Throughout your adventure, you encounter new enemies and variations on old enemies. Being able to quickly map powers to whatever buttons you prefer keeps you immersed in the action and does away with some of the first game’s unnecessary frustration.Īnd you won’t just be using those powers on the same old foes. So you just quickly swap out your powers nothing is locked away behind too many menus. But after that, you may want psi-blast back, to take out some tiny enemies spawning in waves. For example, you might need both the ability to slow time and the power to zip around thought bubbles to get through a gauntlet of spinning blades over pits of death. You can now freely map any four powers to the triggers and shoulder buttons, which is very useful for areas that rely on specific abilities. Both of these issues are resolved in Psychonauts 2, showing off how this sequel builds and improves on the 2005 original. Combat in the original game wasn’t much fun, thanks to some finicky control choices and a lack of enemy variety. Of course, one situation in which you often unleash those nifty abilities of yours is combat. All of these powers are useful too in their own ways and I often found myself changing powers out for different ones as I pushed forward on my psychic adventure. You also get some brand new abilities, including a power that lets you slow down time and one that creates a copy of Raz that can be used to solve puzzles or distract enemies. Luckily, exploring these worlds is made easier by the fact that most of Raz’s powers from the first game return, like pyrokinesis and psi blast, now enhanced with some new features and upgrades to obtain. How many games let you go to a trippy music festival, explore a huge, magical library and then let you visit a city filled with anthropomorphized germs? Not many, I’d suspect. And while the individual locations are wonderfully creative and fun to explore, the sheer variety of them is also remarkable, and makes for a memorable journey. This is the kind of game that makes you want to go back to past levels to get everything just for the pleasure of revisiting these places. All of them are larger than what was found in the first Psychonauts, featuring more collectibles and secrets to find. But just know that almost every world, barring one or two misfires, is incredibly gorgeous, creative, and fun. I don’t want to spoil too many other worlds, because their varied and memorable concepts are worth discovering for yourself. Oh, and all of this takes place inside the brain of someone who has been “dead” for decades. An early favourite is a psychedelic music festival that features a ‘60s era vibe, complete with washed-out cartoony visuals and far-out jams. In the sequel, Double Fine really goes wild, leveraging the more powerful consoles of today and a decade-plus of experience to craft some truly creative and amazing mental playgrounds. In the original game, these were some of the best - and worst - parts of the campaign. Like the first game, this sequel lets you and Raz dive into the minds of numerous individuals, each with their own unique mental landscape. Raz will have to help them all if he’s going to save the day. But circumstances, like people, are often more complicated than they seem, and while I won’t spoil the narrative at all, this villain, the people connected to her, and the folks who defeated her back in the day all have their inner demons, regrets, and secrets. Suffering this blow to your pride, you must work to track down a mole in the organisation, eventually teaming up with some founding members of the group to defeat a nasty and powerful villain once thought to be dead. However, Raz’s joy is short-lived as he’s soon informed that despite his displays of bravery and brilliance, he’s not an actual agent yet he’s simply an intern. Fresh off of rescuing the head of the Psychonauts, protagonist Raz and his fellow agents make a jubilant return to their HQ, The Motherlobe. Microsoft provided me with an early code for Psychonauts 2, which picks up shortly after the events of the original game and its VR spin-off. The end result is an action platformer with a lot to say, a ton of heart, and only a few minor design flaws. Psychonauts 2, even more than the first game, truly explores all the challenging, painful, wonderful complexity we carry around inside our heads. These messes of thoughts and emotions can be hard to handle sometimes, but they’re also what makes us unique. We are a collection of memories and experiences, some good and some… not so good.
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