This moment needs to be cherished. Double fine finally put out a product with the polish and technical competency to match it's whimsy and poignancy. Psychonauts 2 is the best narrative to grace the 3D platforming genre, and by a sizable amount. Characters like Bob and Ford are some of the most interesting and charismatic NPCs I've seen in a long time.

Psychonauts 2 operates with a deft touch, but is unafraid to teach Raz and the player lessons about mental health, the root of "evil" and the importance of companionship while making it fun to play.

The level design is a bit less chaotic in gameplay structure than the first game, but the worlds are of a more consistent quality here. There's only 2 (1.5?) levels for me that stand out as being a touch less engaging, but they're a minor blemish on a great package

I think the mechanical rust that's attributed to Psychonauts 2 is a bit overstated. It's not Super Mario Odyssey levels of fluidity, but it's a perfectly competent platformer mechanically. The actual flaw I'm willing to dock Psychonauts 2 for is the uneven pacing in the games opening hours. In the process of getting the ball rolling, Double Fine struck an uneven balance between exposition and assuming players came into it with all the necessary context. This is less of an issue starting with the first main brain in the hub, and disappears later on, but it's easy to see how players may be turned away early on, despite how rewarding it is to continue with

Really disappointing for me. Gets tedious quickly, and the story gets worse as the game goes on until it reaches a very not good conclusion. I could more easily forgive the weak narrative if the gameplay was consistently engaging, but it plays all of it's cards within 30 minutes of booting up. I think it's visually very interesting to look at, and those initial moments have some promise, but the product seems to be a solid few steps behind it's contemporaries narratively, and within the adventure genre

This is a lot to unpack.

About 50% of Omori is a goofy cosmic rpg in the vein of earthbound but not quite as well written or bespoke. Earthbound is an incredibly high water mark, and I don't want to make it seem like I'm penalizing Omori for not living up to it, but it's noteworthy when setting the table of what this game is offering. The best parts of the alt-RPG half of Omori come from the fantastic art direction for enemy encounters, and specifically bosses. The pen-drawn look is used excellently, and the boss encounters are full of personality.

The combat is also at it's best in boss encounters. Focusing on the emotion management in longer, in-depth fights against singular targets is a much better experience than it is in successive fights against multiple targets. Unfortunately, the RPG segments are paced rather poorly relative to the emotionally intense and interesting parts of the game, and having to fight random mobs is a lot of why. I found myself desperate to click Z through hours of gameplay to get to interesting boss fights, or back to the engaging narrative in the other 2 thirds. This narrative isn't too weak in isolation, but it's quite the thematic clash from Sunny's true arc, and the moments it peaks are the moments it puts the focus back on how Sunny's dreams are reflective of his trauma.

Another 40% of the game is the horror and psychological exploration that's attached to the dream sequences. This includes every White space visit, the black space, memory lane, the fear takeover sections with sunny, etc. This chunk of the game is by far the best aspect of it, and I wish it was leaned into further. The game is not your traditional horror experience, and I don't think it needs to be more horrifying, but I'd gladly sacrifice a few hours of Princess for more of Omori exploring unnerving corners of his psyche. The culmination of these game sections in the final day and branching endings is truly excellent. It's an extremely emotional ending on a variety of levels, and while I think the true emotional carnage it supposedly has had on people may be overstated, (before anyone comments, yes I do have personal experience with a lot of the challenging themes the game throws at you.) It's still a very sobering ending regardless on if you get Good/Bad/Neutral.

The final 10% of the game are the real world sections that aren't specifically going into the psychological horror. This 10% is the storytelling device for showing us what Omori's relationships are with the characters in his head, and contrasting giving us the historical context to piece together what we see in our nightmares. It does what it's meant to very well, and has the better comedic writing in the game.

Omori's linguistic writing isn't particularly spectacular. Thankfully, the best parts of the story are told through some truly amazing visual storytelling. For the sake of spoilers I won't provide concrete examples, but the imagery is extremely powerful in a variety of places, and really saves the story.

The sound design is solid as well. The compositions vary from excellent to acceptable, and it doesn't use sound in any unprecented ways, but it's a consistently solid experience throughout.

Evident from my score, I like Omori quite a bit. I think it's willingness to make brave design and narrative decisions is fantastic, and it's ability to make the player feel emotion is truly terrific...about 40% of the time. From the moment you conclude the last traditional Dream RPG section until the end of the game, I think it's nearly perfect. However, this is a 3/5 at best alt-RPG tacked on to a really exemplary psychologicsl horror RPG, and for the first 3/4 of the games run time, you spend more time doing the former than the latter. I completely understand negative scores from people who were unable to be engaged with Omori in the dog days of middling RPG, but I think if this is something that sounds enjoyable to you, it's really worth pushing through the gruff to find some really, really good game.