The (Lovely) Psychonauts 2 Documentary Was a Great Way to Re-Experience My COVID Trauma
The empty streets, closed coffee ships, people mysteriously getting sick, and the decision to live at home took me all the way back to a bonkers era in my personal life.

I’m nearing the end of PsychOdssey, a tremendous documentary tracking the seven (often grueling) years it took to make Psychonauts 2, one of my favorite games from 2021. There are several moments of trauma for the creatives at Double Fine Productions depicted across the documentary, but I did not expect to revisit my own trauma watching PsychOdssey slowly over the course of many recent lunches.
Towards the end of making Psychonauts 2, COVID-19 slowly (and then suddenly) appears. The developers joke about not catching it while attending PAX East in February 2020, an event where some companies, like Sony, chose not to attend. Some developers start catching “the flu.” Other developers start working from home. The streets of San Francisco become empty. Coffee shops were closing. Double Fine founder Tim Schafer cracked a joke about whether they’re taking COVID seriously enough, and soon enough, Schafer would announce employees were being encouraged to work from home, and quickly after, everyone was forced to work at home.
Slightly out of nowhere, I found myself tearing up as different shots in the documentary—the vacated offices and highways, the confusion over how to use Zoom—helped this descent into isolated madness land in my chest. Plenty of fictional stories in games, movies, and television have remarked on COVID-19, but it turns out I haven’t watched anything that depicted the reality of living through that moment.
The start of COVID-19 was a hugely emotional for me and my family, and there was a specific moment when COVID-19 went from a “huh, how about that” to a real thing.
Want to hear a wild story that I haven’t told in public before?
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