There have been rumors and rumblings for some time Psychonauts was finally going to get a sequel, and now it seems it’s happening.
It has certainly had a case of bad luck, though, as Double Fine wanted to do this some time ago but the project seemed to be in limbo due to the success of Broken Age.
However, that time has now ended and Tim Schafer has spoken about the sequel we have all been waiting for. He has confirmed that it will be on Double Fine’s very own crowdfunding platform, Fig, which allows you to invest money and actually see a return on that investment.
Schafer spoke with Eurogamer over Skype, saying: “With Fig people are actually going to be able to participate in the success of it. So if the game is a hit, they’ll get royalties from it. That allows us to go bigger.”
Double Fine have also had a pretty successful couple of years, so they themselves will contributing a lot towards development alongside a mysterious investor who has supposedly thrown in a lot of cash.
Schafer is expecting Psychonauts 2 to receive roughly a cumulative $13m budget.
“All three of those things combined will bring us to a scope similar to the first game.”Each of those three parts on their own would not be enough to fund this game, but together it makes it possible.”
“We’re going to be using Unreal this time, so we’re not writing an engine from scratch. So that’s a big chunk of our budget that we don’t need to worry about. We know a lot more than we knew with the first [game]. The first game took five years because we were just big dummies, and now we’re not big dummies anymore.”
For those of you wondering about Psychonauts 2’s story, apparently it will follow Raz as he becomes a fully fledged Psychonaut and grows disillusioned with the institution which he had so idolised.
“The first game was about summer camp and Raz trying to be a psychonaut, the second game is Raz is now a psychonaut and he’s going to Psychonaut Headquarters to see how they do it downtown. So he’s going to be hanging out at the actual psychonaut’s headquarters where they do international espionage and he’s going to be meeting the actual people who run the psychonauts.”
“Sasha and Milla are going to return, and Lili, and you’re going to be seeing them in their natural environment; not in their summer camp clothes, but in their super secret spy headquarters. And from that hub you’re going to go into another series of mental worlds and exploring the secrets of the history of the psychonauts organisation.”
“Raz finds out that they’re actually not as perfect as he imagined they were from the comic books he read all his life. And they actually have in some ways things that are very troubling that he’s going to have to fix, and they in some ways need him more than he needs them. But to do that he’s going to have to go into his own backstory, exploring a lot of things that were eluded to in the first game in terms of the curse that’s been put on his family – to die in water – and where that curse came from and how that ties into the history of the psychonauts itself.”
It seems as well that this sequel will still hold the spirit of the fantastic, yet rough around the edges original. However, Double Fine and Schafer himself have come a long way since then, and have undoubtedly honed their craft in that time.
“The major twist with Psychonauts I felt was that each level had a big twist on the gameplay. Not so much in changing every power that Raz had, but how the world behaved and how Raz behaved in the world. Sometimes he would stick to the ceiling, sometimes he would be a giant monster going through a town full of tiny monsters, so each level put the same mechanics in a weird situation and context. But you were still part acrobat, part psychic and using those powers to get through the game. That’s going to the same, but much more honed and polished and refined.”
Apparently, while the dev team working on the game will be bigger than the one that worked on Broken Age, it’s important to remember that some of their talent will be working on other things such as Day of the Tentacle Remastered.
You can watch the Fig pitch for Psychonauts 2 below.
