Developers Double Fine is still working on its follow-up to its cult-classic platformer Psychonauts. Originally planned for a 2020 release, the game is now delayed to 2021.
But thankfully, the game is currently looking to be near-complete, as revealed in a new YouTube dev diary video looking at the state of Psychonauts 2’s development. Now that it’s after the holidays, content and features have been locked.
“The goal is to then come back in the new year. You know, go away for a vacation. Come back. And just polish what’s there,” said Double Fine founder and Psychonauts 2 creative director Tim Schafer.
Schafer also shared that they are now internally against crunch to ensure the game is released this year. He shared how his past experience at the now-defunct LucasArts had carried over to Double Fine, leading to “the worst crunch mode of all time” while working on the original Psychonauts.
“We are like:’ We will not do it! We are against crunch mode!’ We talk about it publicly. We talk about it with the team. We’ve made our assurances,” Schafer said.
“Because this is the time when it’s so tempting to do it, because if you can’t move the money, and you can’t move the schedule, and you can’t move the quality of the game, you can just move the quality of everyone’s life down a lot, by making them coming to work a lot.”
Instead, the team are now cutting features that are not worth implementing to ensure they keep to their schedule, which we can see some snippets of the process in the video.
Also revealed in the dev diary is there will be a post-game mode. In Psychonauts 1, the game has a point-of-no-return (which is nicely pointed out) where any progress beyond that point will lead to the ending. Psychonauts 2 will let you be back in the world post-game to further complete the stuff you might have missed out without needing to roll back to a previous save.
Psychonauts 2 is now set for release sometime this year.