Psychonauts 2 Is Finally Playable, Developers Release Milestone Video To Celebrate

It seems like only yesterday that Double Fine launched a crowdfunding campaign to get its long-awaited sequel Psychonauts 2 off the ground. But today, the developer showed that it's making a great deal of progress, with a 14-plus minute video showcasing the game in fully playable form.

Don't get too excited yet, as Psychonauts 2 still has a ways to go before it becomes available to the market. But it's nice to see that Tim Schafer and company have made notable progress on the sequel, which once again brings back Raz and company as they invade dreams and other weird areas, using their special skills to stay in one piece.

Here's the update straight from the Fig crowdfunding page:

"The "First Playable" is an area of the game that we've built to test our new pipelines and workflows across all departments — art, animation, tech, design, cinematics, etc. We've tested all of this a lot during pre-production, but this is our first big attempt to create a fully arted up, fully playable chunk of gameplay with all the systems, art, gameplay, and tech working in the same place. You may see other teams refer to something like this as a "Vertical Slice" , though we don't use this terminology because it tends to imply a level of polish and completeness that isn't really required at this stage of production.

"This doesn't mean that we now have a final area made to shippable quality, there's still a lot of work to be done. It does however represent a fully playable area that has all the things a level of the game should have: elements like player movement, combat, quests, experience, UI all working together with scratch dialogue and audio, some rough visual effects, textures, lighting, even a cut-scene. This means we can be iterating on these systems so they can be as good as possible for the final game."

So, again, we're waiting a while, but it looks like Psychonauts 2 will certainly be worth it – especially with Schafer back at the helm. Bring back the fish destroying the city!

Psychonauts 2 will release in 2018 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.