One of my favourite things in my Steam library resides in the client’s dormant-if-not-dead ‘Videos’ section. There, arrayed in neat rows, lies my collection of Double Fine’s Amnesia Fortnight 2014 documentaries, which cover a two-week game jam held at Double Fine’s offices almost (oh my god) ten years ago. It was one of my first, fascinating insights into how games actually get made, and I’m ready for another. Lucky me, then, that Double Fine’s just dropped a 32-episode series on the making of Psychonauts 2 (opens in new tab).
The documentary pitches itself as the sequel to the much-celebrated Double Fine Adventure (opens in new tab) documentary, which detailed the development of 2014’s Broken Age (opens in new tab), a Kickstarter-funded point-and-click adventure in the style of the LucasArts games of old.
Clocking in at a svelte 22-or-so hours, Double Fine PsychOdyssey tells the tale of Psychonauts 2 from conception to release. Describing itself as “an unprecedented documentary experience seven years in the making,” the series tells the tale of a studio dealing with “overly ambitious designs, poor morale, technical challenges and financial woes, all during a turbulent span of time for the world”. Still, sorry about the spoilers, but I’m fairly certain that Psychonauts 2 did eventually come out, so I expect there’s a happy ending at the end of the trail.
The whole thing is available for free over on YouTube, where Double Fine has created a handy playlist (opens in new tab) of every available episode for you to get through in an intensely educational 22-hour period.
I’ve only really seen the aforementioned Amnesia Fortnight series, but Double Fine has form for this kind of thing. As well as the Broken Age docs, the studio has also made documentaries about its 2017 Amnesia Fortnight (opens in new tab) game jam, an Amnesia Fortnight movie (opens in new tab), and all sorts of little bits and pieces highlighting this or that aspect of life at the developer’s offices.
Oh, and as for Psychonauts 2, we quite liked it, with Matthew Castle’s Psychonauts 2 review (opens in new tab) scoring it a healthy 89% and praising the game for “[improving] on its predecessor in almost every regard”. All’s well that ends well.
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