![]() Along with your satisfying little jumps, there’s your levitation ability, which allows you to float across landscapes as well as summon a levitation ball to ride upon, like a circus performer’s walking globe. You’ll visit highly imaginative, gravity-bending dreamscape after dreamscape.Īs an out and out platformer, Psychonauts 2 also holds its own. There’s also a humongous mailroom sorting office where you jump from flying envelope to flying envelope, all the while avoiding the vortex of letters below. There’s an over-the-top cooking game show where you carry food stuff through a giant platforming gauntlet. Psychonaut 2’s levels are some of the most inventive in the platforming genre. Psychonauts 2’s cutscenes are as exciting as the best Saturday morning cartoons Not to say the physical world of Psychonauts is dull - it features a waterfall that flows upwards, a vast tree-top playground, and a funicular, to name just a few things - but it’s the ten or so mental worlds that you enter that are the most vivid and unique. Much of the game time involves getting these people to open up, and helping them confront the issues they’ve repressed. The six founders are all broken men and women, minds filled with trauma and dark secrets relating to a confrontation that happened 20 years prior. A large chunk of the game involves digging into how the international group of psychics began. The majority of the game takes place around the Psychonauts HQ. After a mission where you jet out to a huge casino complex, Psychonauts 2 settles into a more internally-focused rhythm. Cutscenes are as exciting as the best Saturday morning cartoons, and the dialogue, in true Double Fine form, is snappy and pun-riddled. There’s an infectious kind of energy to Psychonauts 2. I’m no completionist, but I enjoyed the enthusiastic theming of Psychonauts 2’s collectibles, which constantly pull you away from the beaten path and off into unknown recesses. Memories give you snippets of backstory for whoever’s mind you happen to be in, but many of the other collectibles - including the shiny neon “Figments of Imagination” that litter the landscape - simply level up your Psychonaut rank. You’ll fight monsters of the mind (“Regrets” and “Doubts” in physicalized form) while collectibles like “Emotional Baggage” and “Repressed Memories” are secrets tucked away, up high in obscure corners or behind secret doors and false walls. Fleshy pink walls line the level, while toothy doors require you to unzip them using telekinesis. Loboto’s mindscape is a grizzly realm of body horror. These early levels are sort of like Christopher Nolan’s Inception - a team of spies working together to infiltrate and overcome a mind’s defenses. Together with other members of the Psychonauts, an elite group of psychic secret agents, you help construct an alternate reality for Loboto to try and manipulate him into giving over information. Picking up from where the original game left off, you’re immediately thrown into the mind of ex-dentist Dr. It handles a litany of complex psychological issues - and some darker themes - with a great deal of warmth and compassion, to go along with all the humor. Psychonauts 2 seems well aware of this fact. It turns out, when you go digging around in people’s minds and try to resolve all their problems, you can sometimes end up making things worse. Of course, Freud and his psychoanalytic techniques have a troubled history. If you want curated lists of our favorite media, check out What to Play and What to Watch. ![]() When we award the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the recipient is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive, or fun - and worth fitting into your schedule. Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games, movies, TV shows, comics, tabletop books, and entertainment experiences.
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