Trivia / Psychonauts 2

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• Author's Saving Throw:
  • As the years passed between the first Psychonauts' release, there was growing pushback against the game's casual use of the word "gypsy", which is considered a slur towards the Romani people. Tim Schafer would acknowledge this backlash in a 2015 Reddit AMA, stating he was unaware of the word's history and that it would not be used in Psychonauts 2. ^explanation Notably, when the game was released in 2005, the word was much more commonly used in the United States, including by the Romani community themselves. As international communication grew, Americans became more aware of how it was considered offensive to the Romani community in Europe, and has since fallen out of favor globally.
  • In the first game, Raz invaded the minds of the four mental patients of Thorney Towers under dubious consent. While Edgar and Fred had expressed a desire to be helped, Gloria and Boyd couldn't ask for it due to their impairments. While the original game treats the patients with enough respect to make this a non-issue, Raz performing mental psychiatry for people who physically can't say no has implications that are questionable at best. This is driven home especially in the "Milkman Conspiracy" level, where Boyd Cooper, thanks to Raz, changes from a paranoid gatekeeper to his old arsonist self, as he destroys the building near the end of the story. After that, he flees with the other patients, never to be seen again, and we never know whether or not he changed for the better. So in this game, Hollis' levels are dedicated to showing just how badly recklessly trying to affect people's minds without their consent can go, and Sasha explicitly points out to Raz that because of the immense power they hold over a person's mind, the Psychonauts have to respect the boundaries of their patients and be careful not to overstep them. Additionally, almost every mind you enter in the second game is done so either at the patient's explicit consent, a superior's consent, or to prevent a crisis from occurring, which prevents any questionable implications from arising. The only two minds that buck this trend are Bob and "Truman", but both minds have reasonable explanations for this - for Bob, his plants request Raz's help in curing their gardener in the same way a group of friends might stage an intervention for someone that's suffering from addiction, and it's implied that subconsciously, Bob is the one controlling the plants and secretly desires help through them. In the case of "Truman", not only does Raz have reasonable motivation to enter "Truman"'s mind after seeing how odd he's acting, but Lili asks him to help her dad, which is also presented like an intervention for someone clearly suffering from an unaddressed mental disorder. This is intentional, as in an article, Double Fine expressed a desire to deal with the topic of mental health in an even more tasteful way compared to the last game.
• Blooper: In the cutscene where Maligula reawakens, Milla and Sasha are seen wearing their old outfits. When they get sucked into the whirlpool immediately afterwards, Milla's back in her new outfit.
• The Cast Showoff: Appropriately, for someone voiced by Jack Black, the ending of PSI King's Sensorium involves a big musical number from the PSI King himself.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: Jack Black as PSI King/Helmut Fullbear and Elijah Wood as Nick Johnsmith/Gristol Malik.
• Defictionalization: As this video shows, Press Kits come with a real pair of Razputin's goggles for use with the kit. Likewise, said kits also come with a real version of the Messenger Bag Raz uses in the game, which high level backers also received.
• Development Gag:
  • The game contains a few references to previous Double Fine projects, as well as some game prototypes made during Double Fine's "Amnesia Fortnight" game jams.
    • There's a mug shaped like Big Leg from Pendleton Ward's Little Pink Best Buds from AF 2014.
    • The level "Compton's Cook Off" seems to be inspired by The Gods Must Be Hungry from AF 2017.
    • The final level has a matryoshka doll hidden somewhere that resembles the ones from Stacking.
    • If you use Clairvoyance on one of the characters, they see Raz as Eddie Riggs.
  • Inside the Psychoisolation Chamber, Terryl attempts to unsuccessfully guess Raz's name. The closest she gets is "d'Artagnan", the scrapped protagonist of the first game.
  • Oleander grouses about how the mecha he was going to build was scrapped due to the Psychonauts cutting his budget. As this news post from Double Fine explains, he was going to have a mech but it was scrapped because of out-of-universe budget cuts. (That, and because when the third act was reworked it became unnecessary.)
• Fandom Nod: When encountered during the post-game, Loboto will tell Raz that he needs to get back to camp because he left his kid there. This appears to be a nod to the popular fan theory that Bobby Zilch is Loboto's son.
• Network to the Rescue: The money Double Fine raised through crowdfunding ended up running out midway through the game's production, which would have led to certain features (such as boss fights) being cut or scaled back. Fortunately, when Microsoft purchased Double Fine, they provided additional funding that allowed them to restore those features.
• No Port For You: While the game launched for PlayStation 4 as promised by the crowdfunding campaign, there is no native PlayStation 5 version (though the PS4 version is playable on the PS5 under enhanced backwards compatibility, bumping the frame rate to 60), despite there being a native version for Xbox Series X|S. There was also no native MacOS or Linux port until 9 months after release, despite also being promised in the kickstarter. The lack of a proper PS5 port and the cross-platform port delays are likely due to Microsoft's buyout of Double Fine during the game's production. Notably, there is still no Switch port of the game, as it doesn't have the same Grandfather Clause of being a kickstarter reward the MacOS or Linux ports' did, but as Microsoft has no issue with supporting the Switch, this may well be a compatibility issue primarily.
• Playing with Character Type: Elijah Wood is usually cast as an innocent, "soft" character. After Nick drops his mask, he turns out to be a Psychopathic Manchild who thinks he can successfully control a Generic Doomsday Villain. On another note, he speaks all of the PSI-King's lines while his brain is in Nick's body, which essentially makes him Elijah Wood playing Jack Black playing Helmut Fulbear, and he pulls it off amazingly when Helmut-in-Nick's-body reunites with Bob.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • James Willems has championed the original Psychonauts for years and regularly talks about how much he loves the game. He and his wife voice the two expectant rich skeletons in the Maternity Ward of Hollis' Hot Streak.
  • Jack Black originally signed on for Brutal Legend partially because he loved the original Psychonauts. Here, he plays one of the Psychic Six, Helmut Fullbear.
• Release Date Change: The game was originally intended to be released in 2018, only to be delayed several times to 2021. That said, the scope of the game was significantly expanded after the Microsoft acquisition, and the game touts that it was made without any developer crunch, so the delay was rather understandable.
• Sequel Gap: Downplayed. While Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin came out in 2017, it still took 16 years since the original for a true sequel to the original to be created.
• Technical Advisor: The game relied on the help of a mental health expert to make sure the game's portrayals of mental health disorders were both accurate and empathic, in contrast to the original game depicting mental issues as Single-Issue Psychoses that could be solved by having a psychic kid locate the part of one's mind representing their neuroses and beat it up.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Starbreeze was set to be the publisher of the game until Microsoft bought the publishing rights along with purchasing Double Fine. In spite of this, the game was still released on all previously announced platforms.
  • It has been stated that without Xbox’s financial backing, boss fights (among other features) would have been cut from the game.
  • PSI King/Helmut Fullbear was originally going to be a classical opera singer, hence his horned Viking helmet and his name sounding like "Viking". He eventually became a psychedelic/acid rock singer instead, though the Viking motif stayed.
  • Adam's name was originally Aaron, but got changed during development. This can be seen in the filenames, which refer to him as Aaron.
  • There was initially going to be a game mechanic relating to something called "Distilled Emotions". Voice lines in the files suggest that these were going to be related to the bottled emotions people stuff down inside of them.
  • Cut voice lines suggest that there was a scrapped minigame that Raz could play with his family called Gruloky. Raz mentions the game when picking up the Gruloky deck in the Astral Lanes.
  • Lines of a 5th Cassie Archetype remain in the depths of the second game's coding. This Cassie lived in a paper recreation of Green Needle Gulch and represented her idealized memories of the Psychic Six before Lucrecia left for Grulovia.
  • Oleander's oft-mentioned mecha (that he never built due to budget constraints in-universe and out) was going to be a mermaid mech that tied into Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin. The idea was that Gristol would steal it to fight the Psychonauts and Raz would not be able to fight it because the mer-mech fights with water, so he would have to go into Augustus' mind to defeat the water curse so he could beat it.
  • Bob's Brain went through lots of iterations before ending up on the final setting. The most work saw Raz shrink down to a tiny size and walk along branches of a bonsai tree which you could then flood or dry out to access new areas and solve puzzles. Fighting off tiny insects and manipulating dew drops to drown enemies.
  • A fishing mechanic was prototyped but ultimately cut.
  • "Brainstorm" is a scrapped psychic power, which would create a storm cloud which periodically shoots lightning, activating electrical switches and transforming enemies into different enemies or animals. A transformed enemy taking damage would result in that enemy being locked in that form. It would've been taught to Raz while he's in Compton's brain, with the intent of swapping the ingredients into different ingredients. It was scrapped because the transformations were too random for a level that required specific outcomes, and the electrical switches lacked utility.
  • There was going to be a subplot about a Love Triangle between Ford, Lucy and Bob in the past, with the twist that Bob was in love with Ford and not Lucy like everyone thought.
  • According to The Art of Psychonauts 2, there were plans for the endgame to take place in Grulovia, where the aforementioned mech battle would occur and where Ford had hid Lucy. When that section was cut due to time constraints, the story was changed from Ford hiding Lucy in Grulovia to Ford giving her and Augustus Fake Memories.

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