I've been thinking about buying this game and read about the steam version having an update which made the Meat Circus level easier with additional checkpoint(s) and also some situations not resulting in a death. Does anyone know if GoG also has this fix?

I played the demo of this game some time ago, its got mostly good reviews and its on special. However from what I've gathered about the the last level is that in an earlier version of the game it was a brutal/frustrating level.

I sure hope not.

The difficulty of the meat circus section has been grossly exaggerated overall, it's not nearly as bad as some people claim. Also, it's the final level of the game, so it should definitely be harder than the rest. Can't imagine just having it handed to me freely through checkpoints.

I haven't played the GOG version of Psychonauts 1 yet (only retail). Can anyone confirm the state of the Meat Circus?

For what it's worth (if you still need an answer), I picked it up at least 4 years ago and at the time I confirmed the patch had come to Gog.
Then I played it and I had no trouble finishing the last level within a dozen attempts. Most of those deaths were due to platforming mishaps (due to keyboard ghosting) in the part where Raz needs to jump over water and grab a suspended chainlink fence.
If it was the much reviled tough-as-nails version I'd expect I'd die a lot more at the beginning of the level where Raz has to escort the stupid lil' Olyander. From what I read that escort section was the most frustrating part of the level.

Does anyone know where I can grab the unpatched version? I want to see how awful the Meat Circus used to be.

Or maybe I want the punishment :-P

Unfortunate. Was planning on eventually adding the game to my library despite already having the retail version, but now I most likely won't.

Thanks for answering. They mostly added checkpoints. In original, for the escort part, you had to be on your toes. He could die pretty fast if you let the enemies get to him. If he died, you lost a life and got booted to the start of the section. As for the platforming part, it was just that any time you failed, you got reset back to the start and lost a life. Meaning you had to do it in one go and got booted to the subconscious every time you lost all lives.

Found a reddit thread where someone listed some other changes:
* They trippled Little Olly's healthbar.

* They slowed down the knives of the knife throwers.

* They adjusted the hitboxes of the fires you climb through to be a little bit smaller than the fires themselves, instead of larger.

I got the game from a gaming magazine in 2009 (included for free). The patch with the difficulty change released for the digital version in 2011. Just wasn't sure if GOG had it or not. Gonna be difficult getting your hands on the retail PC version. I'd imagine any pirate sites are also long running the patched versions from the digital releases at this point. So you're probably out of luck.