Psychonauts

Playtime: 18.7 Hours

Ended up finishing with relatively high completion: Cadet level 97 (out of possible 101), all Psi Cards collected, all Challenge Markers found, all Cobwebs collected, all Vaults found, all Baggage collected, and most upgrades unlocked, minus a couple of the final game-breaking upgrades. I'm not interested in shooting for all figments since that will take forever, and isn't worth doing.

Rhombus of Ruin (VR): 2.8 Hours

Finished the game, other than a few of the challenge achievements that I didn't bother with - the VR controls were a bit wonky and I couldn't stomach more than I played, even though I took a ton of breaks. Most of it is point-and-click, so there's not much opportunity to see new stuff with subsequent playthroughs.

This is a very strange, yet very fun game. From one perspective, I feel like the game is exactly what's described on the cover, but that cover shows a psychedelic Tim Schaefer game where you dive into peoples' minds, so I wouldn't consider it underwhelming. I don't tend to be very good at these kinds of games, but I found that in general this game was balanced nicely and was fun to play through for the most part.

This game controls very similarly to most other action/adventure games in the same genre, but I personally found the PC version somewhat unintuitive on a controller (Steam Deck). A lot of the button prompts kept incorrectly showing keyboard icons throughout the game, and I had to set a very finnicky control scheme to get a thumbstick-controlled camera to work properly. Also, I ended up having to use all of the rear paddles to properly handle using the different powers and switching. I imagine the game probably works fine on console platforms, but it took a while to get it working nicely on the Steam version. However, after properly setting up the controls, the game feels great to play - extremely responsive controls that I got used to pretty quickly, and no significant camera or control issues in all but a few areas.

The character design is one of the strongest points of the game. Almost all of the characters are proportioned very differently, creating extremely distinct silhouettes with different head and body shapes. This follows through to costume coordination and skin/outfit color design too - the attention to detail and diversity here reminds me of TF2's timeless design. Even though the textures do admittedly look very old and low-res, the fact that most of them have a 'sketched' quality to them makes the fidelity unimportant and highlights the exaggerated characteristics instead. Some of my favorite designs are probably Raz, Dogen Boole, Mila, Sascha, and Oleander. The way the animations for each character are designed around their proportions just lends more depth to the portrayal of the character. With the prevalence of canned animations in many games these days, it's nice to see so much attention paid to every single character in the game here.

The levels are also another major highlight of the game, minus the last few at the very end of the asylum. True to many other action adventure games, the core loop of Psychonauts takes you across many different levels connected by a hub, which is a campground. While the campground isn't of particular interest, all of the levels are fascinating. Unlike other similar games, every level in this game takes place essentially in its own universe, completely inside another character's mind. This allows each level to look completely different with no central theming (like biomes, times of year, or landmarks), allowing for limitless creativity - which was certainly taken advantage of. Levels like the Milkman Conspiracy, the Napoleon level, Lungfishopolis, etc. all have very different mechanics and requirements to complete, allowing you to explore the psyche of the target. And they are almost all excellent as well, with the exception of the last few...

Despite really enjoying the vast majority of the game, there were still a fair number of things that I wasn't particularly happy with in the game. Most significant is probably that the last couple of levels just aren't fun. The end of the asylum (upper floors) has a ton of infinitely-spawning kamikaze poo gas rats that do a ton of damage and randomly swap movement directions, and a bunch of precise platforming which is an absolute nightmare to play. The final level, the Meat Circus, is also notorious for being quite BS - there is a horrible escort/defend section where you have to do a bunch of precise platforming very quickly to prevent Oleander from being killed. If you fail at any of the 3 sections, you start at the first one again; I only managed to finish it because some enemies bugged and got stuck in place. There's also another section later in that level that requires straddling a wire fence rotated around Psycho-dad throwing flaming torches at you, which is almost impossible to do consistently because the platforming is horrible in that particular section. Other than those moments, I don't really have any major complaints about any other part of the game. Trying to get all of the figments does suck though.

Overall, as mentioned at the beginning of the comments, I really enjoyed this game - but I wouldn't really want to play it again, largely on account of the endgame, but also because I feel like seeing the same wacky levels a second time just won't have the same impact, and I want my first impressions to be preserved as my final opinion over time.

Rhombus of Ruin - VR Spinoff

The Rhombus of Ruin is a short spinoff VR game for Psychonauts - since it only took a few hours, I didn't think it was really worth separating as its own entry. It plays very differently to the mainline Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2, as more of a VR point-and-click game with some Psi powers. I feel like this game was a very good decision by Double Fine - it allowed them to explore VR a bit with a short chapter without taking a huge gamble for a longer game, while capitalizing on the unique visual identity of Psychonauts to make a very unique and memorable VR game. I enjoyed getting to see the major characters again with higher-fidelity models. The plot also connects nicely to the end of Psychonauts 1 and ends in a way that allows almost complete freedom for Psychonauts 2's plot. Aside from that, most of the puzzles were very simple, which is fine for a VR game. Overall, a simple but solid experience.