO of Double Fine and the game's chief creative officer, expressed interest in working on the Psychonaut franchise, with the company imagining a larger plot arc for the characters as it develops. He said the idea was to introduce the game as such, and that the Raz family and how their story and curse continue to affect them would be explored in the game.

Psychonauts 2 dispenses with Razs mental development and instead focuses on the life of Ford Cruller, a character who appeared in the first game and was born in a fascinating manner. For the sake of spoilers, I won't dwell on Ford's involvement, but the satisfying (and shocking) benefit of this is that Ford's world is introduced to Raz without fear, in the best possible way for a gaming experience.

Speaking of space, part of the magic of Psychonauts 2 is that it finds enough of it to let you decompress between precision battles and literal manifestations of inner demons, doubt, remorse, and panic attacks that are more than willing to suppress Razs psionary abilities. Just as puzzling as the physical impulse behind Raza's evolving psychic abilities is the number of lunatics one can talk to, take down their dialogue trees for the last laugh, and paint a world as vibrant and vibrant as Rubacava on Melee Island.

Psychonauts 2 is an unlikely sequel to a 16-year-old game that went straight into people's minds and rummaged through their intellectual baggage, but it is a throwback to a time when games were all about running, jumping, and collecting in a comic-like world and developers were trying to find a way to make it feel fresh and exciting again. I understand it, in the original psychonaut I found Razs jumps sometimes a bit difficult, but with elbow room to grab groins and move, the dangers are much more forgivable. Exploring the world is facilitated by the fact that most Razs forces return from the first game, such as pyrokinesis and psi explosions, but are enhanced by new features and upgrades that can be obtained.

Psychonauts was one of my favorite games of the 2000s taking on the dwindling 3D platform genre and turning it into a creative and varied adventure full of bizarre characters and their bizarre mentalities. Psychonauts 2 combines quirky missions with mysterious conspiracies and is a platform adventure game with a cinematic style and tons of customizable psychic powers. The sequel brings together battle, thought worlds and platforms with more narratives and explores themes that revolve around who we are, what we hide from each other, and how the past finally catches up with us.

A charming animated retrospective at the beginning of each new adventure delivers in an entertaining way the important information needed to shape the short VR-exclusive sequel as a story in its own right, more than exploring Razs family history and that of the Psychonauts as a whole, beyond the specific events of the psychic summer camp Whisper Rocks. Psychonaut 2 is an improbable sequel to a 16-year-old game that penetrates people's minds and rummages through their mental baggage without triggering anything - it is not just a nuanced depiction of the complexity of the real mental health committed to the code - but its themes and metaphors are never quite as simple as one would expect. With sophisticated controls and a lack of hostile diversity, the sequel shows that it builds on and improves the original game.

In spite of Raz and his family, they're among the best characters I've seen in a game in a long time. The fact that Raz left the Aquato family to join the psychonauts is not so much addressed in the first game, but you get to know them and get a sense of what happened.

When the original Psychonaut fans turned up in early 2016 with $3.8 million in crowdfunding buzz, they were convinced that Double Fine would deliver another adventure with tiny heroes Razputin, Raz and Aquato and their gang of mind-driven secret agents.