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I am very interested on what you mean by that.
I assume he means that there’s no way to perms die or challenge to the game from a combat standpoint, that is more story driven. If so, he’s right. Double fine specifically built that into their game design. It was an intentional choice
So the ability to permadie would be a lives system that you could run out of lives? That seems like an old design philosophy to me.
If you watch the youtube series doublefine has on the making of Psychonauts 2 (I’ve actually never played it, but I’m a hobby game developer and found the whole series a fascinating behind the scenes for how established studios do game development), they had a project lead early on to the Psychonauts dev cycle that pushed for things like “blood gates” where you had to kill enemies to progress, and more challenging combat and more traditional sort of “God of War” style gameplay mechanics.
The core devs, UX, animators, level designers, etc. all sort of rebelled against him and went to Tim (the President of DF and the writer of it) and complained until he sorted things out.
So not having these challenging combat pieces was 100% intentional by the dev team that built both Psychonauts 1 and 2.
I absolutely had a blast with Psychonauts 2. I loved each and every character and levels associated with them. Since I never played the original, I honestly cannot tell if it played it safe.
In a lot of ways I felt that 2 was an improvement on the original.
Still though, if I had to pick, there was something about the original that I liked more.
Wonderful games, both of them, though.
I loved 1 and couldn’t stomach playing 2 for more than an hour or so. Bored me to tears.