Psychonauts 2 Review (Optimus BoxCrate)
Note: played in offline mode, completed the game.
There's a thing that happens with older composers where they start to prioritize production values over originality and feel as they get older, not realising that virtually noone cares about the former, and I think this is the case here.
The original had incredibly diverse art direction throughout the levels, whereas this one more or less has the same art style for most of the 'mind' levels, but with a different setting. The graphics are polished to a much, much higher degree, and there's incredible detail, but it feels pointless at times.
For example, in the original the mailman level featured the weird physics-bending level-design where the roads twisted and turned on all axis. Unfortunately that feature is present in every single mind level here, and loses it's effectiveness almost immediately as a result. Likewise, the same 're-connect three aspects of the persona' trick was done for at least 3 or 4 different characters.
There's some missed opportunities which seem weird, like the 'stray thought'-following mechanic, which initially is used to link disparate concepts together in someone's mind in order to solve puzzles. A genuinely ingenius puzzle mechanic.
But this is never used again, instead it becomes a redundant travel mechanism. Even when you unlock the ability to follow 'dark thoughts', these don't lead anywhere exciting. Overall, that power shouldn't exist. The 'stray thought detector' and clairvoyance powers also had only incidental usage.
The game has a little bit of 'Doom Eternal Syndrome', where too many powers are thrown into the gameplay. If you could use all of them at once it would be better, but having to equip/unequip them feels tedious. It's better than simply doing the sequel classic approach of 'whoops I forgot my powers' but... still.
Early game is better. As it gets later I got bored of sitting through endless cutscenes with little gameplay. At that point, just make a movie. It also felt tedious to be constantly doing mind levels, with little time in the 'real world' to balance it out. Mind levels only feel cooky and unique if they contrast against the main gameplay - and there wasn't enough of that to make that happen. And I really feel that was a massive missed opportunity - the Psychonauts base had a great atmosphere, as did the surrounding woods, and I felt that couldn't been explored twice as much as it was.
The older game felt like a kids game, but in a good way - it had a strong comforting feeling, and didn't take itself too seriously. The plot is deep enough on this one that you can't get away with feeling lighthearted, and the strain of that on dialogue was felt more as the game progressed.
Lastly, the game has too many characters - few of whom are given enough screentime or gameplay for us to give a damn about. When the interns all pooled together at the end, I felt nothing.
There are some nice moments, like the gay wedding (the first I've seen in a videogame) that had some genuine heart behind it, and the entire 'senses' mind level had some good feeling. Likewise the cooking level was innovative, and the casino level packed some fairly dense interior backstory into a character we knew nothing about, through gameplay metaphors.
But overall the feeling of this game is that they packed so much into it, but then didn't flesh it out with enough (a) non-mind-world gaming (b) character development and (c) feeling.
And somehow they felt like they had to polish it to a mirror shine, while ignoring those fundamentals.
A good case study of "more is less".