Psychonauts 2 has players taking control of Raz as he rummages around inside people’s brains, messing them up, and trying to fix them. While our review and Steve Saylor’s review go into detail on how clunky that rummaging is in play, we wanted to share all of the settings you can fiddle with for Psychonauts 2 accessibility so that you know what to expect when you jump in.
Double Fine already revealed the below information earlier this year for Global Accessibility Awareness Day, but now that we’ve had a chance to try them ourselves, we can offer more insight.
Boot Menu
From the off, you’re greeting to an Assist Features area, which is essentially an accessibility area. There isn’t much here, but it’s enough to get you set up in case you decide to just jump in before going through the full settings menu.
Starting off, you can change the text language for the game, with a Localized Navigation Sign UI toggle. There’s an option for increasing the font legibility by using a different font instead of a handwritten one. You can enable subtitles and assign the larger setting for these, and there’s a brightness slider.
Controls
This is the first section of the menu, and there are a good number of options here. You’re able to remap your gameplay inputs here, adjust the intensity of the vibration and camera sensitivities for both mouse and controller. The camera can also be inverted and an assist mode for the camera will ensure the camera automatically rotate as Raz moves.
Triple jumping to glide is a feature that allows you to press the jump input a third time to activate a balloon as opposed to having to press another input in addition to the double jumping. Levitation ball pulldown from glide allows Raz to use the ball —that’s usually used for moving fast— by jumping while gliding.
Lock-on is available as either a toggle or a hold, and a radial power menu mode comes with different options that adjust the input method used for displaying the psychic powers available.
Assist Features
This Psychonauts 2 accessibility section has a few features found in the opening boot menu, but it starts with a gameplay sub-category. In this section, there is a Fall Damage toggle that will ensure you don’t take damage from falling.
There’s an invincibility toggle as well that makes you immune to damage, but still finds you reacting to damage or being respawned to your last position following you falling and “dying”. Narrative combat gives Raz a buff to combat damage so that players can focus more on the story and action taking place without having to be overly strategic in their approach to fighting.
For the user interface, text language and localized navigation sign UI make a return as do larger subtitles and increased font legibility. Camera shake intensity comes with a slider, and there are several color blindness options to choose from. With the color blindness option, you’ll get a visual preview showing a graphic.
Display and Graphics
For display, you can choose what windowed mode you want, the resolution, and can enable V-Sync. A max framerate can be set if desired, and motion blurring can be turned off. The brightness slider returns and will also remove the menu background to reveal the paused Psychonauts 2 game so you can see how your brightness affects the game which is great for accessibility.
Graphics allow you to change the quality of the game, ranging from options such as shadows, lighting, post-processing, and resolution scaling. With this menu, you’ll also find the menu background being removed here, allowing you to see changes in real-time.
Audio
In this area, you’ll be able to enable or disable subtitles, and there are also a number of sliders for different audio levels. Master volume, music, sound effects, voice, and ambient volume. By default I found these to be nicely balanced, but as mentioned in our review, the audio cues for nearby collectibles are incredibly subtle.
Psychonauts 2 is launching on August 25 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X.
