he shock of the new is important to Tim

Schafer. “The challenge when making

a Psychonauts level is coming up with

something that makes you feel like you

haven’t seen it in a game before,” he says.

In that regard, we’d say what we’ve played

is a qualified success. It begins at a music

festival called Feast For The Senses, and that’s

a tacit promise on which Double Fine fully

delivers. Via a kaleidoscopic transition, we’re

transported to a woozy, substance-fuelled

brainspace that makes us feel lightheaded.

With a psychedelic rock-inspired soundtrack

noodling away in the background and shrewd

use of chromatic aberration giving the world’s

angular lines and edges a fuzzy, soft-focus

feel, it’s a trip in more ways than one. But

though we might not have been here before, at

the same time there’s an undercurrent of

homecoming: a strange, comforting sensation

that steadily washes over us. Now we feel

transported in a different way, back in time to

15 years ago, and another game that took us to

places where real-world rules no longer apply.

Psychonauts 2 certainly does offer something

new, but it also gives us something equally

precious: more Psychonauts.

A degree of continuity is exactly what Tim

Schafer and Double Fine are aiming for. Not

least since the story begins pretty much

where we left off – or exactly where it left off,

if you played two-hour VR adventure

Rhombus Of Ruin, which itself ran on from the

end of the first game. “It’s like the third day in

this story,” Schafer says. As before, we’re

controlling Raz, a former circus acrobat with

psychic abilities who can astrally project

himself into another person’s mental world.

The level we play kicks off at Psychonauts

headquarters, when Raz finds a brain in a jar

abandoned in a storage room. “It’s been alone

for 20 years, which has caused it to shut

down a little bit,” Schafer explains. “So when

Raz goes inside, he finds it’s all blackness

except for a tiny little mote of light who can’t

remember anything.” To restore the memories

of this brain, Raz finds a convenient body for

it to inhabit, causing a flood of sensory

information. As the frontman anxiously waits

in the wings while a baying audience throws

tomatoes at the empty stage, Raz must

reunite the rest of the group – each member

representing one of the five senses – before

the crowd gets really angry.

That suggests an urgency that’s lacking

from the first part of the equation at least,

which involves frontman Vision Quest, a

humanoid figure with a giant eye for a head.

Naturally, we’re soon subsumed into that

same eye, and we emerge blinking into a

green-tinged world of stacked amps, scattered

microphones, spotlights and other stage

props. Around those we find extended mic

stands that double as grind rails as well as

spinning fans, on which you’ll find phrases

like “perception is reality”, alongside fish

swimming through the air and – of course –

clusters of mushrooms to jump across.

Even without stimulants it feels like

a consciousness-expanding experience. What

follows is, for the most part, an easygoing

delight. It’s quite early in the game (“Not the

first level, not the second level,” Schafer

muses; “It’s right in the middle – well, early

middle.”) and it’s all fairly relaxed. The

original game’s Censors are present, those

fragments of a person’s psyche that try to

maintain order in a chaotic mind. Yet as they

scamper up with their little stamps, they

seem more harmless than usual, and are easily

dispatched with a swipe or two of Raz’s basic

melee attack. That there’s little to be afraid of

is in keeping with the mellow mindset of the

host, naturally, but when we mention its

lightweight challenge to Schafer – as an

observation, not a criticism – he quickly

insists that this won’t be the case for every

level. “It feels like the right amount of combat

for where you are, just like, a little bit of it

here and there. But it definitely ramps up

throughout the game.”

Here, instead, you can focus on exploring

and platforming, which feels appreciably

tighter than it did in the original – as, 15

years on, you’d hope it would. Raz still has

several of his original Psi powers, which are

bound to the bumpers and triggers, though

there’s little call for many of them here. Psi

Float carries us across a few larger gaps that

a double-jump alone isn’t enough to reach,

though some require use of a brand-new

ability: Time Bubble. As your glowing partner

explains, he’s been alone for so long that

T

WE’RE TRANSPORTED TO A WOOZY,

SUBSTANCE-FUELLED BRAINSPACE

THAT MAKES US FEEL LIGHTHEADED

Game Psychonauts 2

Developer Double Fine

Publisher Microsoft Game Studios

Format PC, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X

Release 2021