Psychonauts 2 Review

The premise was always going to age badly or brilliantly: a summer camp for psychic children where you dive into minds and repair them. Double Fine chose brilliantly by refusing to treat mental illness as a boss health bar. Each brain is a legible place first, a bowling alley of compulsive gambling, a hospital of sensory overload, a psychedelic cooking show where a panicked chef cannot stop performing, and the platforming inside it is built from the same anxiety it depicts.

Raz controls better than any Double Fine protagonist before him, with a verb set of telekinesis, pyrokinesis, mental connection and time slow that combines into encounters which are honestly the weakest thing here. What carries it is the writing. Nobody is cured, several characters stay wrong in ways the script declines to resolve, and the Psychic Six turn out to be flawed adults rather than a rogues gallery. The art direction moves from whimsy to genuine unease without a visible seam, and the score knows exactly when to drop out. A sequel that waited out an entire console era and arrived improved rather than embalmed.