Psychonauts has been sitting in my backlog for 5 years now and with the recent successful funding of a sequel I thought maybe it’s finally time to take it off the shelf, dust it off, and see what all the fuss is about. The Psychonauts 2 thread has over twenty exclamation marks, clearly someone is excited about it.
It’s available from the usual suspects, Steam and GOG.
Technical issues: I had a hard time getting it to recognize my controller until about the 3rd time I launched the game. Not sure why that was, it’s pretty consistent about it now as long as I turn the controller on before launching the game. It’s modern enough to just ask the OS what resolutions are available, so no hijinks were required to get it running at my monitor’s native resolution. GOG does not list Windows 10 as one of the compatible OSs, chatter on the forums claims it’s fine. If you try it with Windows 10 let us know how it goes.
Awesome choice. I’ve played it three times but it’s been a while - I think I’m ready for a replay. I really want another shot at the Meat Circus, because I never got what the big deal was.
Okay, so I’m the curmudgeon on this one. Setting and characters in this are brilliant. Gameplay is… meh. Super-meh. I feel like platformers–especially 3d platformers–need to be really crisp and polished to be worth playing. It’s just a genre that’s really sensitive to little deficiencies. And Psychonauts felt full of those deficiencies.
I have it on PS2. I guess I’m probably not going to hook that system back up for this, so I’ll grab it for PC and see if it can convince me to change my mind…
EDIT: To be clear… definitely a great choice for the club, given the sequel funding recently and the intense love for it from many.
I played it using an xbox 360 controller on PC. I prefer it to mouse/keyboard, even though the game still gives you the keyboard bindings for the on-screen hints (which is annoying). I don’t really have any reason why I prefer it, it just seems more natural.
Perfect choice CaseyRobinson! It’s what I would have chosen too.
The only problems I ran into when I installed the Steam version is that the game crashes during cutscene movies for me. And there’s lots of those interspersed throughout the game. I did get around the problem somewhat by going into Windows XP Compatibility mode, but that caused other on-screen graphical anomalies. So the PC version doesn’t run perfect for me like it does other people, sadly.
They really did. When the trailer came out, it was full of compression artifacts and made the game look horrible (to my eyes). Plus after the trailer, they had a few more months of development, and when I played the final game I was really shocked at how good the game looked. They had completely overhauled the lighting which made the same art pop so much more, and really look great in a 3D engine.
I’ve just gotten the ability to zap stuff with the right Trigger, and I’m just loving the crispness and polish of the platforming. There’s a few blemishes in that objects sometimes have these huuuuuge hit boxes, much bigger than the actual object, so you collide with them from far away. But I like how they handle it in the game. It’s just really clear: hey look, we don’t want you to go over here. Places that are accessible are nicely reachable with that absolutely beautifully precise double jump animation where you jump once, create a ball, and then jump by propelling yourself against that ball. Mechanically I find that so much more satisfying than even Mario or Rayman, since there’s a physical explanation and visual manifestation of the double jump.
In what sense do you mean it hasn’t aged well? The only thing I can think of is the compression. I do wish they would update the game with less compressed cut-scenes, considering that the file size shouldn’t be an issue now. It’s a bit sad that the game looks better than the cut-scenes!
But as far as the humor, and the art, I think its aged fine. And at least it plays at modern resolutions.
I meant the pixelation when stretched out on my 1440p monitor, but that is a non-grievance to my enjoyment.
Played the first level. The humor and art style is for the most part good. The voice-acting too, although I am not the biggest fan of some of the usual character sterotypes – but I guess there’s a lot of time for them to be subverted.
I went i to this knowing it is a platformer, which is not my favorite gameplay. So far it works well with M+KB. Do I miss much if I skip collecting the psi cards? I have an aversion to empty collection sub-systems.
The figments, as far as I recall, were not terribly important. The PSI cards, however, are optional, but very useful. They upgrade your abilities and such. Granted everything ties into the PSI cadet rank, even figments.
My general recommendation would be to get the ones you can, but don’t feel the compulsion to get them all. I found it fun to experiment with traversal and the mechanics to get most of them, but strictly speaking you don’t have to collect them all. You should get enough through incidentals.
I played it a bit more today. Explored more of the camp and did some of the levels. So far so good. I can now shoot PSI BOLTS and set fire to stuff. So far there’s not been any aggravating jump-puzzle bullshit, but we’ll see…
Next time I boot it up: I’ll see if any of the tricks I’ve acquired so far works on a certain annoying quirrel.
Also: Should I make an effort to get hold of the cobweb-detangler in the camp store?
I’m once again amazed at the amount of dialog between other characters that you pass by. Dialog that I’m fascinated by each time I play the game. There’s so much of it! But you can completely skip all of it and run to your next objective instead.
