Review: Psychonauts 2 Is a Joyous Sequel That Plays Like a Fond Memory

Double Fine’s original Psychonauts is a prototypical cult classic, having become widely beloved only after its commercial failure. Now, the sequel arrives weighed down by 16 years of expectations, and it takes a surprising approach to addressing them, as it largely proceeds as though little about the industry has changed since 2005.

Psychonauts 2 takes place just a few days after the events of the first game, during which tween circus runaway Razputin “Raz” Aquato uncovered a brain-bending world domination plot at a summer camp for psychics. He had seemingly achieved his great aspiration to join his idolized Psychonauts, the organization of globe-trotting psychic operatives capable of projecting themselves into the minds of others. But rather than the trusted agent he assumes he will be upon reaching their headquarters at the start of Psychonauts 2, Raz finds himself relegated to the intern pool, expected to diligently attend classes and sort the mail even as Maligula, a sinister figure from the organization’s past, threatens to resurface.

At first, the game’s faithfulness to its predecessor is a little shocking even for a direct sequel. After all, Psychonauts 2 is a modern-day video game without such modern staples as a busy minimap, an omnipresent objective marker, or a bolted-on crafting system. Even the collectibles are the same as they were the last time, and their quantities have also scarcely changed: Levels still feature, for example, five bug-eyed manifestations of emotional baggage.

In keeping things so similar through another hub world where you transport to different platforming levels, Psychonauts 2 reiterates the joy of such a pure and digestible concept in a soup of overblown, overwrought peers. But as its levels grow more elaborate, you start to notice that the game and the original aren’t nearly as identical as they might initially seem.

Beyond a new system for allocating upgrade points and equipping pins for power boosts, Psychonauts 2 has to make few changes to the original’s winning formula so that it can reach modern standards. The sequel, for one, translates the abstract cartoon art style of the no less funny original to a higher visual fidelity. It also doesn’t require the player to juggle a whole separate inventory, and the combat features a more fluid incorporation of abilities like telekinesis and psi blasts, which run on a cooldown rather than an ammo counter.

Double Fine has managed to create a sequel that looks and plays like a fond memory, and many of the changes here fit so naturally into familiar mechanics that it’s easy to forget they weren’t present in the original. But despite improvements in enemy variety and generous breaks between encounters, combat still remains a distant third to the platforming and character interactions. You have such an array of different powers that you need to constantly bring up the on-the-fly selection wheel to slot in something like clairvoyance or the time bubble, briefly replacing more broadly applicable abilities like levitation.

Psychonauts 2 is a game that lives and dies on the back of its art, writing, and general creativity. After a slow start, it excels at spinning strange new worlds that invite you to investigate their every inch and then move on to the next one, assured that it will be bizarre and hilarious in its own distinct fashion. One level involves a cooking competition for hard-to-please hand puppets that uses fully sentient ingredients and culinary instruments. In a psychedelic realm, Raz dodges slurping tongues and gets snorted up the nostril of a nose person to enter one of the game’s levels-within-levels, separate locations that fit in the environment only according to flexible dream logic. There’s a city of fatalistic germs, a chain of desert islands overtaken by alcohol bottles with plants growing inside, and even a moment that milks horror from the seemingly innocuous act of knocking over a large water container.

Without sacrificing its sense of kooky, inventive humor, Psychonauts 2 more freely engages with the darker and sadder facets of its premise. The ability to dive into a person’s mind comes with the expectation that you won’t breach that trust and start breaking things, and that trust isn’t always upheld. We see realities constructed and twisted in order to cope, images of friends and family warped by insecurity. The original Psychonauts walks right up to the edge of our most insensitive portrayals of mental illness, with a stretch in a sinister mental asylum where you enter inmates’ minds in order to “fix” them. Perhaps as a corrective, the sequel lacks for such a setting and even tries to reframe the Psychonauts as pulling people out of their lowest moments, helping them to “fight the demons they already have.”

All told, the impact on the story is minimal, but the fantastical concept creates separation from how mental illness functions in the real world rather than just painting the Psychonauts as hacky, sermonizing stand-ins for therapy, medication, or supportive friends. If it’s still a bit reductive to portray certain issues as things to be shaken off, it’s at least consistent with a premise where a psychic boy with an abnormally large head can platform through your psyche.

The game clearly respects our intelligence, too, using its exceptional imagery in implicative ways—that is, without simply spelling out all the meaning in explanatory dialogue. In short, it lets players either do the work of connecting the dots or simply sit back and absorb the broad strokes. Though there’s been a massive uptick in games about mental health, what sets the Psychonauts games apart is their refusal to reach for the easy, obvious depictions of a big depression monster or a sad gray world restored to color. Psychonauts 2 in particular is a game of surprising psychological insight, full of rich, flawed characters at the end of their ropes. If so much of this game is a reiteration of what worked about its predecessor, it functions as a reminder for just how much of the medium is still catching up to Psychonauts.

The game was reviewed using a code provided by Assembly Media.