It's been a long, long time since a game has disappointed me as much as this.

This game starts out phenomenally. The effort put into making the footage feel old and from its era is incredible, the mystery is intruiging, the acting is stunning, I had a strong desire to make sense of the clips and the greater narrative, the game clearly sets up some sinister undertones about the sexualisation of women in film and the abuse that goes on behind the scenes in that industry and I was prepared for a very subtle treatment of that where the difficulty of uncovering what had happened to Marissa was a ludological parallel to how stories of abuse are swept under the rug. The one big issue from the very beginning is that the player has no control over what clips they will get. Initially, I thought this disconnectedness was the point, and was expecting to be required to pay close attention to the clips.

Sadly those mechanics never build towards anything. Eventually you realise that the object-matching mechanic has very inconsistent interpretations of what it will take you to, and that you actually don't have to figure anything out in this game except for how to find the rewind clips.

The first time you rewind and discover a secret clip is an excellent moment. It's unexpected, disturbing, and raises a lot of questions. My first hypothesis was that Marissa had somehow hidden footage documenting her time between 1970 and 1999 in the newly discovered tapes so that people could discover the truth about her trauma-induced mental breakdown or something.

Unfortunately the true answer is not nearly as grounded as that. It's all supernatural bullshit! Turns out Marissa is not a human with motivations who can be empathised with but a creepypasta with the ability to possess people and make them die or something, also she's Eve from the bible or something and Jesus is here and there were no grounded human reasons behind Carl's murder it's just "The One" killing "The Other One" and...

Honestly I very rapidly stopped caring at this point because once this game reveals this, you suddenly realise that this is no longer a game about discovering what happened to Marissa Marcel, this is now a game where you repetitively fast-forward through clips until you hear "the noise" and then watch an actress with way too much gel in her hair look into the camera while spouting metaphors that just explain the message and themes of the game to you.

Even worse, these messages and themes are incredibly asinine. There are two currents to the concept of "artistic immortality" here, the first being the interesting relationship between abuse and forms of media that allow that abuse to be infinitely replayed for the rest of time, the second being the incredibly trite observation that art allows people to 'live' beyond their death. Unfortunately the game seems far more interested in the latter of these to have any developed exploration of the former. The game ends with "The One" stating that she is "part of you" now, which interpreted literally within the game is basically a creepypasta ending where the game is possessing you now!!! but interpreted non-literally I'm not pretentious enough to interpret as anything more than the basic truism that art affects people... wow, so deep!

I have nothing inherently against surrealism or ambiguity. I do not think that art needs to be realistic to be meaningful. This game evidently attempts to trade in it's coherence for some deeper meaning and all I can say is that it was not worth it. I hate the heavy-handed metaphors of this game, I hate it's incredibly shallow reflections on the nature of art. I hate people looking into the camera, I hate "meta". No, I don't care how "Lynchian" it is, it's not deep and it's not interesting. I don't want to sound too hateful but some of the word-salad I've seen written on this game is downright embarrassing. When you strip it all away this game has shockingly little of substance.

I guess I feel so strongly negative about this because I was so in love with the opening hour or two before the big twist, they had the potential to do something really subtle here but instead it's a game that almost wants you to feel like an idiot for taking it's premise seriously. At the start of the game I was interested in learning about what happened to Marissa Marcel, by the end I realised my true answer to that question is "I don't care".

Breath of the Wild was a game I loved and I’m still very fond of. I think its weaknesses are pretty clear-cut and acknowledged by a lot of people, but the reason I still hold it in high regard is because of how cohesive it felt. Without sounding too corny or sycophantic, for a Nintendo who (especially at the time) were increasingly attached to an image of coddling and handholding, a Zelda game starting with the objective to “destroy Ganon” and declaring everything else to be optional felt like an important statement, it felt like a shift away from the streamlined, prescribed experiences of Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword and toward a vision of natural discovery, which landed for me because of how much it felt like the game was constructed around it: A breathing, living world, the sound of nature and the swaying of trees, puzzles revolving around non-discrete physics and grounded temperatures, world design intended to accentuate the simple desire to climb on top of things and jump off them, looking at something in the distance and thinking “I want to go there”. They were so committed to this vision that they abandoned the heroic, melodic field themes of the past in favour of something restrained, which was guaranteed to piss some people off. I’m under no illusion that Breath of the Wild was a perfect game, in fact, its an extremely flawed one, but as my tastes in games have aged and (hopefully) matured I’ve come to value thematic completeness over "content" more and more, which Breath of the Wild achieved, despite its flaws.

Make no mistake, Breath of the Wild had a lot of flaws. Arguably outside of that core experience of free exploration, it was a game composed almost entirely of flaws. This seemed to be common knowledge for everyone but Nintendo, who saw the praise and thought it would be sufficient to replicate its core systems verbatim. I think if you asked someone what their wishlist for a BotW 2 would have been, practically nobody would have imagined what Tears of the Kingdom actually ended up actually being: More Koroks? Identical combat? More shrines? Cooking and healing unchanged? Clothing and inventory slots unchanged? Weapon durability? Still no traditional length dungeons? I don’t think many people would ask for that. This isn’t to say that Tears of the Kingdom has improved nothing: Enemy variety is significantly better here and the world in general is much denser and has more to discover - the Elden Ring influence being obvious in the depths and caves. Bosses are also much better and even have multiple ways to defeat them, bringing them in line with the freedom on offer in the rest of the puzzles. These things were “asked for” and they’re good, but they’re very much “more of the same”.

I think the most emphatic success of the game is the new powers. In BotW, powers were rarely useful outside of the shrines that required them, whereas here so much of the experience is curated for them. Caves and ascend create this beautiful continuous flow where exploration never comes to an arbitrary stopping point, and rewind feels like it perfectly accompanies ultrahand as well as being a general programming marvel. Fuse is the one I’m most sceptical of. Doubling down on weapon durability - a mechanic which was almost universally complained about in BotW - is a design decision I respect on paper, but I feel in practice it serves to make a lot of the weapons more interchangeable. If the majority of weapon attack power comes from fused monster parts, then the base weapon barely matters, meaning getting a weapon in a chest is just as shrug-worthy as it was in BotW. That this system hasn’t been fixed by fuse is evident in the late-game, which has the identical problem to BotW in that you have so many weapon slots and so many equally good weapons that each individual weapon becomes meaningless. Ultrahand, however, is easily the star of the show and feels like this inexhaustible source of hijinks which the whole game is constructed to support.

One of my favourite reviews on this website by nrmac, a review I think about frequently, talks about how a lot of great art wasn’t “asked for”. I don’t think this game in general fits that bill but ultrahand feels like it does; something great that nobody asked for. In concept, it feels like a perfect elaboration of the ideas in BotW - drawing attention to the environment as a source of problem-solving and furthering the theme of freedom, the new crystal-fetching shrines that were integrated into the world ended up being consistently my favourites for how they encouraged building hilariously dumb contraptions. At the same time, I do have a problem with ultrahand. It seems likely to me that ultrahand is a mechanic designed with the Twitter clip in mind, something aimed toward the potential limits of play rather than the average situation. I say this because throughout the entire game I only really needed to build about 3 different things to solve these problems: Fanplanes for long horizontal distances, hot air balloons for long vertical distances, “thing with rocket” for everything in-between. Granted, I had fun building these things, it didn’t get old, but it never felt like the game coaxed me into the complex depths of this mechanic, something which the shrines should have done. This is evident in the frequently ignored building materials that litter Hyrule’s roadsides, which might be fun to build with but never actually time-efficient, why build a car when you can just fast-travel?

This creeps into one of my biggest problems with TotK. Not the shrines alone but their connection to the new verticality offered by the floating islands. The paraglider in BotW was a tool that risked breaking a lot of the experience by allowing the player to traverse great distances with little effort, but it was rationed and balanced by high places being a goal. There was this flow to exploration where mountains would invite you to climb them, then once at the top you could paraglide to anywhere you could see, it was core to the exploratory loop. In TotK, however, verticality is cheap, not only because every tower catapults you so far into the sky, but by how you can just fast-travel to a floating island and paraglide wherever you please. This greatly exacerbates the problem that shrines pose. Shrines were disappointing in BotW not just because they offered lacklustre experiences, but because they were one of the only few things in the game which offered permanent rewards, as well as permanent progress in the form of fast-travel points, which put this awkward focus on them which they couldn’t live up to. It was a necessity imposed by this that shrines were obfuscated by the geometry. If it was possible to spot shrines easily, the whole game would just be about running from one shrine to the next, which would only further highlight their problems. In TotK, however, this essentially happened. I frequently found myself jumping off floating islands, paragliding to a shrine, then fast-travelling back to the floating island to jump off to another shrine. The majority of the shrines I completed were found this way. At the end of the game, my “Hero’s Path” was very frequently just straight lines toward shrines.

There’s this point in Matthewmatosis’ BotW video, (starting at 28:28, I recommend you watch these few minutes, it’s incredibly relevant to what I’m saying here.), about how free traversal isn’t actually what leads to memorable encounters. Personally, my most memorable moment from BotW was the path to Zora’s domain, which I did very early on and felt like something special. It’s telling that in TotK, a similar setup occurs with the path to the domain being blocked by mud, trying to encourage the player to find creative ways to clean up the path before them, but whereas in BotW I was forced down that path, in TotK I simply paraglided right into the domain from a nearby sky island, which I knew the location of anyway, and so its effect was completely nullified.

Here’s the moments in TotK which I loved the most and were memorable to me: The buildup to the Wind Temple, finding the entrance to the Korok forest, and the entire Mineru questline (the least spoiler-y way I can put it). I imagine the first of these will find general agreement as the best setpiece from either of these games, but the second, to me, was this amazing eureka moment where I finally figured out how to get there. But imagine for a second if you could just glide into the Korok forest from a sky island. Do this, and it illustrates my problem with the rest of the game.

A lot of this would be alleviated if shrines were better, but they are shockingly just as bad in the exact same way that BotW shrines were bad. The introductory shrines on the Great Sky Island are the same level of complexity as all the rest of the shrines, they mostly start off with an idea that’s “very simple” and iterate on it until it’s “simple”. Many solutions are just “use recall on a thing then jump on it”, or “build something incredibly rudimentary with parts that the game gives you anyway, making it obvious what the solution is”, or “use ascend on one (1) thing”. Practically every “combat training” shrine is insulting, even to the intelligence of young children, and every demeaning jingle that played when I did something incredibly easy had me questioning whether I was in Nintendo’s target age range anymore. While BotW’s premise of “freedom” seemed to be Nintendo letting go of their coddling tendencies, shrines were evidence that they couldn’t let go entirely. I was expecting the sequel, at the very least, to develop this part of the game, or at least skip the shrines dedicated to tutorialising basic mechanics, but it still has the problem that some tutorial shrines will be found dozens of hours into the game. Personally, I found a sneakstrike tutorial and bow-bullet-time tutorial over 30 hours into my game, which would not only be bad on its own, but considering the previous game made the same mistakes 6 years ago, it’s embarrassing. I’m sorry if you like these shrines but I fundamentally think they are a bad idea; a game about discovery and exploration is at odds with the aesthetic homogeneity they offer. It’s still possible to solve them in multiple ways, but when the solutions are this easy, why spend any time experimenting?

Intrinsic motivation was an important concept in BotW, but intrinsic motivation needs to work in conjunction with extrinsic motivation in order to be compelling. A player may wander in a certain direction out of the intrinsic desire to go towards something that looks interesting, and the game may reward them with a shrine, but if an extrinsic reward is easily accessible without doing anything intrinsically interesting, the only thing stopping the player from bypassing it is their own willpower and ability to curate their own experiences. I could build a big mecha car with laser beams on it and roll into a moblin camp to commit war crimes, but when I can jump from a sky island directly to four shrines in the same timeframe, it dramatically challenges the lengths I need to go to “find my own fun”; I could spend 30 minutes experimenting with the most hilarious way to break the solution to a shrine, but when the intended solutions take about 2 minutes, it gets to the point where only the most dedicated players can make the most of the experience (again, why I think this game is designed with the Twitter clip in mind). In short, the intrinsic and extrinsic parts of this game are out of sync with each-other, or to put it in another way, there’s too much freedom.

This is starting to sound incredibly negative, but to be clear, I do think this is a good game, but in many ways it has exacerbated the problems latent in BotW, when many many other problems it hasn’t iterated on at all. It’s easy to ask for “more stuff” in a sequel, but despite BotW’s relative lack of content, it still inspired a sense of wonder in me that lasted throughout the majority of the game, some of which is lost simply by knowing where things are. When I stumbled upon Zora’s domain in BotW, it was magical. When I paraglided my way there in TotK, it was expected. When I found my first dragon, or maze, or the blood moon rose for the first time in BotW, it was special. When I found these same things in TotK I was bitterly disappointed that they reused them.

The story makes this all even more disappointing. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Link and Zelda have a fatal encounter with Ganon/dorf and some amount of time passes, Link, far into the future, travels around Hyrule enlisting the help of four champions/sages, a Rito, Gerudo, Zora and Goron, he finds the master sword, which Zelda had prepared in advance for him, and collects memories of the past which inform him of what happened. Finally, he travels into the interior/depths of Hyrule castle to confront Ganon/dorf, who turns into a beast and is ultimately defeated by Zelda and Link together in a mechanically dull cinematic final boss. Beneath the Zonai stuff, it's the exact same story, set in the same world.

It’s a good game, how could it not be? but during the marketing cycle, I was hoping it would be to BotW what Majora’s Mask was to Ocarina. Something that, despite using the same assets, offered a different experience and used its direct sequel status as an opportunity to tell a radically different story to the typical Zelda fare. This isn't a Majora's Mask, it’s a Twilight Princess, something with a superficially edgy veneer that ultimately struggles to find an identity distinct from the game it models itself on, something that feels "asked for", despite its parts that definitely weren't. I think I’m self-aware enough to realise that pontificating about the reception of a game is a waste of time, but given the glowing feedback this has received, I think we’re likely going to see the next Zelda game also retread the same ground, here’s hoping that once the new formula becomes stagnant again, we can see another Breath of the Wild, not in its flawed superficial mechanics, but in essence.

I don’t think I really have anything positive to say about the story that hasn’t been said by people who played this game right when it came out so before I go ham picking apart how much the second half of it bums me out I do want to say that I more or less like it and I think a lot of the positive reviews I’ve been reading here on backloggd are good, and that I agree with them! Me slapping this bad boy with a two point five and spending the next thousand words criticizing the bits that I couldn’t shake is not me saying that the writing in the game as a whole is bad, or that I didn’t enjoy it for the most part. Just wanna make it clear up front. I Like Psychonauts 2. I just haven’t really seen anybody talk about what I’m about to talk about which is wild to me because it has been a huge blinking light casting a terrible shadow over the back half of this experience for me, beginning as a small niggle and only growing larger and uglier the deeper we go.

So. Psychonauts 2 positions itself as a game about self-acceptance. Our ability to be cool to ourselves as much as we are other people, to cope with our traumas, to handle adversity in a healthy way. In a much more explicit way than in the first game, Raz every mind Raz enters involves him actively seeking to aid but not cure people. He gives them the push they need, or squeezes their hand in assurance when they’re wavering. This is a sweet premise to work from, and it works, mostly, in a vacuum. This is the real way the psychonauts are supposed to use their powers, we’re told, and the first lesson Raz has to learn is that responsibility and empathy. This is the first hitch, though; the psychonauts aren’t therapists, they’re mercenary spies, and ambiguously pseudo-nationalist ones at that? These two things, the “ask for permission before you enter a mind and only help people out” ethos and the “governments hire us to do spy work to protect people” work they actually do are simply incompatible. I would have accepted an argument that this is a game, if not for kids, then set in a childish universe, but Psychonauts 2 goes out of its way to forbid me from framing it that way, what with its central plot revolving around genocide, putting front and center imagery of violent suppression of peaceful protests even as it’s too PG to directly voice a character’s struggles with alcohol in dialogue.

Genocide really is the word I would prefer not to be typing right now and the Deluge of Grulovia is the event from which all of my little frictions with the game’s story blossom into full on disappointments. For as much as the actual battle with Maligula is key to the game as the event that shaped the lives of most of the people Raz interacts with, changed the course of his family history, and with the lengths the game goes to portray that specific event from many different points of view, it’s shocking to me how intensely uninterested it is in the context surrounding it.

Lucrecia is painted as a sympathetic character who was manipulated by people she trusted because of forces she couldn’t control within herself, but that’s not really true? It’s stated in the game that Maligula didn’t become her dominant personality until after the first time she committed mass murder, and it’s implied that it wasn’t the mass murder that did it, only the fact that she also killed her sister in the event. And sure, the first deluge event was an accident, but Lucrecia was still voluntarily and completely under her own volition aiding a fascist dictator in the violent suppression of people who were openly stated at multiple times throughout the game to be protesting the regime peacefully. When a fragment of Ford’s memory blames the Grulovian people for “pushing her too far” by…asking to not be oppressed, I think that there’s room to take that as a bitter piece of his psyche indulging in some dark thoughts, but honestly given the way the rest of the game portrays Lucrecia and the first generation of psychonauts it’s hard to say! Outside of the actual physical confrontation that had with Maligula that broke so bad, there’s just too little to contextualize how anybody else in the game felt about her, and what little we do see in Ford’s memories seems to portray it more along the lines of “we’re all worried about you!! You’re not acting like yourself!!” rather than treating her like the state sanctioned fascist she was?

And this is the thing right like, Ford should be the villain of this game, and it does seem like it’s gonna go this way with the initial reveal of what he did to Lucrecia and to Raz’s dad, but he never really answers for it. Raz forgets he’s mad at him after like two scenes. We see Raz’s dad experience the grief and trauma of remembering the truth but that’s the last time we see Raz’s family in the game – there’s no reckoning or reconciliation, no coming to terms at all. It’s a combination of two factors, one of which is a common problem in Tim Schafer games and the other a certainly unintentional but more insidious one. The first is that the end of this game is rushed as hell, and there’s no room for any real thematic resolution after the big climax. Any resolution, really. Lilly’s subplot, her dad’s, Raz’s family, Ford in particular, none of them get any time. There’s no denouement.

The other is the bigger thematic issue at play across this whole game. I’m loathe to use these words because they make me sound like a chud asshole but they’re shorthand that I think people will understand so I’ll just try to explain myself to the best of my ability. Psychonauts 2 feels like a Cozy game to me. Like a Wholesome game. I’ve seen a lot of people mention that it feels like some of the teeth are gone from specifically the comedy in this game and I would agree with that but I don’t mind it, the goofs are cute in this game and it got real actual laughs out of me a few times. But this sensibility has tendrilled out into the rest of the writing in a very uncritical way, to the detriment of this game having anything impactful to say about almost anything it wants to.

There’s a desire in Psychonauts 2 to be kind and respectful of people with mental illness and people who are struggling in general. This is good. But the aforementioned Wholesome Mentality shorthand is what gets you to the point where you’re accidentally saying that people who have been addicted to alcohol and people who resign themselves to self-pity and people who make selfishly unilateral harmful decisions for other people’s lives fully aware of the consequences that will ripple out across generations and people who commit genocide are equally worthy of forgiveness and reevaluation. It’s how you get a game that emphasizes the importance of asking for consent to enter a mind and then has you almost exclusively entering the minds of people who don’t have the faculties to provide actual consent, or worse, has Raz openly tricking people or asking people he knows can’t answer him, with every intention of doing it either way, and finally eschewing the consent thing altogether once we’ve decided that the guy we want to go into is a bad guy. In all of these cases there are justifications, and often good and reasonable ones, but there is also a lack of self-reflection. Why do we have these rules if we can so easily explain them away? How can we not consider our own relationship to power and institutional authority when we make these decisions and our excuses for them?

Psychonauts 2’s biggest failing isn’t that these things happen in the game, it’s not even that the game is so uninterested in interrogating the way it handles or presents them. It’s that it doesn’t seem to understand that there’s anything contradictory here at all.