The long-awaited Psychonauts 2 releases in a little over a month, and Game Rant was able to get a hands-on preview and interview with the top brass at Double Fine ahead of the game's release. The Art Director Lisette Titre-Montgomery, and Studio Head Tim Schafer, were able to talk to Game Rant about all things Psychonauts 2, including how the game deals with mental health and how Double Fine has fared since its acquisition by Microsoft. The interview paired with what was shown of the game so far looks to be a dutiful sequel to the game that had captured such a unique feeling over a decade and a half ago.
Double Fine's unique personality shines through in every single one of its games, and Psychonauts 2 is no different. With updated graphics that look like a natural successor and a return of favorite characters, this game is set to win over many fans of the original. Something Schafer wanted to evolve on in the sequel was creating a much more intentional sense of empathy around mental health and stresses the importance in that we can all relate to the characters in Psychonauts 2. Everyone has parts of ourselves they can't control sometimes, and that's where Raz comes in to help.
Q: In what ways were you able to improve the platforming mechanics thanks to current-gen tech?
Tim Schafer: I think a lot of it was bringing on new folks to the game and really focusing a lot. We identified what we liked and what we wanted to improve on in the first game and we felt really good about the narrative, storytelling, and characters. We wanted to work on things like combat and also improving the integration of our core psychic power mechanic with combat and puzzle-solving. So, of course, platforming, in general, is a million little things you gotta get right and there’s always a million more you can do. If you played the first game and then played the second game, it’s immediately just more fluid and intuitive and it flows really well into and out of combat. The way the powers are integrated is something the team did a great job at achieving.
Q: How and why did you decide to change the controller layout from the original game?
TS: We left a lot to the powers and platforming team who did a lot of iterations, tried lots of different things, and did a lot of testing that honed in on that. There’s a lot of remapping and customization in the menus for people. Also, the ability to throw in some things from the first game that I really liked, like the ability to throw down your thought bubble under your feet while you’re floating is one of my old things and that’s in there. So I really wanted to up the number of powers that you can map to the controller. You can map four to the controller, which was one of our goals. It was hard to map eight, but you’ve got four in there and you can swap them out faster.
Q: How have Psychonauts 2's themes matured compared to the original?
TS: I think the way we treat mental health is a little more intentional. I think we still, like in the first game, treat it with a lot of empathy and humanity because you’re going into someone’s mind so empathy’s kinda built into the game mechanic. You’re naturally seeing what someone is going through, so I think that part is intact, but there are a few things we’ve definitely learned. I think all of gaming, all of culture, is a lot more aware of stigmatizing stereotypes about mental health to avoid and I think we naturally honed our approach using that more sensitive approach to things. In general, deep down, each level in Psychonauts is still about healing and still about empathy, and still about fun on top of all that.
We didn’t want to have a big tonal shift from the first game because it happens just three days afterward. So it’s still the same in that it’s a comedy but, for anyone who’s found Milla’s secret room, it’s a comedy that likes to get into some dark things and comes back out of them and it’s very inwardly consistent in that way.
Q: How has Raz's status been reset in the world at the beginning of Psychonauts 2?
TS: In the first game, he saves the day – saves the world basically, from armored death tanks with children’s brains in them, and then he’s made an official Psychonaut. But Ford’s brain was slightly decommissioned and he’s not the Grand Head of the Psychonauts anymore, so it was kind of like a field promotion and more of an honorary thing that Raz figures out when he gets to headquarters. That it’s not as official as he thought. Although he was the coolest kid at summer camp, he comes to the international headquarters of the Psychonauts and naturally enters the bottom of the intern program. So he has to start over again by ranking up prestige, but he does start with some of the psychic powers from the first game like Pyrokinesis, Telekinesis, Psi-Punch, and levitation. We add new powers as you saw in the demo of this game.
He still has some things to learn. He learns his mental connection, he learns projection, the ability to project an aspect of himself out into the world to keep him company.
Q: How much higher are the stakes this time around?
TS: I would say this time the stakes are higher because they’re a lot more personal. It’s more about things we hinted at in the first game, which is that Raz’s whole family has a history back in the circus and being “cursed to die in water.” What is that all about? Who cursed them? It gets into a lot of his story, his backstory, his dad’s backstory, and a lot of family secrets are revealed. It also gets into how those relate to the formation of the Psychonauts because actually Raz’s history and the Psychonauts’ history are more connected than he realized.
Q: How does Double Fine maintain the same kind of witty and sarcastic humor throughout both Psychonauts?
TS: I think it’s a natural expression of the personality of the team. The team is a very funny team and it’s a very lighthearted and joke-y team that also has a lot of teasing and stuff. I think you see that in the game, it has both wholesome and sweet moments but also some kids teasing and some very dark moments. I think that’s just the style of what we like to make and players like that kind of game, and maybe they don’t get as much of that as they like. So we’re here for that.
Q: In what ways has your team worked to accurately portray mental illness?
TS: It started a lot with personal experience. Mental health is not just one of those things, like a far-off culture, it’s not something you have to guess what it’s like. We all have brains and we’ve all dealt with anxiety or depression, and sometimes more serious conditions whether in ourselves or family and friends. Mental health touches everyone’s life and so we had a lot of people on the team who had family members who’d been through trauma or addiction, things they could talk about. It’s not like an after-school special, where we’re telling kids not to do drugs or anything like that on the nose. It’s more just like “What’s behind it? What’s the emotional meaning behind it?” and getting more into the relationships of the characters more than what’s the effect on people.
We just tried to approach it from a perspective of having the most empathy for the character and what they’re going through and once we became a part of Xbox, we had access to all the resources of Microsoft Testing Groups where they have actual clinical psychologists who can look at our game and talk to us about what’s in it. They had some great corrections for us that were really simple to implement but also made the game a lot more accessible to lots of people. They also connected us to Takethis.org, which helped us craft that mental health advisory and also talk about ways to make the game not harmful to anybody. We’re open to everybody.
Q: How do you stay truthful to the art style of the original while evolving it so well?
Lisette Titre-Montgomery: I was really blessed and fortunate to inherit this really great legacy from Psychonauts, and the look and the feel of that game. So for me, it was sort of taking the great parts of that style and particularly the element of “wonk” where wonk is where you look at the world and nothing is exactly how it should be, things aren’t symmetrical and nothing is exactly the same size. That sort of style concept is applied across the game and it helps everything feel like sort of a dreamscape, cause everything is slightly off-kilter. We kind of took that concept of wonk art and expanded that with new technology and all the tools we had.
We worked really hard to make sure our shaders, visual elements, and technical elements were all brought up to date. Our environments are absolutely gorgeous and our brain levels are our core focus of making this a really unique experience. Even our cinematic team led by Zach Baharov is amazing. It’s almost like a Pixar-level quality of animation going on. So we really just wanted to push in all the areas we could with the new technology. Our visual effects and transitions are some of the trippiest things you’re gonna see in gaming. That’s where we really focused on selling this new world and our new experience.
Q: Did the Microsoft Acquisition Have Any Effect on the game? If so, in what ways?
TS: There’s a lot more, of course, Windows branding throughout the game. You’ll see a lot of logos on… I thought for a second I had you going. (He absolutely did.)
LTM: There’s an Excel sheet minigame, y’know.
TS: Well, you have to buy it in-game, so it’s an in-app purchase.
As a studio, we’re not trying to get acquired per se. We just started talking about different stuff, it came up and took a lot of convincing. But what they were able to show us is that they are committed to letting studios keep their personalities and keep their culture, and really not change them at all. They’ve done that with a number of studios that I was able to check first and be like “Is this true, are they…” and it’s been true for us too. What it allowed us to do was finish the game properly. They asked us, “What would you do if you had a few more resources than you did as an indie studio?” where you’re scrambling to finish the game and chopping off levels, boss fights, and stuff like that.
We were like, oh we can restore the content to the way it’s supposed to be and also make sure that we have time to polish it and make a AAA game, and that’s what has happened and we’re happy to have had a little more time to make sure it’s the game that players deserve and the game itself deserves to be.
Psychonauts 2 will launch on August 25 for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.