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Psychonauts 2: Cheaper than Acid, but Twice as Fun!

Psychonauts 2 is a wonderful little game that has more love poured into it than a family circus performance. Indeed, the main character’s acrobatic prowess leads to a game filled with enormously fun platforming and a wealth of secrets to reward you for getting good at it. While its gameplay doesn’t always hit the mark, the game more than makes up for that with zany visuals, batsh*t insane level design, and a remarkable approach to portraying psychological illnesses. I really hope I won’t have to resort to hypnosis to convince you to give this little gem of a game your time and your money.

Steam Deck Performance: Even considering how great Psychonauts 2 looks, the game runs as well as a cheetah on speed, and it is just perfect for the deck’s control scheme. Just watch your battery, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen the deck get drained quite that fast.
Cirque de Solace
Psychonauts 2 was put on my radar by an overenthusiastic friend who confidently proclaimed it as being the greatest video game ever made. Although I hadn’t played the original, its unique visual style captured me enough for it to earn a spot on my bloated wishlist. Though I assume the game follows directly on from the events of its predecessor, the story is so well summarised that you needn’t be dissuaded from purchasing for this reason alone. This series concerns itself with a secretive cabal of telepath-agents called Psychonauts, who enter other people’s minds to fix their problems, solve mysteries, and save the world. You play as Razputin (Razz), a young intern freshly recruited from the circus, whose acrobatic skills are rivalled only by powerful latent psychic abilities.
Since Razz’s day job is literally running around in people’s heads, the game is structured accordingly: each “Mind” is a level to be explored and completed, interspersed with expansive, secret-laced hub areas. You progressively unlock abilities that allow you to explore in more depth, and access new areas. If you’ve played any LEGO game, you already know what to expect.
This layout works like a charm, bringing an uninterrupted but varied flow of activities. It also leads to an ungodly number of collectibles, in particular, the dreaded Figments of Imagination of which there can be multiple hundreds per level. Luckily, the information provided for each item is just enough that the hunt for everything isn’t a chore, while still a challenge. The game’s complex movement also allows some secrets to be hidden in unexpected places, and reaching these locations is enormously fun. Razz’s acrobatic prowess has been baked into the game through the way you traverse the world, leaping off trampolines, swinging between trapezes, and balancing on tightropes. While this sounds difficult, the game has managed to make it seamless in a way that lets it feel cool while not overly difficult to pull off.
Razz’s psychic abilities are similarly varied and fun to use, and all of them are useful in a surprisingly wide range of scenarios. This demands creativity: at one point I discovered that inverting your “time stop” ability made a horrendously slow funicular move at a bearable pace. This was achieved by using a Pin – a collectible upgrade, and since these can be so useful, I was dismayed to discover you are never able to equip more than three. Similar constraints impact your psychic abilities, at least when playing on controller: you can only access four at a time without having to enter a menu. This becomes frustrating with how many you are expected to use simultaneously, particularly when in combat.
The final daring feat in Psychonauts 2’s gameplay spectacular was pulling off a fun combat system, but sadly this is where the game fatally slips. Most enemies require the use of a particular ability to win, abilities that are frustrating to juggle. Even when you are equipped, you will discover that enemies are just frustrating. Your basic attacks are repetitive and monotonous, and your dodge is so clunky that combat feels like swimming through pitch where before you soared through the air. Each enemy is named after a negative mental state, and so I find it deeply fitting that the appearance of a “Panic Attack” would usually bring me close to experiencing one myself. At least the bosses are balanced, and boy are they creative.
A Feast for the Senses
Creativity is perhaps the single biggest selling point of Psychonauts 2. I’m not sure what manner of psychedelic-fueled bender the concept artists went on to come up with this game’s setpieces, but I want in on it. Each level is a miraculously well-blended combination of every thought going through your host’s mind at the moment you enter. While each level is great in its own way, my favourite has got to be the brain of a deranged bowling alley attendant, who is in the process of disinfecting rental shoes as you enter his mind. You arrive in a city with pins as buildings and lanes of polished wood. The city is populated, of course, by shoe-driving germs who grieve over the coming apocalypse, a slowly spreading antiseptic that eventually sanitizes the city of its inhabitants.
Double Fine’s creativity is also turned to something much more purposeful than great level design: this game is ultimately about healing people’s brains, and with this comes an incredibly mature and thoughtful representation of mental health illnesses. On my first launch of the game, I was surprised by a trigger warning regarding serious mental health topics in a game I thought was marketed towards kids. What I hadn’t expected was that these topics would be represented in a way a child can grasp. In one mind, an alcoholic gardener left with severe mistrust of others is stranded on a desert island, and you must help grow plants into friends. In another, you must help someone with severe anxiety, stage fright and insecurity win a game show where his life is on the line. While we don’t have a magic little Psychonaut to jump into our own heads, watching Razz nudge each character into ultimately saving themselves and healing was an enormously uplifting message.
Psychonauts 2’s plot is certainly not the sum of its parts, however: while each character was handled with immense maturity and nuance, the resulting plot felt decidedly childish and mundane. There was nothing wrong with it, but it never did anything interesting either, and I rarely felt more engaged than a surface-level interest. The game’s oddball, zany sense of humour is translated poorly into dialogue and cutscenes, each gag coming off as awkward. The writing is too restrained by child-friendliness for my liking, sometimes feeling almost corporate in its self-censorship. While I don’t expect characters to drop constant f-bombs, I do think the best children’s media are those that are able to appeal to all audiences, coming off as much more genuine as a result.
While my friend’s hyperbole-riddled recommendation was perhaps not entirely accurate, I really loved my time with Psychonauts 2. Polished, seamless and fun AAA games from companies not named Nintendo are a rarity these days, especially ones with playtimes that don’t extend into the triple digits. Even though it looks like a trip on acid, I have not come out of this game a changed man, but not every game needs to do that. Regardless of its minor issues, I really appreciated this game’s message, especially as someone who is healing from my own mental health struggles. We could all use a little Psychonaut like Razputin in our heads, and while this game can’t give us that, it can give us the next best thing.
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