It would have been cool to have a little more time or a few extra puzzles where we could have put the full extent of Raz’s abilities into action.The road to a new Psychonauts game has been a long and uncertain one. Though many of the puzzles were good leading up to that full-power moment, it doesn’t offer a great amount of opportunity where you get to use everything you’ve learned before you’re done. The problem is that once you’ve got Raz’s full repertoire back, it doesn’t feel very long before the end credits are rolling. As stated before, you lose access to most of Raz’s powers and gradually gain them back one by one. Rhombus of Ruin is around a 4-6 hour romp from beginning to end. The only real issue with Rhombus of Ruin comes from how short it is versus its pacing. Even without that, it’s also just kind of fun to hear what Raz has to say about things when you interact with them. Add to this that nearly everybody from the original Psychonauts has returned to deliver their voices for the characters and lend some extra fun and exposition to the whole experience. It’s a pretty amusing place to explore and getting a look at everything from various angles thanks to Clairvoyance is an enjoyable romp in of itself. Outside of the mysterious installation in which the captive Truman Zanotto is held, the ocean floor is littered with planes, trains, and automobiles, quite literally, from multiple eras. Without giving too much away, the Rhombus of Ruin is exactly what you might expect out of a fantastical Bermuda Triangle spoof. The environments and characters are looking great as well. It’s in this way that the game slowly builds the complexity of the problems and doesn’t overburden players with having to using everything in Raz’s psychic repertoire all at once. You start with Clairvoyance and visual puzzles and exploration, but it isn’t long before you’re burning wooden boxes with Incinerate or using Telekinesis to push and pull distant levers. Throughout the game, Raz slowly gains access of all of his powers back through the help of his fellow agents. Though you start with access to all of Raz’s psychic toolkit and a pretty good guide on how to use each power, an early event cuts off access to most of Raz’s more powerful abilities, forcing him to make use of only a few of them. It jumps in a little hot, but it also does a pretty commendable job of getting players unfamiliar with the first game up to speed. It makes for some clever first-person puzzle-solving in the quirky context of the Psychonauts lore. The use of VR means interacting with something is as simple as looking directly at it and activating whichever power you need. Clairvoyance allows Raz to spring his consciousness from body to body to get different perspectives on the room while other powers like Incinerate, Psi-Poke, Psi-Blast, and Telekinesis allows Raz to directly interact with and manipulate objects in the room. Often confined to one place for one reason or another, players use Raz’s psychic powers to interact with the environments in a myriad of ways and solve puzzles to either discover more clues or move forward on the mission to save Raz’s friends and Truman. The Psychonauts aren’t far on the trail to Truman before they find themselves plunging towards an underwater base in the Rhombus of Ruin: An area of the ocean as mysterious and deadly as two Bermuda Triangles.Īs a VR game, much of Rhombus of Ruin takes place from the perspective of Raz. Joining Raz and Lili are the fun loving and extravagant Milla, the strict and stalwart Sasha and the regimental former baddie Coach Olleander. Truman Zanotto, Grand Head of the Psychonauts and father of Raz’s girlfriend Lili, has been kidnapped and it’s up to the Psychonauts to find and rescue him. After becoming an agent of the psychic group established by the government that we know as the Psychonauts, Raz is finally off on his first assignment. Rhombus of Ruin picks up right where the first Psychonauts left off. Rhombus of Ruin is short, but it does well as a VR game, a reminder of the colorful quirk many of us like about the Psychonauts world and a teaser of what’s coming next. This title puts us behind the eyes of Raz in a VR puzzle adventure. Thankfully, Double Fine has us covered with Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin. Psychonauts 2 is thankfully coming, but it still feels quite a ways away and with such a gap in between, it leaves a craving for something to sate the palate while we wait on Tim Schafer and Double Fine to deliver on the anticipated sequel. Psychonauts always presented a fun world to play in, but it’s been quite a while since we had anything substantial to interact with in that universe.
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