Her experience bursts through via incredible audio effects.Psychonauts made its debut on Xbox in 2005, hitting PlayStation 2 a couple of months later.
PSYCHONAUTS 2 REVIEW SERIES
PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Series X/S, Nintendo SwitchĪ woman with psychosis battles her way through Norse mythology. Even if you haven’t played the first instalment, I highly recommend it, as it is one of the best games so far this year. It could be a recipe for disaster, but the team succeeds in this balancing act even when events take a much darker turn in the latter half of the game. The game opens with a thoughtfully worded mental health advisory, warning players that it tackles serious conditions, but usually in a comic manner. It’s all thematically fitting and very well thought out.Īs a whole, Psychonauts 2 walks a fine line between exploring trauma and making light of it. These include Regrets, which fly about and attempt to weigh you down Bad Moods, which you have to study to find their source and Panic Attacks, which frantically scrabble at you in a way that can be overwhelming.
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The enemies you encounter within these minds all derive from mental health concepts. You help him rediscover it by reuniting his five senses, represented as band members who are scattered across a Yellow Submarine-esque psychedelic land.
But my favourite has to be the mind of a brain in a jar, played superbly by Jack Black, who has completely lost his sense of self. Other mindscapes that Raz visits include a mash-up between a hospital and a casino, a city built from bowling lanes and a gigantic mailroom. This manifests in his mind as a bizarre version of The Great British Bake Off, in which Raz has to prepare a variety of anthropomorphic ingredients (which are all very cute and extremely enthusiastic about being cooked) before presenting the results to a panel of judges.
For example, one level involves Raz helping someone with a fear of judgement. The entire game sparkles with wit and creativity, without shying away from serious issues. “The entire game sparkles with wit and creativity, withoutshying away from serious issues” “We’re here to help people fight their own demons.” “We’re not here to change people’s minds, not here to fix people,” one of the Psychonauts tells Raz early in the game. The structure of the game is much the same – exploring weird and wonderful mindscapes – but its approach to mental health has grown in sophistication. In Psychonauts 2, Raz becomes an intern for the organisation. Here, he learned to dive into people’s minds and help them come to terms with their deepest fears. The new game’s story picks up just three days after the end of the first one, which saw a young boy called Raz attend a summer camp for individuals with psychic abilities run by the Psychonauts, a kind of psychic spy agency. Thankfully, I needn’t have worried about this revival. Barring a brief virtual-reality spin-off in 2017, I wasn’t expecting to see another instalment. The original Psychonauts, a cult classic, came out more than 15 years ago, a gap almost unheard of in an industry that tends to release yearly sequels. It’s this risk that had me holding my breath before beginning Psychonauts 2, a sequel to one of my favourite video games of all time. Of course, there is always the chance that revivals go wrong – the most recent season of The X-Files probably should have remained buried in an FBI vault somewhere. In recent years, I have enjoyed returning to the worlds of Jurassic Park, Twin Peaks and Veronica Mars to name just a few.
PSYCHONAUTS 2 REVIEW FULL
THESE days, film and TV are full of revivals: continuations of a much-loved story decades later that are a chance to revisit favourite characters when they are older and perhaps wiser.
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