I turned the corner on Psychonauts 2 at the point where the hub area opens up and lets you explore the grounds around Psychonauts headquarters. Up until then I thought it was a decent follow up to the first game with better gameplay but less compelling story and characters. From that point, about a quarter into the game, to the end, I became convinced that it’s a masterpiece.
Psychonauts 2 is technically the second sequel to 2005’s Psychonauts. Rhombus of Ruin was released in 2017 and it contains a chunk of narrative that the second game recaps (along with the first game’s story) at its beginning. This is a good decision, since few people played Rhombus of Ruin and even those who played the original Psychonauts might have done so as many as 16 years earlier. Some of the second platformer's playerbase wasn’t even born when the first game came out, though it has been commercially available in some form since release and is currently for sale on three of the major platforms.
Like the first Psychonauts, and unlike Rhombus, Psychonauts 2 is a 3D platformer. You play Razputin, a 10-year-old psychic who only a few days ago intruded into Whispering Woods summer camp and unraveled a conspiracy to steal the campers’ brains. After that adventure, and being the most important member of the team who recovered the kidnapped leader of the Psychonauts, Razputin finds himself taken to Psychonauts headquarters where for all his valorous deeds and enormous powers he is given the much coveted title of…Intern. You see at the end of the first game Raz was given the title of full fledged Psychonaut by the founder of the organization, Ford Cruller, who had taken up residence at the camp doing a number of odd jobs through the psychic projections of his shattered mind. Hollis Forsythe, the second head of the Psychonauts and acting leader, informs Raz that Ford doesn’t actually have the authority to induct new agents, but agrees to let him into the intern program after Sasha and Milla vouch for him. Raz is allowed restricted access to the Motherlobe, the Psychonauts home base. There he intermingles with various agents of the Psychonauts and his fellow Interns, who are all teens and are not thrilled to have a ten year old boy join their ranks.
This introduction comes off as a bit dry. The Motherlobe is a corporate campus rather than a summer camp and the agents there are mostly rather normal adults who talk about boring stuff like overtime and not liking kids. The interns are more colorful, literally and figuratively, than the adults, but not quite as out there as the camp kids Raz’s age. Unlike at camp where Raz had both friends and enemies, these interns are various levels of hostile towards him. There’s just not the sense of joy and adventure in the beginning of the game. It doesn’t help that after an introductory level in Dr. Loboto’s gross dentistry themed mind the next major level takes place in Hollis Forsythe’s, where Raz uses one of his new abilities to convince her to take more risks so Raz will let him go on a mission she has deemed too dangerous for the interns. It’s not that this level is bad it’s just that it’s kind of subdued. One of the major changes from Psychonauts 1 to Psychonauts 2 is that while in the first game the levels were mostly based on the wacky characters and only sometimes had deeper themes to them, in the second game they are much more grounded in the characters’ psychology and have a lot more symbolic depth. Forsythe’s sense of responsibility and anxiety about balancing all the demands made on her is well represented, and clearly acts as a stand-in for the anxieties and responsibilities that writer and studio head Tim Schaefer had when trying to make this huge budget game in what was then an independent studio. This is interesting and textured, but it’s also much subtler and less funny than the levels from the first game. In fact the game in general is less funny than the first game. Oh there's lots of humor in the game, which is definitely a comedy, and I chuckled, but nothing comes close to the outright hilarity of something like The Milkman Conspiracy, and there’s nothing as wacky and silly as Mr. Pokeylope, the flirtatious sentient turtle.
What you get instead is a much more intricate and personal plot. As the game’s story unfurls Raz learns more about the Psychonauts, the founders of the organization, and even his own personal history. I don’t want to go into specifics, but there’s a lot here, both in terms of characters’ history and development and lore around the world Psychonauts is set in. Psychonauts 2 is one of the best written games ever made, and easily the best written platformer of any kind, and while its story is somewhat predictable and has a few holes in it (especially around the timeline, which doesn’t make any sense if you try and puzzle it out) the character development is really something special. By the end of the game I cared about almost every major character in it, both new and returning, and even better the vast majority of them are decent people rather than cartoonish villains or clueless authority figures. Psychonauts explores a number of deep and important themes, such as the possibility of redemption for even the most heinous monsters, and the fact that nobody ever accomplishes anything important completely on their own; we all need help and interconnection to make an impact. Unlike most powerful kids in video games Raz isn’t dealing with clueless or outright malicious adults, but rather is helped and supported along his way by almost everyone he meets, and it's this theme of the importance of togetherness and mutual support that I think shines through the strongest. Video games are massive collaborative efforts but single player games are mostly about lone superheroes fixing everything themselves. Psychonauts explicitly isn't. The fact that the game communicates its themes so well while also having a strong plot with important stakes and a sense of player agency makes this all the more impressive. The sacrifice of comedy for symbolism and depth is completely justified here. I won’t say that I didn’t miss The Milkman Conspiracy or Lungfishopolis, but I do understand why they couldn’t co-exist with the game that Schaefer and his team were making. Psychonauts 2 has too much to say to really revel in nonsense, even though it definitely dips its toes into that water from time to time. It's a funny and lighthearted game with serious messages.
But most people don’t play video games for the messages, and most of your time in Psychonauts 2 is spent in platforming and combat rather than dialog, though it is a very, very, talky game for a platformer. The action here is a marked improvement from the first game and everything from the controls to the camera feel up to snuff with modern games in the genre. Raz has a nice suite of powers, ranging from psi-blasts to pyrokinesis and telekinesis, and they all have their uses for both combat and puzzle solving in the environments. While the platforming is smoother and more fluid than in the first game the greatest improvement is clearly in combat, where powers that were once situational and clunky are now much more integrated into the flow of things. In the first game pyrokinesis forced you to stand still while a meter built making it very situational, while in this game you instead grow an AOE bubble by holding down whatever button you have it assigned to meaning you can continue to run around and do other things while it primes. The game has ditched certain powers like shield and invisibility for some new ones like Mental Connection and Mental Projection, and on the whole it’s a much more active mix. Mental connection acts sort of like a hook shot, allowing you to grapple to certain floating “stray thoughts” or grab enemies and pull them to you, and Mental Projection summons a 2D paper Raz that draws enemy fire and can slip through thin gaps to open up new areas.
The biggest improvement in Psychonauts 2 is clearly in the combat. It’s not just the changes to the powers, but instead primarily the much greater variety of enemies the game offers. The first game really only had the basic censors and some tougher variants along with some exploding dog creatures, whole Psychonauts 2 has nearly a dozen different enemy types outside of bosses, each with their own behaviors and specific weaknesses. Some enemies carry things that you can rip away and throw back at them through telekinesis. Some are weak to fire. There are even bad moods that are invincible until you look through their eyes with clairvoyance to find their cause and destroy that, and enablers that shield other enemies while shouting vapid cheerleading slogans and need to be destroyed so you can get at the baddies they’re protecting. I wouldn’t say combat in Psychonauts 2 is great; it often gets a bit tedious and overly hectic, but it’s very good for a platformer and much deeper than that found in the first game. The bosses have been improved even more and while I don't think they're all time greats they're fantastically creative in appearance and mostly pretty enjoyable to fight.
The platforming is also better, but the gap is not as large. Psychonauts 1 had pretty good platforming and Psychonauts 2 also has good platforming. There have been some tweaks to improve things. Levitation has been nerfed, which is probably for the best considering how level breaking it often was, and Raz can now wall jump. Everything feels better and more responsive, but it’s not going to challenge the Mario games for the sheer number of moves or creativity. Psychonauts 2 is a solid 3D platformer but its platforming is the least exceptional part of it. It doesn’t ask all that much from the player in terms of platforming skills and the levels tend to be relatively bland and straightforward in design up until the end. It’s not boring or dull, it’s fun if you enjoy 3D platformers, but it doesn’t feel like you’re given a set of tools and set loose in a freeform playground, it’s much more grounded and full of defined challenges and right ways to do things.
Part of that is because of the level design. I mentioned before that comedically Psychonauts 2 can’t reach the high water marks of Psychonauts 1, and when it comes to creative level design that’s even more true. Psychonauts 1 had some of the most creative 3D platformer levels ever made, including levels that played out like an adventure game and others that were kaiju themed with you as the monster or played out like a giant board game where you maneuvered pieces into place to defeat Napoleon. Psychonauts 2 has one big set piece level that’s themed after a cooking show, and it’s probably the gameplay highlight of the game. Other than that, though, you just get a bunch of platforming levels. There are a few that change things up, like one where you ride a series of giant bowling balls, spinning them with your feet, but otherwise these levels feel like they could come from any good 3D platform game. It’s not bad or even basic design (there are definitely gameplay variations) but it’s also not head and shoulders above the competition like some of the levels of the first game were. Fortunately there's nothing like Meat Circus here, so it's not all downside.
Where the levels do shine is in their aesthetics. Every single world in this game is fantastically realized around the emotional themes that underlie it. Each feels personal and special and important. I don’t think any other game I’ve played has a visual design as wildly varied and yet utterly cohesive as Psychonauts 2. From a level in a demented dentist’s brain where the platforms are teeth and gums, to a dip into a psychedelic mind complete with drug references and trippy visuals with a unique color palette, the game’s worlds are all given different themes and they’re all wonderful, but they all also look like Psychonauts 2. From the character and world designs to the peppy, catchy, music, Psychonauts 2 is a game that demands to be played for its unbridled aesthetic creativity alone, even though that’s far from the only thing it brings to the table.
Psychonauts 2 is not a perfect game. It is big and messy and unkempt. It has a ton of story to chew through, a huge number of varied locations and collectables in them, and a lot of mechanics and powers, some of which are better implemented than others (I’m looking at you, psychic projection). But the messiness also ties into its complicated themes. Every person is complex and contains multitudes. Every story has more than one side. Psychonauts 2 fleshes these ideas out better than pretty much any video game that has come before, and it’s also funny and fun to play. It’s reductive to call this a 3D platformer because most 3D platformers don’t even attempt half of what Psychonauts 2 does. Even the organic and grounded structure of its real world locations, which have lots of good platforming in them but also feel like real, logically constructed, places, is rare for the genre. It’s paced totally differently than any platformer I’ve played; more like a big budget action adventure game like Uncharted than a contemporary of something like Mario Odyssey. It evolves what a 3D platformer can be and the stories it can tell without sacrificing gameplay.
I’m a recent sojourner to the Psychonauts universe, having played the first game less than a month ago, but this game cemented it as one of my favorites in all of gaming. It’s the best game I’ve played this year and one of my favorites in recent memory. It’s also something so bursting with creativity that it reminded me of why I love the medium and have devoted so much time to video games. Psychonauts 2 is a masterpiece and I just hope that Tim Schaefer has a couple more games of this caliber left in him before he retires, because nobody else but Tim and his hand-picked team could have made this game and I want to play more games like it.
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