For those of you who have already completed the recently released Psychonauts 2 and are hoping for maybe more in the series, designer Tim Schafer would like you to slow your roll. Or, at the very least, he says in an interview with TheGamer that the team has no plans on making any Psychonauts 3 at any point — after all, they just completed one game that took quite some time — but that they haven’t ruled it out completely yet.
In the interview, Schafer jokingly (or at least so I presume) chastised gamers for asking for another entry immediately when the development team had already spent five years making Psychonauts 2 and asked if they’d all already achieved 100% completion of the game. Psychonauts 2 was known for having a fairly lengthy and complicated development cycle, and even regular game development cycles can be arduous at best, especially towards the end. It’s not uncommon for game developers to take breaks between finishing one project and starting another.
As Schafer told TheGamer: “There are no plans right now for three. No rules about that either, we don’t lock the door on anything. I think the team and I are both looking forward to something completely brand new. We love these characters though, and psychic worlds are easy to expand upon for further adventures, but there’s nothing planned now.”
Psychonauts 2 was originally announced as being Double Fine’s new project at the 2015 Game Awards, and would be crowdsourced through the platform Fig. For years, details on the state of development were a bit vague, until 2019 when it was announced that Double Fine had been acquired by Microsoft. Double Fine said that the game would still release multiple platforms. It delayed the game a few times, and it finally launched on August 25. It’s probably not a surprise the team would want a break from Psychonauts for the foreseeable future.