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Man, I really want this to be good. I don't think I could play the original anymore - it's still funny and atmospheric, but the gameplay has aged badly. But honestly the sequel could just be exactly the same game with updated gameplay and it would still be 10/10 for me. They don't even have to invent much, just make it play like a game from 2021. But the reviews are sounding positive so far, right?
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Aug 23, 2021 14:59
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Been playing up to when the greater outdoor area unlocks, game is good so far. Game is very good so far. It hits all the notes that trick you into believing this is exactly what the original game was like, even though this is better on every single technical point of execution. It has its minor issues here and there (mostly pacing-related), but I am having a hecking good time.
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Aug 25, 2021 23:00
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Holy poo poo everything that comes out of Sam's mouth is top tier. I love these characters.
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Aug 26, 2021 18:41
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MMF Freeway posted:I think she was being sarcastic to own you While I think this is true, I have felt as the game continues that the dialogue occasionally seems to assume you've already seen or heard something earlier and makes reference to it, even though I haven't seen it before. For example (spoiler: those three levels what have to do with the same thing) the dialogue in the barber level makes casual reference to cutscenes in the bowling level, even though nothing in the game forces you to do it in that order.
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Aug 27, 2021 13:26
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Broken Cog posted:Are you sure about that last part? Because while the game says you can do the Ford levels in any order, it seemed to me like the barbershop didn't open until I'd done the other two. It also had the centerpiece of the mirror. Very sure. I did the barbershop first, then the bowling alley. They're listed in the log in a particular order, but I just... walked right in there. I haven't even started the third one yet! e: I explored the outdoor area a bit before ever going in, though, so maybe some unknown thing out there triggered it if it isn't open from the start? I have no idea what though. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Aug 27, 2021 |
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Aug 27, 2021 13:43
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Can you get up on top of that waterfall somehow? I got the (three levels) slowdown power and managed to get onto one of the logs quite easily, but then I just got insta-killed once it floated up to near the top. That isn't how you do it?
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Aug 27, 2021 19:43
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Finished the game, 16.5 hours (not 100%, obviously). Worth every penny, worthy successor. Full game spoiler talk below. I felt that some of the levels were a bit... tacked on, oddly enough, particularly Bob and Cassie's levels. I mean, they're clearly very well built and fun to play, but they don't advance the plot a whole lot. Bob's level paints an interesting picture of a poor dude who grew up with what I interpret to be an alcoholic mother? (At least that's what I assume "sneaking out into a greenhouse that turns out to be full of bottles" is supposed to be.) And then gets punched in the guts again when he believes his husband has died in part due to his fault, and just sort of becomes a recluse and starts drinking too. But the problem is this is someone we literally met for the first time two minutes ago and his only purpose is to be half of the key we need to open the next progress gate, so as interesting as all this is, it has nothing to do with the plot. I'm not even sure what Cassie's level was supposed to say about her, or what was up with the humanoid bee-swarms, or why they were keeping her hostage. That feels like by far the most half-baked of all the levels in the game.
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Aug 29, 2021 15:19
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Oxyclean posted:Cassie was a hostage to herself, she was in control of the bees. In general, her level was about having these different sides of yourself for dealing with different parts of your life. Who is the real you? The you that you are around friends, around yourself, etc? Ultimately, you are a collection of yous. Her librarian archetype/personality was about closing herself off from being hurt / letting people down by locking away parts of herself metaphorically, which means isolating herself literally/physically. Sure, that's obvious. But none of that has anything to do with her as a character history or what you see of her outside her brain. Part of this is that, like Bob, she's introduced like two seconds before you go into her mind (nevermind that Compton is looking for her, we have no idea about her personality at this point in the game). But where Bob is very clearly depressed and possibly alcoholic the moment you meet him, Cassie is by all appearances a functional human (as much as anyone appears human in this game, anyway) being held hostage by bees. The librarian has no obvious connection to bees. In fact, the only bees in her mind are figments. And the two personas you hunt down were free to begin with, so what is the librarian keeping locked up exactly? Besides which, as the game itself points out, having multiple personas is not unusual nor particularly psychologically unhealthy. She doesn't appear to be particularly disassociative. Her vaults are just about her writing her book and then the crew kind of falling apart afterwards, but that had more to do with feeling alienated from the new psychonauts (and Ford being a complete wreck) than anything about her personally or the greater plot of the game. Then a bee person appears. I don't know, I don't feel like all this really coheres for me. She doesn't seem troubled the same way the others are, and so the "solution" is not satisfactory to me. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Aug 29, 2021 |
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Aug 29, 2021 17:09
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VA chat: I didn't even realize until now! Also, am I crazy, or are there several scenes that are deliberately set up so that someone will ask a question immediately before a censor spawns so it's almost like the censor is answering "no!" in response to the question? Because I've had that feeling multiple times through the game.
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Aug 29, 2021 18:01
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Studio posted:the ram judges fight was one of the worst boss fights I've played in a game. It's too bad, really, because I think that fight could be improved like 10x if only all (or just more than one) of the ingredients for the round could pop out of the same vomit so the fight isn't so drat long.
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Aug 29, 2021 19:59
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If you're supposed to defeat the final boss some other way than with PSI Blast, I don't know what it is, because that's all I did.
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Aug 29, 2021 21:53
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I bound Levitate L1, Mental Connection L2, and PSI Blast R1 and never changed them for the entire game. R2 was everything else and constantly changed. Like, you always want to have your mobility powers on hand, right? And PSI Blast is so generally useful.
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Aug 29, 2021 22:14
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The extra button was definitely Pyro for like 50-70% of the game.
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Aug 29, 2021 22:23
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Psychonauts 2 is a completely different kind of game, and a very good execution of the concept. Don't expect any similarities at all in terms of gameplay.
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Aug 29, 2021 22:34
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Procrastinator posted:Also the biggest place I suspect a thing was cut was a level gating the barber shop. From a design perspective, it's weird to me that it's the only Ford level with no other level gating it, ala Compton and PSI King. This plus Otto Mentallis being the only psychonaut whose mind we never enter could mean they were supposed to have a level there.
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Aug 30, 2021 13:34
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They've still got to go fish Helmut's body out of the ice, too.
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Aug 30, 2021 18:24
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I got the right ingredient every time, and that boss still took forever. It's easily the worst in the game.
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Sep 1, 2021 09:16
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Jerusalem posted:I'm a little surprised at how often I see people make the complaint that they only appear at the beginning then at the end I don't think anyone is saying they cease to exist or anything. It's that they're not part of the plot anymore after the Lady Luctopus (and even then, they seem to go from "haha stupid new kid" to "let's all band together tally-ho" real fast without much buildup - yeah, there's the boss, but it ain't enough for me). Until they show up at the very end to help Raz save the day, except... because they didn't really contribute to most of the plot, it's a bit, I don't know, unearned? It's not quite a deus ex machina, but I also feel like Raz shouldn't need the help of those chumps at this stage of the game after doing everything else on his own.
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Sep 3, 2021 13:54
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(All game) Raz's family overall is kind of underused. I know that's weird to say given how technically important they are to the plot (well, at least one of them is), but what do they actually do to advance it, besides showing up?
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Sep 3, 2021 14:24
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Sakurazuka posted:Make sure you're using slowdown on the rotating stuff It's entirely possible to do the levels in a different order and not have slowdown at that point, however.
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Sep 4, 2021 13:18
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Otto talk Personally I'm really not sure where people are getting the "sociopath Otto" angle from, at all. Nothing about him really suggests that would be the case. There's nothing to suggest he doesn't care about other people, or is particularly manipulative or anything of the sort. If anything, given that the whole fight took place 20 years ago, he seems to be the most healthy of the bunch given that while he regrets things, he was able to move past it and not let it consume him. He also seems to be an introverted fellow who would prefer to tinker with machines all day, but that's okay. That's not any kind of pathology. He's still an active contributor to the psychonaut mission which is more than you can say for, well... any of the other Psychic Six, really, although we don't really have a good idea of how Truman is really doing since he spends the entire game out of commission.
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Sep 5, 2021 13:40
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That post originally said ... of the other regular crew..., but then I edited part of it before posting to say the other thing and didn't go back and change the implication. Derp. Point about Otto stands, I think.
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Sep 5, 2021 13:56
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(Maligula talk) I'm not particularly into any retributive aspect of all this, but I do think that in discussions about redemption and rehabilitation there has to be some consideration given to the victims of her actions, and the game doesn't really address that part as I remember. For as much as the game makes a good point about the role of the psychonauts not being to "fix people", the endgame amounts in practical terms to "let's go in this woman's mind and fix the evil demon that lives inside it", and even if you include the fact that Nona was instrumental to Maligula's defeat in the end, you don't build redemption off of a solely internal change of heart. No matter what mental strain she was under at the time, Lucy murdered innocent people and hasn't faced up to any (direct) consequences of it, nor faced the survivors or family members of those she killed. Now, I'm not saying the game is letting her off scot free exactly, but it seems more concerned with what this revelation means for her family and less on what it means for the Grulovians she suppressed.
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Sep 5, 2021 17:22
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Oxyclean posted:As for direct consequences, Lucy and Maligula was basically put in mental prison for 20+ years. Yes, and there's a good argument that this amounts to punishment, quite aside from the fact that frankly Ford had no right to do what he did. And if in the totality of time Lucy faces the victims of her crimes (or their surviving family) and they all come to agreement, then that would go a good way towards being more satisfying. But as it is it has this... off flavor of a war criminal coming along 20 years later and going "I have made peace with the inner demons that made me kill all those people, and now I will at last live a happy life without ever facing those I harmed or making any kinds of amends towards them". I know it's not what they're going for, I get it, but it's hard to not feel there's a slight sour note here. Oxxidation posted:the role of the psychonauts is to "fix people" Forsythe explicitly uses the phrase "[We're] not here to 'fix' people" to dress down Raz about it. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Sep 5, 2021 |
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Sep 5, 2021 17:31
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I think we can all agree Ford's actions are pretty hard to defend, not to mention cowardly. I won't quite say he's to blame for everything, but he certainly messed a lot of things up and overreached in pretty hosed up ways.
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Sep 5, 2021 17:46
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To clarify something, I'm not really advocating for retribution so much as feeling like a redemptive arc is incomplete without facing the victims and at least listening to what they have to say.
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Sep 5, 2021 18:13
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Taffer posted:Who else should they face? I'm primarily thinking of the victims of her deeds in Grulovia. I'm not sure I buy that "separate personality" is the right way to interpret Maligula either; she seems way more like a metaphor for the dark, ugly part of every human that reacts to (possibly life-threatening) stress with violence. She was pressed into her actions by the Gzar and he certainly would face a lot of responsibility too were he still alive, but in the end I think the idea that Lucy and Maligula are separate persons with separate things to answer for doesn't seem right to me.
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Sep 5, 2021 19:20
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I'm honestly kind of split on the music. Yes, the music itself is performed well, and during gameplay it's a treat, but there are so many cutscenes where it isn't being used to underscore what's going on in the scene at all. Like two characters could be talking and there's no music at all or some faint plonking here and there, or the music swells and dips with no relation to the intensity of the action.
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Sep 6, 2021 07:33
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I do wish they had done more with the Dark Thoughts than just put a few extra collectibles behind them.
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Sep 6, 2021 12:38
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I was totally expecting it to be something like a certain mind from the first game.
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Sep 6, 2021 15:44
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Fatherland Follies is actually one of my favorite levels just because the concept is really neat and encapsulates its owner so well. The weakest in my mind is probably Cassie's level, mostly because I think it's kind of extraneous and doesn't contribute to the greater scheme of the game much. That doesn't mean it's bad. The game is very, very good. But in a long list of good levels, it sort of just passes by as kind of... unremarkable. I get why people think the former level isn't great though, it's definitely bogged down a bit by long stretches of non-interaction.
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Sep 6, 2021 19:33
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You literally can't 100% many levels on the first go through if that's what you mean. As for whether it's worth it to go back and 100% the game, only you can answer that. You don't get any rewards from it (other than the ability to use psi abilities without cooldown at the point when you no longer have any reason to do it).
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Sep 8, 2021 15:46
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Speaking of, "young" is kind of a relative term here, isn't it. Ford Cruller in present day appears rather elderly, maybe a couple years past 60 or so. Which means he was in his forties when he did the stupid poo poo. He really should've known better.
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Sep 8, 2021 21:04
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A charitable interpretation could be that art is best when it's skirting the edge of what's acceptable, and that there's a real risk of it becoming anodyne and uninspiring if you always tread on eggshells and refuse to do anything whimsical with what is in real life a very serious topic. It's just, whatever game that's describing, I don't think it's Psychonauts 2. This game is full of silly gags. There's an entire level where a man's crippling social anxiety is portrayed as a cooking show with goat hand puppets representing his friends and a grief-stricken alcoholic appears as a potato man whose breath is so bad it repels water. So that criticism really fails to hit the mark. But also like, I don't think it's quite fair to crucify Yahtzee as someone who doesn't give a poo poo about mental issues either. But as comedy and/or review material goes, this one is a miss.
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Sep 10, 2021 12:48
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Willo567 posted:How's the PC version? I heard that there's really bad stuttering because of the game using UE4 and that the game can crash at random. Is it just the Steam version, or is the Game Pass version affected as well? Played the whole thing (Steam version) at 1440p on an an rear end-old 1070 at pretty much max settings, never experienced any performance dips or crashes.
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Sep 11, 2021 07:12
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Broken Cog posted:Also, why didn't Otto take a peek into that mystery brain he stumbled across. I can at least understand this one as Otto being waaaay too distracted by whatever his latest invention is to really worry about some random brain he found, it goes in the brainframe backlog that I'm sure we'll get around to working on any month now. Oh, wait, he just had another new brilliant idea that has to be worked on right now...
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Sep 14, 2021 20:37
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One alternative would've been to not act like judge, jury and executioner all on his own. He hid what he did from basically everyone else, and he pretty much admits he did it because he still loved her and wanted to protect her, not because he feels it was the right thing to do. (He also says he was "young and stupid", but he couldn't have been any younger than 40 or 50 by the time this happened so... young is relative.) Let's also not forget that it involved completely brainwashing an entirely innocent person (Augustus) and overwriting his memories. We may be able to disagree on where exactly here Ford crossed the moral event horizon but he surely did it.
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Sep 16, 2021 15:06
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 23:48 |
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Neddy Seagoon posted:So intent does factor in then? Like, say, Being a psychologically-vulnerable young woman tormented into performing said killing actions rather than doing them of their own free will? Only semi-relevant to what you're talking about, but this reminds me that Maligula wasn't a "young woman" when she did what she did, either, any more than Ford was a young man. Nona looks to be very elderly now, 70 or 80 at least. She would've been 50 when poo poo was going down. Psychologically vulnerable, maybe, but she was a grown-rear end woman with more than half a lifetime of experience behind her already.
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Sep 18, 2021 16:58
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