Psychonauts steam1/8/2024 What advice would Shakespeare offer Raz? How does a country's military history sound sung as a chirping Disneyland ditty? Got any gags about funicular railways? Amazingly, these are the boring questions. I'm not sure anything tops the first game's Milkman Conspiracy, but hearing an egg boast about its own execution comes close.Īt moments I wonder if Tim Schafer, as the game's writer, is playing a kind of game design Whose Line Is It Anyway?, drawing random words from a hat and attempting to roll with it. One mind's an archipelago explored like a miniature Wind Waker another, a cooking show that becomes a parody of Overcooked as you race to feed whooping strawberries into a blender. The best levels still flip the rules as the original's did. This is a game where you explore a shoe while bacteria shriek about an antifungal extinction event. This isn't one of those heart-on-sleeve misery fests you sagely nod at while secretly wishing you were playing Peggle. This maybe paints Psychonauts 2 as more dour than it is. Weirdly, it also makes Psychonauts 2 a good companion piece to Yakuza: Like A Dragon as a tale about the turmoils of an older generation than tends to hog the gaming spotlight. It's wistful and tragic, all while conjuring disasters from human hair or a vortex of unread love letters. I love the segment that revisits a relationship in an aging, fractured mind, each memory getting jumbled with the host's stints as a barber, mailman and bowling alley attendant. You don't see that in Crash Bandicoot (though I've not played 'The Wrath of Cortex', so apologies if I'm misrepresenting its psychological nuance). Sick of slippy-slidey ice worlds? Try a level set on the wedding cake of a now-mourning widower. Exploring pill-filled pachinko parlours is a visual spectacle and can be appreciated as that, but the metaphorical dimension is just as satisfying to decipher.Ĭrucially, there's not a tired genre trope to be found. Another standout sees a bureaucrat's clinical hospital of a mind hijacked by a casino. For example, one man's familial alcoholism becomes a toxic swamp where his shame manifests as a riverbed of discarded gin bottles that you navigate before booze drowns them again. And not in the hackneyed language of audio logs and ten foot-tall 'HELP ME' graffiti. Picture Mario 64's self-contained worlds, if Tiny-Huge Island was a metaphor for Wario's impotence.Įvery mind tells a story. But levels are much more than obstacle courses to tidy up. It's solid, standard stuff and will keep completionists happy for 20 hours. You hoover up hundreds of imaginary figments and earmark hidey-holes to return to with later upgrades. On one hand they serve up the comfort food of those older platformers. Picture Mario 64's self-contained worlds, if Tiny-Huge Island was a metaphor for Wario's impotence. From there, Raz hops inside heads to unpick personal traumas that both infect and shape the mental landscapes.
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