After releasing a 22-hour documentary last February on the making of Psychonauts 2, Double Fine and 2 Player Productions are back with a surprise final episode that covers the game's reception, how the team recovered afterward, and what might come next for the Microsoft-owned studio.
From the jump, it's a much more bittersweet affair than you might expect given Psychonauts 2's extremely positive reception. Contributor Matthew Castle gave the long-awaited platformer an 89% score in our review back in 2021, writing that it was "a glorious return to one of gaming's most inventive and empathic universes."
But the game's development was a long and difficult one, as chronicled in the first 22 hours of PsychOdyssey documentary released last year, and this final episode is a somewhat haunted by creative conflicts and staff departures that occurred during Psychonauts 2's long gestation. There's also a long section about how staff crunched on the project, and how even a studio run with good intentions and a collaborative work culture can tacitly incentivize or encourage its developers to take on unsustainable workloads.
- I’m not sure what’s weirder: that someone made a sequel to a completely forgettable 37-year-old game I played as a kid, or that it was actually worth the wait
- Avowed could have been Obsidian's Redfall, with a Destiny plus Skyrim co-op multiplayer vision scrapped early in a grueling 6-year development
It's hardly all doom and gloom though: Developers at Double Fine note that Psychonauts 2 experienced fewer staff departures than other projects in the past, and there's a sense that everyone, from the rank-and-file to studio leadership, wants to learn from Psychonauts 2 and ensure that Double Fine's future development cycles are less fraught.
And we've gotten the slightest of peeks at what Double Fine's future might entail: Among a selection of smaller-scale games currently being worked on, company founder Tim Schafer has been working on a new prototype with a small team, though it remains an open question whether it will be ultimately pursued as a full game.
