Psychonauts 2 : Change of Scenery section... the only annoying part of this game so far
Well it is the only annoying part of the game that you are actually playing. While this is a personal preference I do not like when games have massive storylines that you are forced to watch and Psychnauts has an honestly, too long story but at least you can skip it. You can't, however, skip individual lines of dialogue, you have to skip entire sections and this can result in you not having any idea what is going on.
Towards the end of the game, or at least it sort of appears as though that is the case, you enter the mind of someone that has infiltrated the Psychonauts facility and you discover that he is actually a mole in the organization by wandering around his head.
This is the very first time at any point in the game where I felt as though the level design is poor and the game is actually a bit unfair and stupid in all that I have played up to this point which is probably around 20 hours.
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one thing I had to laugh about in the cinematic leading up to the annoying level was the interaction I ended up having with this person "Truman." Apparently I am supposed to know who this is any why he is important to the story but I guess I held down circle during too many of the points in the past because I have no idea who he is.
Apparently he holds the keys to some sort of evil that is potentially invading the Psychonaut's headquarters and I have to put a stop to it. Whatever! let's get in his head!
You end up being forced to ride on a ride of sorts that reminds me of things like "A Small World After All" from Disney and this was fun for the first few minutes but here we are again, just another sort of cinematic that you cannot skip. At a certain point you run into a closed door that you cannot get past and this is where the real problem that I have with this level starts to kick in.
At least at this point control of the game is finally passed back to you but then we find ourselves in a very compressed environment with a lot of enemies being thrown at us. So many that you can't really get a good fix on where they actually are and you find yourself just mad-button-mashing to get through it.
I suppose I'm not going to get too worked up over this because just like the rest of the game, you cannot possibly lose and you simply respawn until you manage to randomly hit the correct buttons that can get you through it. I did die at one point and this was mostly because I was trapped behind environmental factors and was stuck while projectiles were being launched at me.
The room is too small for the amount of things they are throwing at you and this is the only time this has ever happened in the 20 or so hours that I have been playing up to this point. So I guess I can forgive them for this..
But the really annoying part was still yet to come
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There's this bit where there are 3 backgrounds, and a few sets of props like trees and cacti, as well as the family in the foreground that you have to maneuver into various positions so that you can climb up to the holes in each scene such the barn that is on the top of the one above.
This isn't complicated but the problem here is that any time you want to move something, and you have to move A LOT OF THINGS, you don't just move them, you are subjected to dialogue and back and forth between you and your partner who is in another room and this means you are going to be hitting the "hold circle to skip" button a LOT. All of this for what? so you can move some decorative trees to the side of a scene that is actually an easily solvable puzzle?
This entire thing didn't need to have spoken dialogue and I am surprised that they bother to have it because you end up repeating so much of it over and over again and maybe I am starting to sound like I complain too much but I just wanted to get on with it.
I don't mind dialogue in a game but useless dialogue? I'm really not a fan.
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All of this, and it took about 15 minutes or so of constantly repeating the same dialogue and me gritting my teeth as I held down the circle button the entire time, all of it is simply so you can maneuver these platforms to allow you access to the top there as this is not-so-evidently the way forward.
The puzzle wasn't hard, it was just unnecessarily tedious. Not a fan of that in any game.
Then when you do get up top we are subjected to more and more cutscenes that seeing as how I am so close to the end of the game I guess I am going to endure, maybe make a sandwich before I start it, so that I don't end up being completely confused as to what the hell is going on at the very end of the game.
So that was a lot of complaining I know but I am a fickle gamer.
Overall I still think that Psychonauts 2 is a good casual game but man does it really push the limits for how much in the way of cinematics and dialogue that I, as a gamer, am willing to endure. I've played about 20 hours and only this one hour was something I would consider annoying and not fun, so if you can get 19 out of 20, that's a pretty good game in my book.
The game is free for anyone on a PS-Plus Extra or higher subscription tier, so if you have that, why not give it a try?