Not good. Turned it on and off. Maybe the race affected the interests, so most likely it did not go.
Great game!! Great storyline, very well thought out levels that are fun to explore. Well, the visuals did not let us down.
In general, a kind of soft reboot of the first part was released.
Gameplay: Although it may seem that nothing has changed, however, the game has been completely redesigned from a puzzle platformer to a puzzle action game. Some of the useless abilities like Confuse and Force Field were abolished, and the rest were bound to 4 buttons to make it convenient to use in battle. Also, a little bit tried to give them meaning in the puzzles. For example, Clairvoyance now marks hidden collectibles, and Pyrokinesis allows you to open secret passages. Abilities have their own passives / actives and are reworked for them, which are opened for skill points from ranks (more on that below). Not always successful, by the way. The same Levitation was simply nerfed to zero, it became almost useless, although here, rather, in the first part, it had no limits of what was permitted.
Structure: by and large, it's still the same first part. At each level there are fictions, emotional baggage (now also shards of wisdom and parts of the brain) and other rubbish for gamblers, for which you are given a rank. Rank, from now on, is no longer a useless number in the corner (yes, passives were given in the first part, but they didn’t play a special role) - they are given for it ... POINTS OF NAVIYYKOOOOV! What else to expect from the sequel to the game 17 years ago. Finally, let's not forget... Ah, no, it's still fragments of Psitania. A whole shop has been added to the game. True, they did not come up with what to buy. It seems that they expanded the range of icons, the same ones that only the cutscene with the pedestal reminded of in the first part. They gave 3 slots and it is assumed that you can build a build. And, in fact, these are all the same passives of varying degrees of uselessness from the original. There are stupidly no such challenges in the game, to run to them. There are more kagbe enemies, but they also have enough PSI abilities to upgrade. But the bosses have become at least a little more interesting
Design: everything is also good and mind-blowing. The game uses the fourth iteration of the Unreal Engine, which allows it to draw sometimes unimaginable landscapes. Schafer has gone wild and uses the full potential of the setting occasionally even balancing on the verge of ludonarrative dissonance. While the engine creates hitherto unseen dynamics in game scenes. Glory to technology, damn it!
Plot: FORGET THE WORDS ABOUT THE SOFT REBOOT, THE SEQUEL COMPLETELY RElies ON THE FIRST PART, WITHOUT THE KNOWLEDGE FROM IT IT DOES NOT MAKE A POINT TO EVEN START. The plot of Psychonauts is massive, exciting, still funny, and yet... completely stupid. What was the main feature of the original? Behind the outer trashiness, banter and mercy, there was an extremely serious narrative about mental problems. I can't say that Psychonauts 2 doesn't have all that at all. There is plenty. However, the game is now like a cartoon for preschoolers, it always throws in some kind of moralizing, or some kind of super creepy characters, most of which do not have personality arcs, but just ... yes, cause cringe. The first part was literally a psychotherapy session, and the second part was just a dynamic fairy tale in an unusual setting. Hell, even fiction used to be an important narrative element because they revealed the inner world of the character and they could be considered separately. And now they are just stylized collectibles. Psychonauts can and should be studied in order to better understand how a person works, and there is no point in researching the second one, because everyone will tell you with a finger to your temple anyway. I don’t know why Schafer suddenly wrote out so much, but I hope that he will work better on the next game.