Psychonauts 2 on PS5 - about midway impressions

So this is another game that I likely wouldn't have even bothered to try had it not been included in my PS-Plus membership, which is likely going to expire soon and I am going to have to make a choice about whether or not I want to renew it.

I do like platformers though, and this game has a lot of old-school elements about it that kind of brings me back to my roots of SNES, Genesis, or PS1 gaming days.

How to describe this game? Well it is an adventure platformer of sorts where you have certain skills that can be upgraded and have various purposes as far as exploration and combat is concerned. Much of the game is platforming, and none of it is too demanding. The combat is relatively straight forward, silly, and not really all that challenging. I don't think it is possible to properly lose and it certainly isn't soulslike even though I know that people hate that word.

It's colorful and kind of "trippy" in parts because your job as a Psychonaut agent is to enter the minds of other people who are having issues and sort them out. It's an interesting take on gaming I think but at times the amount of story, most of which isn't terribly essential, can get in the way of the flow of the game and this annoys me about any game. It is a big part of the reason why despite their near universal critical acclaim, I could never get into the Kingdom Hearts games.

The boss battles are amusing and fun such as the one above where you are fighting against some sort of casino something or other because you are in the head of someone that has a gambling addiction.

The attacks they use might catch you off guard the first couple of times you see it but they aren't so varied to make it seem unfair or difficult to figure out. I have only died a couple of times in boss battles and it was mostly because I didn't seek out the loads and loads of healing items that are constantly appearing on screen.

Exploration is pretty fun. There are a bunch of totally optional collectibles that I mostly skip as well. But for people that are into the whole trophy collection thing there is plenty of that contained inside. The controls are responsive and there aren't too many of them to make it difficult to remember.

I find the game to be a lot of fun and the story is actually pretty good. The only issue that I have with the story is that there is so damn much of it.

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It seems like every 5 minutes or so, gameplay is being interrupted for some sort of cinematic sequence that you can skip if you want (I do, often) but you can't skip individual lines of dialogue, you have to skip the entire thing and on one particularly long bit of cinematic I guess I skipped something absolutely huge and then found myself on a "game show" with objectives I had no idea how to accomplish because I skipped the instructions... haha.

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in the game show, which is actually really fun and a very creative quest to throw at you, you are meant to pick up various ingredients and take them to certain parts of the arena for preparation. In the above case I had to carry a bit of bread to be chopped, then carry the chopped bread to be fried. Without having watched the cinematic I had no idea this was the case and was just wandering around with the clock ticking down and not doing any of that. I still figured it out after a couple of times and as it turns out, even when time runs out you can still complete the mission. It's very forgiving in that regard. You just don't get the prizes for fast completion but since I almost never go for collectibles in games, that doesn't matter a great deal to me.

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There is some amount of open-world-esque things that are going on such as wandering around on a canoe to get to other various islands surrounding the city, but all of this is optional and again, just for collectible purposes. So after I parked the canoe somewhere and forgot where that place was, I stopped doing that. For people that enjoy 100%ing a game though, there are lot of things to discover that I didn't bother doing.

In all this game is probably less than 20 hours for a full playthrough according to other, more gifted gamers that I follow, but those 20 hours can be considered a pretty fun and very casual experience. It's just shame that the dialogue can only be skipped Entirely and not just line by line. That's how I prefer it to be in a story-based game.

At the end of it all I don't think the rather nonsensical story is really all that essential to enjoying the game because most of it is intentionally really silly and while that is fun for a while, I am the type of gamer that would rather just get one with playing the game. As I have said many times, if I wanted to watch a movie I would watch a movie. I have streaming services :)

All in all I think that this game is a lot of fun for people that appreciate more casual games but would not the cup of tea for people who need their gaming experiences to be super challenging. This is definitely not that kind of game.