KickStarter Psychonauts 2

[Verylittlefishes]

Meat Circus

Still arguably the worst level of the game.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I never got the complaints about the Meat Circus. It definitely doesn’t have anything on Waterloo World, Black Velvetopia, Milkman Conspiracy, or Lungfishopolis, but I prefer it to Sasha’s shooting gallery or Gloria’s Theater.

 

[kain30]

This one flew completely under my radar. D1P!

 

[J_C]

I never got the complaints about the Meat Circus. It definitely doesn’t have anything on Waterloo World, Black Velvetopia, Milkman Conspiracy, or Lungfishopolis, but I prefer it to Sasha’s shooting gallery or Gloria’s Theater.

Same here. I just played it through like any levels, it was some time later when I read all the complaints about it. And I was like, what, there wasn't anything outrageous about it.

 

[J_C]

 

[Forest Dweller]

Already pre-installed on Gamepass.

 

[Ghulgothas]

Power Modifiers, Enemy Healthbars, Minibosses and about 4 new common enemies. Didn't expect the combat side of all things to get this much of an expansion over the original.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I revisited Rhombus of Ruin (as much as that is possible, considering I don't own a VR-set) to see if there is anything in there needed to help understand Psychonauts 2.

I'll just quote Wikipedia here for the plot:

Spoiler

At the end of Psychonauts Raz is recognized as a talented PSI Cadet and is asked to join his tutors as a fully fledged Psychonaut. But as Raz prepares to leave Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp with his father, news arrives that Lili's father, the Grand Head of the Psychonauts Truman Zanotto, has been kidnapped. The team (Raz and Lili included) fly off in the Psychonauts' jet to rescue him. Using his Clairvoyance ability, Raz discovers Zanotto is being held at an abandoned Psychonaut research facility in the Rhombus of Ruin (a play on the Bermuda Triangle). The team travels into the Rhombus of Ruin, but the jet crashes before they can act.

Raz awakens tied to a chair in the chamber Zanotto is being kept. Using his psychic abilities to explore the junk-filled ocean, Raz finds Sasha, Milla, Lili and Oleander trapped in hallucinations due to a Psylirium deposit below them. After freeing his team from their hallucinations, Raz is pulled back into the chamber by Zanotto's kidnapper, the insane ex-dentist Dr. Loboto. By using a Psycho-Portal given to him by Oleander, Raz enters Loboto's mind. There, he fights a gigantic version of Loboto and enters his memories, where Raz learns Loboto was once a psychic himself, and his parents disapproved of his abilities and had him sent to Thorney Towers where they lobotomize him, removing his psychic powers and driven him insane.

After Raz exits Loboto's mind, Loboto seems to have a change of heart, but instead leaves Raz and the others and floods the base. They escape from the base with Zanotto, and the game ends with Lili telling her father about their adventures, and him shouting in disbelief that Raz is her boyfriend, unannounced to everyone, Loboto hijacked into the jets overhead bin.

I think the key points here are:

# Just like Psitanium can boost psychic abilities, Psylirium warps and dispels them. Don't be surprised if it makes an apperance.
# Lili makes a new friend, Harold the rat. He 'plays' a supporting role in Rhombus of Ruin, and is on board the plane at the end. Let's see if he returns in the sequel.
# Truman is barely conscious during a few key points in the game, but his mind is inaccessible to Raz.
# During a 'making of'-video for Rhombus of Ruin it is revealed that the Psychonauts-games take place in the 1980s, though it's purposefully left vague "in case we need a piece of technology that we're stealing from the 90's."

Finally, here's the reconstructed soundtrack to Rhombus of Ruin, enjoy!

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

 

[Unkillable Cat]

If you're the living embodiment of

then this video is all you need to get up to speed on the sequel:

 

[Ivan]

happy to see the warm reception the game's receiving. looking forward to playing

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-08-20-psychonauts-2-review

Psychonauts 2 review - a feast for the wandering mind
Brain-pleaser.

As witty, eccentric and imaginative as the 2005 action-platformer, with a more developed understanding of mental health.

I played through the original Psychonauts properly for the first time this year. I've been trying to work out how it would feel to play it at release in 2005, at a horrible time in my life, long before I'd given any structured thought to things like trauma and depression. Would it have offered me any useful insight? I'm undecided. Psychonauts is a clever and caring game but it's hardly a coherent or clinical investigation of mental health, and nor does it claim to be. It's a witty and humanising reworking of clichés of madness and repression, a psychedelic 3D platformer in which you dive into brains and roam mental landscapes that range from Manchurian Candidate suburbia to Oedipal circuses of pulsing meat. With its twisty asylums and literal emotional baggage, it's far more surreal gothic comedy than educational fable. Still, I think 2005 me might have taken solace from its teachers: Sasha Nein and Milla Vodello and yes, even Coach Oleander, who place their all-too-fragile inner worlds at your disposal so that you can hone your skills as a budding psychic agent.

Rolling and bouncing around those brilliant stages, messing with Sasha's tightly-wound neural plumbing and visiting the house fire inside Milla's cerebral disco, I thought of how my own teachers had, in various ways, opened their minds to me, suffered my trampling questions and generally made themselves vulnerable so that I could learn. I don't want to suggest that this is everybody's experience of teaching, or being taught, or that there's no place in teaching for boundaries. But it's surely the kind of connection every teacher hopes to create, and plenty of game developers, too: here is the world of my experience. Spend time with me here and see what you can bring away. Having learned from these worlds, you're then in a position to restore them, helping the owner confront their personal demons and unpack buried truths. It's an idea carried forward into Psychonauts 2 - the same clever and caring game, but slicker, busier and with updated notions of mental health that reflect, not least, the crunch and burn-out of the original's development.
Psychonauts 2 begins just after the events of VR expandalone Rhombus of Ruin, with circus acrobat turned mind-diver Razputin Aquato joining the intern programme at Psychonauts HQ - an Epcot Centre-style hub where you'll find brains in hamster balls and a man haunted by visions of flying bacon. The first thing you do is hack the memories of one Dr Loboto, a character from the original who has links to a legendary psychic megavillain from decades past. The plot is about investigating said megavillain - who, shocker, may be more than a memory - and her relationship to the original founders of the Psychonauts, a collection of traumatised hippy Avengers whose brainscapes are all badly in need of a visit from the janitor.

The Motherlobe and the forests, mine shafts and swamps that surround it are the game's overworld, a winding and plunging expanse of bounce pads, rope swings, rails, ladders, collapsing platforms, secondary fetchquests and dozens upon dozens of collectibles. The 'dungeons' are the minds of the people you'll meet, which you must probe and revitalise to glean clues about your ultimate adversary. Milla, Sasha, Oleander, Ford Crueller and Raz's off-and-on girlfriend Lili return from the original game; new arrivals include a gang of bullying fellow interns and Raz's circus siblings, all raised to fear psychics and as such, not entirely trusting of their wayward brother. The writing is more sweet and dry than laugh-out-loud funny, but there are some wonderful sketches: the intern making pancakes with the aid of some terrified forest creatures ("I CAN HEAR YOU ROLLING YOUR EYES, MRS THATCHER"), splitscreen heist sequences, and any scene featuring Raz's sugary-savage mother Donatella.

Raz himself is much the same scrawny yet resourceful 10-year-old as before: the butt of many jokes, touchingly naïve at times, older than his years at others. He's still a talented acrobat, with cleaned-up platforming controls that, nonetheless, probably won't keep Mario awake at night, and he has all his old psychic abilities: telekinesis, mind bullets, pyrokinesis, a clairvoyance skill that lets him turn other characters into CCTV cameras, and the ability to funnel his brainwaves into a bouncy balloon that can be run on for speed or dangled from to glide.

The old progression system is back too, warts and all. Skills, equipped in sets of four, are upgraded by plugging psy-cards into eyeballs to generate points for your intern card. It's still a weirdly roundabout way of doing level-ups, almost redolent of Destiny's preposterous currencies, and it's just the tip of the iceberg. Psychonauts 2 is an absolute quagmire of dropped tat: psitanium shards with which to buy consumables and "pins" that modify your abilities, "insight" statuettes for additional level-up points, and "half-a-minds" that can be paired to increase your max health. It carries the weight gracefully, however, because most of the collectibles plug into a joke or complement their surroundings in some way - be it a piece of emotional baggage beaming at being united with the appropriate luggage tag, or the use of "figments of the imagination" to flesh out levels with drifting themed doodles of germs, tombstones and cats.

It sometimes feels like Psychonauts 2 fancies its chances at being a Devil May Cry-style combat style builder. The upgrade options include extra combo hits, ground-pounds, health leaching, dodge attacks and projectile mods. While spruced-up with a new auto-lock, the base combat isn't really tight or involving enough to justify all the appendages, and in any case, 3D platformers like this are typically better when your abilities are left crisp and unblurred. The tactics are seldom more demanding than targeting an enemy with the right skill, and it's a chore to keep opening the ability wheel to switch things up during multiple-wave encounters.

The mindscapes more than make up for it, however. The thrill of Psychonauts 2 is partly that it's a return to the concept of level-based worlds, which nowadays feel like an endangered species - squeezed out by an industry-wide contempt for interruptions of any kind that owes something to virtuoso "no-cuts" auteurism and something to the modern cult of engagement and monetisation. Double Fine's choice of mental over physical geography allows it to sidestep all that without trying to. Of course there are breaks in the flow: skulls are thick, minds vary, and who amongst us really thinks in one world all the time?

Spoiler

Playing Psychonauts 2 is like opening a series of presents. There are hints of the old platforming staples such as ice and lava, but most levels are delightful originals that put a gentle spin on the fundamentals of hopping and blasting. One brain harbours a full-blown 90s cooking show with some of the best-observed musical pastiche I've encountered in a game, featuring monstrous handpuppet judges and an audience of ecstatic meat and veg who must be prepped against the clock. Another houses a rock concert dressed in Sergeant Pepper hues, with rainbow bridges winding from prisms over a shimmering lake of stars, and a "Feelmobile" ferrying you between main stage and camping grounds.

All of these spaces hide other spaces. Giant bottles on the tropical shores of a Mario Galaxy-esque potted planet are portals to an iridescent swamp of yellows and violets, where belching seedpod heads blow convenient craters in the scum. Another city level is set inside an extremely unsanitary bowling shoe, where germs in trilbies await the coming of the dreaded Spray-pocalypse. There are nods to other games like Super Monkey Ball, though nothing quite as inspired as the first game's riff on tabletop wargaming, and bosses - added thanks to Double Fine's mid-development partnership with Microsoft - that are stupendous of conceit if slightly rickety in execution.

These worlds are more than parodies. Psychonauts 2 might play fast and loose with conventions and references, but its micro-realities have substance. It's all about consistency and follow-through: if you are going to play through a character's backstory in the form of a theme park ride, you need to have disenchanted staff taking tickets, gantries overhead where stencilled handymen peer down with cigarettes, and a control room where Lili can yell instructions through a mic. Each inner world has a slice-of-life ambience redolent of Pixar, with NPCs pursuing their own little stories in the corners - circus fleas arguing about whose turn it is on the trapeze, rattling animatronic clerks getting all steamed up about misaddressed mail, and a dragon trying to talk down a knight in shining armour.

All this was true of the original game. But where Psychonauts 2 stands apart is in the careful line it walks between caricature and empathy, between treating neurological foibles as quirks and applying a more sophisticated understanding of concepts like anxiety, addiction and post-traumatic stress. The game's opening screen forewarns you that it's a work of fantasy, but its levels and writing are shaped nonetheless by a sense of responsibility built around consultation with organisations such as Take This. Raz, for example, usually asks for permission to enter somebody's mind, though this obviously isn't always possible where villains are concerned.

Part of that ethic of responsibility is recognising that an action-platformer template may not be the best vehicle for what are essentially acts of invasive therapy (or, when it comes to hostile characters, sanitised interrogations). This comes across especially in certain new tools and enemies. One of the new additions is a grapple that is presented as forming "mental connections" between grey thought spirals, linking up concepts with dotted lines. On getting hold of this, Raz promptly uses it to tamper with somebody's mind to disastrous effect, transforming their inner universe into a tortured blend of hospital and casino. It's an opening, welcome acknowledgement that to portray somebody's psyche as an obstacle course carries the potential for abuse.

The expanded enemy line-up, meanwhile, hovers intriguingly on the edge of a Serious Games-style recreation of debilitating mental phenomena. At the sillier end of the scale you get Judges with over-sized gavels; Doubts, which bog you down; and Bad Moods that drift around hurling expletives till you use Clairvoyance to see through their eyes and track down the caged heart that will restore their good humour. But you also get fairly full-on recreations of panic attacks, manifest here as polychromatic monsters that teleport around spitting darts till snared in a bubble of slow-mo. The first time you encounter these creatures, it's inside the mind of somebody who is dealing with feelings of sensory overwhelm and dissociation. Enablers, meanwhile, are goblin cheerleaders that make other cognitive fauna invincible.

I never felt that Psychonauts took any damaging liberties with these portrayals, but there is definitely a tension between Double Fine's continuing debts to various gothic clichés and the second game's more sober awareness of things like consent and gaslighting. There's an awkward moment when Agent Nein takes Raz aside to lecture him about the aforesaid act of wanton rewiring - while simultaneously handing him the ability to re-enter any brain he's visited where he has "unfinished business". Here, the platform game collect-a-thon element wins out over the story the game wants to tell. The same seems true of the last level, which hints at the ethic of dawning self-knowledge and acceptance that characterise most previous levels, but ends with you booting somebody's oversized vindictive streak into a big old pit of repression - because every platformer needs its final boss.

I'm not sure these are entirely criticisms, however. For me, watching Double Fine pick its way through this messy web of cliché and insight, imperfectly translating very complex phenomena into architecture, opponents and abilities, is part of the appeal. Psychonauts 2 is, once again, a universe of damaged teachers and teaching environments, a space for thinking through dark thoughts with varying degrees of earnestness and absurdity. Its worlds are works of matchless invention, its characters a joy to exist alongside. I might have missed it first time round, but I'm glad that games like this are still being made.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/psychonauts-2-review/

PSYCHONAUTS 2 REVIEW
Jump for joy, sorrow, regrets and more in Psychonauts 2.

You can tell a lot about a game's soul by what it deems a 'perk'. Fallout 3, for example, thinks being better at murdering women is one. In Modern Warfare it's dropping a grenade after death like a smug ghost. In Psychonauts 2, Double Fine will sell you a 'beastmastery' pin badge modifier that allows Raz's psychic fist—usually used for thumping and tossing—to stroke woodland animals. You spend money to hurt fewer things. Another pin makes him groove when left unattended; dance like nobody's watching, when no one is playing. Honestly? It's a tonic.

As headlines go, "Tim Schafer game favours silliness over sadism" is hardly a shocker. But it's been 15 years since the original; time enough to forget how silly Psychonauts can be, and the startling places those jokes can take us. Of course, for the game's inhabitants, it's been but three days: wannabe Psychonaut Raz left Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp on a rescue mission—seen in VR spin-off Rhombus of Ruin—and we rejoin him in its aftermath. A video fills all that in, but first-hand experience is recommended given the juicy callbacks throughout.

And what a start: a Mission Impossible-style con to fool a villain inside his own mind, only for a dental fixation to infect the plan. With its heroes' power to enter and influence the psyche, I always thought Psychonauts did the Inception thing long before Inception, and this ESPionage only hammers the similarity home. Of course, Psychonauts doesn't settle for a dreamscape as humdrum as a rotating hotel corridor. Here you're riding molars, zapping tooth fairies and descending throats. It slips down the gullet of this returning fan just as easily.

Fundamentally, not much has changed since 2005. OK, it has an eye-searing prettiness that comes from an extra 16 years of HD knowhow. But under levels that are variously knitted, hand drawn or printed on x-ray film you still sense familiar cogs. It's another throwback to the 3D mascot platformers of the late '90s. An explorable hub world siphons you into standalone levels, all festooned with enough collectibles to give even Banjo and Kazooie cold sweats.

The hub is now Psychonauts HQ, which feels like The Incredibles and The Muppets chucked in a blender: its workforce of potato-faced oddballs spitting zingers, while stirring music and retrofuturistic decor sells you on the group's grand mission. After 15 hours I still regularly fast travel to the atrium just to get a hit of its swelling theme. Composer Peter McConnell does incredible work throughout the game, turning his hand to more genres than some might tackle in an entire career.

From there, Raz hops inside heads to unpick personal traumas that both infect and shape the mental landscapes. Picture Mario 64's self-contained worlds, if Tiny-Huge Island was a metaphor for Wario's impotence. On one hand they serve up the comfort food of those older platformers. You hoover up hundreds of imaginary figments and earmark hidey-holes to return to with later upgrades. It's solid, standard stuff and will keep completionists happy for 20 hours. But levels are much more than obstacle courses to tidy up.

Every mind tells a story. And not in the hackneyed language of audio logs and ten foot-tall 'HELP ME' graffiti. This is level design as exposition. For example, one man's familial alcoholism becomes a toxic swamp where his shame manifests as a riverbed of discarded gin bottles that you navigate before booze drowns them again. Another standout sees a bureaucrat's clinical hospital of a mind hijacked by a casino. Exploring pill-filled pachinko parlours is a visual spectacle and can be appreciated as that, but the metaphorical dimension is just as satisfying to decipher.

Crucially, there's not a tired genre trope to be found. Sick of slippy-slidey ice worlds? Try a level set on the wedding cake of a now-mourning widower. You don't see that in Crash Bandicoot (though I've not played 'The Wrath of Cortex', so apologies if I'm misrepresenting its psychological nuance). I love the segment that revisits a relationship in an aging, fractured mind, each memory getting jumbled with the host's stints as a barber, mailman and bowling alley attendant. It's wistful and tragic, all while conjuring disasters from human hair or a vortex of unread love letters. Weirdly, it also makes Psychonauts 2 a good companion piece to Yakuza: Like A Dragon as a tale about the turmoils of an older generation than tends to hog the gaming spotlight.

This maybe paints Psychonauts 2 as more dour than it is. This isn't one of those heart-on-sleeve misery fests you sagely nod at while secretly wishing you were playing Peggle. This is a game where you explore a shoe while bacteria shriek about an antifungal extinction event. The best levels still flip the rules as the original's did. One mind's an archipelago explored like a miniature Wind Waker; another, a cooking show that becomes a parody of Overcooked as you race to feed whooping strawberries into a blender. I'm not sure anything tops the first game's Milkman Conspiracy, but hearing an egg boast about its own execution comes close.

At moments I wonder if Tim Schafer, as the game's writer, is playing a kind of game design Whose Line Is It Anyway?, drawing random words from a hat and attempting to roll with it. What advice would Shakespeare offer Raz? How does a country's military history sound sung as a chirping Disneyland ditty? Got any gags about funicular railways? Amazingly, these are the boring questions. In the game's most audacious comic set piece you're given an entire brain to rewire, with every possible combination of thoughts resulting in a punchline. It's a literal joke factory, and I can only imagine the dark nights of the soul spent making every combo zing.

I'd go further and say that as you wander the overworld and chat with fellow 'nauts it begins to resemble a lost LucasArts adventure. The puzzling is more physical, driven by Raz's evolving psychic abilities, but the number of weirdos you get to converse with, mining their dialogue trees for every last laugh, paints a world as vivid and alive as a Rubacava or Mêlée Island. I'm head over heels for The Questionable Area, a daft hit of tourist trap Americana where you half expect to bump into Sam and Max, such is the powerful oddness of its rickety attractions.

One downside to the newness is that I miss the Whispering Rock gang. Bar Raz's (maybe) girlfriend Lili, none of the kid cadets make the trip, and their replacements, Raz's rival interns, don't have the same impact. Their shared standoffishness blurs together, and the story sidelines them after a fantastic first act. That opening stretch does such a good job establishing characters and stakes, and delivering a payoff (honestly, it's like a Pixar film in a game) that it doesn't leave those relationships anywhere to go. Well, aside from offering mundane side missions—a plodding bit of zig in a world that always strives to zag.

It's a rare moment of untapped potential in a sequel that improves on its predecessor in almost every regard. Just the act of moving makes it easier to recommend. If Raz entered my mental scar tissue he'd find the platforming from Psychonauts 1. Part of me never left the Meat Circus. In 2021 Raz is responsive, his rope and pole gymnastics are no longer a mess of button presses and the camera has your back, or whatever side you want it to have. Throw in generous checkpointing and no life counter and it's as responsive and welcoming a 3D platformer as you'll see outside of Nintendo.

Combat is likewise revamped, with an easier dodge roll and dollop of autoaim that unlocks the potential of psi powers I found too fussy in the original. Just being able to telekinetically lob scenery without wrestling with throwing arcs makes for rambunctious rumbles from the outset. And there's more enemy variety this time as flying imps, mine-laying sprites and gavel-wielding judges give individual fights a distinct flavour and ensures every ability has a chance to shine. Remapping powers is still a faff, but if that's the price of meaningful brawls, so be it.

Given how Double Fine spruces up the thrashings it's perhaps surprising how stingily it rations them out. Fights are rare in most levels—non-existent in the hub world—which makes a new upgrade system slightly superfluous. It's hard to get excited about nimbler lobs when you use them so infrequently. It makes post-credits play particularly strange: you're essentially returning to empty worlds to push up your cadet rank and buy upgrades and power-ups with no enemies to use them on. It's just you and a whole lot of squirrels to scritch.

Maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that the places Psychonauts 2 bows to convention are where Double Fine is a little more unsure of itself. This has always been a team more comfortable taking creative risks—its studio logo is a baby fired from a cannon, after all—and it's that aspect I choose to celebrate. Not just the wild comic swings, but the fact that this is a mainstream videogame that deals sympathetically with the messy business of being human. Strip away the screeching eggs and bacterial prophets of doom and it's a tale of regrets and the path out of them. I don't think playing Psychonauts 2 will become one of them. So don that beastmastery badge: pats on the back for all involved.

THE VERDICT
89

PSYCHONAUTS 2
Improved platforming underpins a glorious return to one of gaming's most inventive and empathic universes.

 

[Great Deceiver]

reeeeee

What the fuck is "DENTAL PHOBIA"? The dangerhairs are at it again

p.s. Loved the original. Preloaded on game pass

 

[Ivan]

I love going to the dentist. The grinding sounds and unique pain.

 

[FuckLiefeldGiveMeChew]

I really hope this comes out in a couple of days. Psychonauts is among my favorite games, and I love that the real world is just as weird as the dream world in that game. Double Fine's quality varies wildly though the games are usually fun to some extent, but its games are always creative and humorous and worth playing to see what happens. I recently beat the game 100% after beating it a few times with lower levels of completion, and it was amazing and totally worth it. I like the idea that it will explore insanity to a greater extent and I hope that leads to even weirder settings.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I love going to the dentist. The grinding sounds and unique pain.

I'm sure the idea of rotten teeth and purulent gums is a lot more appealing.

 

[J_C]

Of all the fucking kickstarters, this is one I didn't backed. I could have gotten this at half price, not $60 like the current price. Fuck me.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

I'm glad the sequel is living up to everyone's lofty standards, but I ain't shelling out 60 Euroshekels for a grandiose one-off experience. 50% off though and DoubleFine will have another customer.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Of all the fucking kickstarters, this is one I didn't backed. I could have gotten this at half price, not $60 like the current price. Fuck me.

You can get it for $10 or whatever the sub cost is on game pass and then cancel if you don’t care about keeping it in your Steam library.

 

[Riskbreaker]

I never got the complaints about the Meat Circus. It definitely doesn’t have anything on Waterloo World, Black Velvetopia, Milkman Conspiracy, or Lungfishopolis, but I prefer it to Sasha’s shooting gallery or Gloria’s Theater.

Same here. I just played it through like any levels, it was some time later when I read all the complaints about it. And I was like, what, there wasn't anything outrageous about it.

I'm pretty sure that level was made easier in the Steam update years ago? I do recall going thru it smoothly when I replayed the game on Steam after it received surprise big update at one point, whereas I almost dropped the game at the escort+platforming bit the first time I played it.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

Of all the fucking kickstarters, this is one I didn't backed. I could have gotten this at half price, not $60 like the current price. Fuck me.

Haha, Russians have it for $14. Fuck you, EU!

 

[DeepOcean]

Biggest problem of Meat circus was the camera, but once you get it, it isnt that bad, people over exaggerate the difficulty on that level. Two tries and I was at the end of the game, dunno why people wanted to nerf it that bad.

 

[Ivan]

 

[J_C]

Of all the fucking kickstarters, this is one I didn't backed. I could have gotten this at half price, not $60 like the current price. Fuck me.

You can get it for $10 or whatever the sub cost is on game pass and then cancel if you don’t care about keeping it in your Steam library.

Fuck game pass.