The biggest moment for me was when the James Bond style theme song came on during the late title sequence. And since the things you do in them are pretty limited the game as a whole isn’t exciting or wonderous. They all have cool and interesting visual touches, but they aren’t exciting in the same way, and instead they are just polished takes on environments we’ve seen in other games. Rhombus of Ruin has you inside environments you’ve seen dozens of times. Jumping from fish to fish as a way to transport around gets kind of boring. This underwater pit area looks good but it also looks like a lot of other underwater pits we've seen in games. It feels like a bit of a stapled on license, even though it's not. It was always conceived of as a Psychonauts game, but it doesn't feel like it's really part of that boundlessly creative universe. It's even set underwater, and while it acknowledges that Raz has a hydrophobia it sort of drops that in a way that felt inauthentic to the character. This game just does the conventional with a Psychonauts twist. It showed you things you’d never seen before in a video game. It had a level inside a black velvet painting and another in a circus made out of meat. The original Psychonauts took the concept of a 3D platformer and overlayed adventure game elements on to it and then added some of the most outlandish and trippiest visuals of any game ever. The problem with Rhombus of Ruin is that it plays things entirely too safe. You get a recap in the beginning to Psychonauts 2 but for people who played the game in 2005 or have played it many times since as an old favorite it feels a little cheap to hide the resolution to that part of the story in a flimsy VR only title. The first game ends on a cliffhanger and this game resolves it. It's also canon in the Psychonauts universe in a way that feels a bit unfair. The story is lighthearted and fun and worth seeing through to the end. Despite that some of the environments are still interesting and impressive, and sometimes when you see the world through a character’s eyes there are some cool effects caused by their delusions. You spend the majority of the game in the real world in the game, instead of entering people’s minds, so you don’t get quite the trippiness you do in the main Psychonauts games. It’s written by Tim Schaefer and it has those great Psychonauts characters so it’s funny and engaging in that way. If the gameplay isn’t the focus then how does it rate as an experience? The answer is…fine. Also the fabric textures are really great! You get to use some of the powers from the main games. This is more of an interactive VR experience, though there are enough puzzles and things to do that it does qualify as a game. It just never asks very much of you and much of the challenge is in looking carefully over the environment to find the things you can interact with. An example of this is that there’s a puzzle where you can pull objects apart and combine the components to create new objects, and the game offers you two objects with two components each, meaning that you only have a few possible combinations and the puzzle is trivial. Rhombus of Ruin is primarly concerned with showing cool environments and telling its story anyway, so you’re not going to get complex puzzles or involved mechanics like in a game like Statik. This is a pretty common gameplay technique for earlier VR games and it works okay, but it doesn’t make for the most exciting game play. You play as Raz again and you transport yourself psychically in between the minds of various people and animals in the environment and interact with various objects using your psychic powers to do things like press buttons, burn curtains to reveal what’s underneath, or pile a bunch of heavy objects in front of a door to block a guard from entering a room. The Psychonauts series is known for its 3D platformers but Rhombus of Ruin is a point to point VR puzzle game. For people who played Psychonauts in 2005 the tension Raz and Lili's kiss was over a decade ago. Fans hadn’t seen these characters headline a game in 12 years when it was released, though I played it the same evening I finished the original Psychonauts so it didn’t have quite the same impact. Nonetheless it’s a fun piece of Psychonauts storytelling with a lot of the fan favorite characters from the original game, mostly with their original voice actors. It takes place immediately after the end of the original Psychonauts and resolves that game’s cliffhanger, though in a way that makes the timeline a little confusing. It came out in 2017 on PC and PS4 VR as a short experience that bridges the stories of Psychonauts 1 and the sequel. Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin is a weird little project.
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