The award-winning game will become available to play on PS4 in the next couple of months.
Even if Double Fine has some troubles when it comes to full game releases and brand new IPs, the company has a rather good track record when it comes to remastering its old games. This is why the news that Psychonauts gets a PS4 port this Spring might make people that haven’t yet experienced the game pretty excited.
The port will be made from the game’s PS2 version, but Double Fine has yet to release any additional information regarding its exact release date or if it will have new features. The previous remastered version of Grim Fandango was actually pretty good in comparison to Double Fine’s full game Broken Age.
In regards to Psychonauts 2, waters are still somewhat murky. The majority of game critics responded to Tim Schafer’s decision to make the sequel a crowdfunded game in a rather skeptical manner. This is not entirely surprising if one would take into account how Schafer usually fares when it comes to crowdfunded games.
His first attempt at crowdfunding ended with a massive flop, with Double Fine completely ending Spacebase DF9’s support just after a few months after release. The so-called old-school adventure game Broken Age suffered from Tim Schafer’s ways of handling funds as well, even if the game was one of the biggest Kickstarter success stories to date.
After surpassing its original goal of $400,000 by a staggering amount, reaching $3,3 million when the campaign ended, Broken Age was split into two episodes due to the lack of funds. Of course, this decision made the general public become rather skeptical in regards to Double Fine’s business practices. The finished product was critically panned as well, being described by some critics as just a slightly above-average point and click adventure game.
The reason why this happened is thought to be based on massive feature creep. Once the company sees the amount of funds they gathered, they hire better voice actors, invest more towards graphical fidelity or advertising and so on, eventually running out of money before launching the game. If this will happen to Psychonauts 2, only time can tell.
Another shady part of the action-adventure platformer’s funding was how Tim Schafer chose to use Fig as a funding platform. Fig allows its users o invest large amounts of money while at the same time receiving a part of the game’s shares. The reason why the decision to launch Psychonauts 2 through Fig is seen as shady stems from the fact that the crowdfunding platform was created by Tim Schafer along with other people. Although many criticisms aimed at this are just allegations, they still have a somewhat fair point when it comes to Fig’s bias towards the game.
But the fact that Psychonauts gets a PS4 port this Spring still remains, with extremely high chances that it will be a very good and high-quality port to say the least, given the company’s track record. But only time will tell if that will be the case, as well as how Psychonauts 2 will get developed and become a reality. Hopefully, Tim Schafer learned his lesson when it comes to feature creep from crowdfunding and the sequel will not be split into episodes just like Broken Age was.
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