There's a bit halfway through this game where you enter a diner and there's a girl making pancakes out of random things she psychically made a bunch of woodland animals gather for her. The girl is more then a little off, and it immediately becomes clear that the animals are absolutely terrified of her and are trying to hint to Raz that he should help them. It is, by far, the funniest part of the game that I saw. It's also the only part of the game where I really felt like I was playing a psychonauts game, and it made the rest of the game feel kinda jarring by comparison.
The original psychonauts was a black comedy in a madcap world that didn't include very sensitive portrayals of mental illness, but did make you feel a lot of genuine empathy for the people whose brains you ran around in, even if they were sometimes cartoon characters. Psychonauts 2 is much more responsible and adult with these elements, which is fine and frankly it makes me feel like an asshole to complain this kind of thing, but it doesn't feel congruous with what the last game was. The first game was about an insanely unsafe summer camp for psychic children run by 70s era superspies who taught them how to brainwash people and set fire to squirrels with their minds. Why is Sasha Nein, a man who taught Raz how to shoot lasers with his brain five days ago in canon, now giving him lectures on not invading peoples mind without consent? Why is this game now about interning at what appears to be a failing start-up?
The game introduces a bunch of older teens who become Raz's peers, but they almost immediately become irrelevant as the game shifts to being about resolving the trauma of Raz's new mentors, in particular Ford Cruller. Ford Cruller used to be a joke! You summoned him to pop out of your ear by waving bacon around your head! Now he's much less absurd, his insanity something to be treated and cured, and I just struggle to actually care. The game gives you big lectures about the power of empathy, how you just need to listen to people and it just feels dumb coming from a game about figuring people out by turning their mental illness into a series of jumping puzzles. I understand, on some level, psychonauts has always been a game kind of for kids, but the former game was for kids by being funny and weird and gross. And it was ABOUT kids-about kids stuck in a summer camp with no supervision while a plot to takeover the world happened around them. Now it's about old men trying to deal with their guilt and raz is kind of just along for the ride, putting them back together while they teach each other life lessons about how to be nice to one another and I can't imagine this wouldn't come across as any less patronizing if I was still a kid.
The game plays just as sloppily as it used. Jumping and dodging is floaty, swapping between powers is inelegant, it's a game that feels unnecessarily hard to be good at. The only reason to play the game is for the story and level design, and while the latter is still great and creative and bursting with character, I just can't bring myself to care about the rest of it.

Hooked me in a way I genuinely wasn't expecting-once I started reading I couldn't think to do much else until I had finally finished the game. Misericorde is a kinetic novel, not a visual novel, so unfortunately there are no branching little paths or choices you have to make but for its type it doesn't really need them. Your character is barely socialized shut-in who could at best recite the dictionary definition of guile, so there's virtually no chance of them solving much of anything. Running around in their head and trying to figure out what the hells going on as they poke around aimlessly, sort through their emotions, and try to learn to be a person is as much a game of picking apart clues and trying to read the general writing on the wall as any game that purports to be about Big Choices.
The game completely nails what this genre requires, which is a cast of vibrant characters who, despite most of them coming off as deeply neurodivergent weirdos, all feel like genuine people with histories and rich interior lives. Conversations hit a really good balance between "it sure is fun to hang out with these loveable kooks" and "what does it mean that they said this? Is what you told me true? What can I learn from how you're reacting right now? Is the way you're acting right now the way you really are?". It's a mystery that is first and foremost about character analysis, about trying to guess why someone did what they did, where someone goes when you're not seeing them, and when someone is only telling you a little bit of the truth, and it perfectly captures the feeling of being a shut-in suddenly thrust into social situations where you're not sure how to look after your own best interests.
Of course, it's only half a story and I'm ravenous for the next part, but I'm extremely confident that whatever volume 2 looks like, I'm going to very much enjoy it, especially since I"m pretty sure this game just gave me a nun fetish.