Psychonauts 2 | Playthrough pt4 | PSI King's Sensorium/ Cruller's Correspondence

Psychonauts 2 is a 3D platformer video game developed by Double Fine Productions and published by Xbox Game Studios. It is a sequel to the 2005 game Psychonauts and features the return of its protagonist, Razputin "Raz" Aquato, a young psychic who can enter people's minds and explore their subconscious.

Psychonauts 2 features a range of psychic powers, including telekinesis, pyrokinesis, levitation, and more, which can be upgraded over the course of the game. The game also includes a cast of colorful characters, each with their unique personalities and abilities, and features a story with humor, heart, and surprising twists.

Review:

I wasn’t the biggest fan of the first game. It was a noble attempt at being a platformer that was very different, but coming from the N64 generation of high-quality platformers, and then into the next generation with Mario Sunshine, my platforming standards were very high. Little did I know that platform games were just going to get worse from here on. So at that time, I guess Psychonauts was good if you weren’t already spoilt by N64 platformers.
Then the VR game came out not so long ago. I really enjoyed it and it felt like a proper game rather than a tech demo. Although it was really short, it was nice to be inside a quality production.
Then this game came out of nowhere. Like a 20 year later sequel which no one was expecting.
I had to play it.
The production quality is very high. It has a lot of character and the design is very interesting it’s not very orderly and levels can be completely different in the way they are set out. Very unique places for levels and unique gimmicks for every level which is refreshing in a genre usually filled with bog-standard ice, fire, desert, water levels etc.
There are lots of interesting moves too. Again, very different to any other game. You can also spend in game currency to upgrade the move sets.
There are also pins that you can buy which give you heightened abilities like protection against fire, having a weapon be more powerful against a certain enemy, or get cheaper prices in the shop.
These seem like a good idea. But since you are limited to only having 3 equipped at one time, it’s a pain to be changing your abilities throughout the game so I just ended up picking my favourite three very early on and keeping them throughout the game. This left buying anything from the shop later on pretty pointless.
The controls are good but it’s a bit annoying having to assign the various moves to the shoulder buttons on the fly. Only holding 4 moves at a time is limiting so say if you want to do one thing like test if a wall can be burned down. If you don’t have the fire power up on, you need to stop the game to assign it to a button to use it. Then if you don’t want the fire in your permanent arsenal, you ned to go back again to change it. This is time consuming and makes you only carry the moves that are more likely to help you find secrets in the level. Then when it comes to combat, I couldn’t be bothered switching my move repertoire most of the time because you have no idea if the combat is just going to be a couple of enemies so I’m more likely to ‘bash’ my way through. There are enough buttons to combine to make all the power ups useable on the fly. Banjo Kazooie had loads of moves and you never had to change the controls. Banjo-Tooie added twice the amount!
The glide has a very strange control configuration. There is a power up that is a ball that you use to roll around danger floors and it is barely useable in the game. But it doubles up as the glide in the game if you have it equipped in your control scheme. Even though you don’t have it in it’s ball state, you press it in the air after you have done your double jump.
This should have been part of the regular control scheme as you barely use the ball in the game but you always need the glide. There is an option to change the glide to a third jump button press but I can’t fathom why this isn’t a default control because some people will miss this.
The main hub worlds are expansive and fun to explore. There are some quests which could do with being marked out as after you think you’ve explored everything, you really have no idea where the last pieces can possibly be so I wasn’t interested in 100 percenting it.
All in all, a very high quality game, made with love and care for the franchise. I just prefer the older style platformers.

Rating - 8/10

Played on PC.
No cheats used
Boring bits cut out (deaths and time wastes etc)

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PC Games - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QcgsRnZSR4&list=PLXnIZkuKAW4MA7QA6nmeCEfdhp57tvhEw
PS4 games - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TiRquElPG4&list=PLXnIZkuKAW4OIbFMRNXpshbfsfM1TiMV

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