5 Years Ago, Double Fine Boldly Tried to Reimagine the AAA Machine

Psychonauts 2 turns five years old this month. Its existence, and Double Fine's story, are inextricably tied to Xbox for better, as Microsoft funding let Double Fine finish the game, but mostly for worse. Double Fine is once again independent after Xbox mismanaged its brands for years and its leadership ultimately decided that its studios, rather than its executives, should pay the price. It's a shortsighted move on many levels, not least because Double Fine and Psychonauts 2 represent a better, or at least a more enjoyable, future for big-budget games that Xbox and PlayStation are ignoring.

Psychonauts 2's best features are its writing and world design. I've extolled the virtues of the former in the not-too-distant-past, but the latter often gets overlooked or oversimplified as just psychedelic or "cool" (Rick Lane's deep dive from 2021 aside). It is psychedelic, but it's also a loud statement about what makes good video games good.

Because the answer to that isn't adding more pixels or making things seem as close to lifelike, or some bizarre approximation of lifelike, as possible — something as Nvidia recently discovered, with its disastrous attempt at "upscaling" character models. The answer is using flashy tech to do cool, fun stuff that riffs on the idea of fun. It doesn’t even have to be transformative. Psychonauts 2 is, to borrow a phrase some of my peers enjoy using, a video-game-ass video game. And it's not compromised by being one. The way Double Fine uses its tech and creativity blurs the lines between traditional game-y staples like platforms and collectibles into something much more ambitious and memorable.

Psychonauts 2's surrealist tooth platforms, for example, are still just platforms, the most standard video game element that's existed unchanged for decades. But they're icky and gigantic and disturbingly realistic. Moving across them, even just seeing them, feels horrible, which is the point. The level belongs to someone who's terrified of dentistry. The grind rails and of Compton's Cook-Off send you into what feels like an endless loop. You're on a timer and have so many things to do, but why is everything, even moving, taking so long and making even the simplest things so stressful!? Welcome to every moment of every day for Compton, the man whose mind you're inside.

Psychonauts 2's blend of style and function is uniquely Double Fine, but the studio isn't alone in its pursuit of creativity over trend-chasing. As my colleague Giovanni Colantonio recently argued, the Switch 2 exists so Nintendo has the freedom to fill its games with the kind of effects and off-the-wall mechanics that would've made the original Switch explode — not so you can see Link running around in his briefs in 4K. (Though I admit, a version of Tears of the Kingdom that doesn't make me want to barf just from looking at it is a very good thing.)

Image: Double Fine Productions

That creative ethos and the experiences it leads to are why games like South of Midnight win prestigious awards, why nearly 5 million people bought Donkey Kong Bananza, despite Donkey Kong historically underselling compared to Nintendo's other franchises, and why Fuse Games is taking a chance on the forthcoming Star Wars Galactic Racer. It's an unexpected blend of arcade-style racing game in an era when those are long-since out of fashion, made relevant and (potentially) exciting by the inclusion of some light roguelike elements. Sure, Galactic Racer's visual direction suggests it's your standard AAA game, but rather than making it a jaunty tour through exotic locales a la Forza Horizon (except, y’know, Star Wars-ified), Fuse is putting those environments to what seems like good use. Careless driving and crashing brings your career to a screeching halt, and there's no rewind. Time will tell whether Fuse's gambit pays off, but just the fact that another studio is thinking deeply about how to turn setting and action into something new and exciting is heartening.

Which makes Xbox doubling down on doing the same thing, but at a higher volume, all the more frustrating. Sony's strategy isn't much different, now that Naughty Dog, Guerrilla, and Insomniac are its primary studios. Take Astro Bot out of the lineup, and the last decade of PlayStation games is filled with different shades of the same over-the-shoulder action, with few efforts to try something, anything, daring or new.

So on Psychonauts 2's fifth birthday, I'm happy that Double Fine managed to bring its long-gestating dream baby into the world and has a plan for the future. But I'm saddened by how little this industry and the blinkered, self-destructive people in charge learned from Psychonauts 2 and its bold vision for a better future.