Psychonauts 2 review – a surreal adventure that’s unashamedly itself

PC, Xbox, PlayStation 4; Double Fine/Microsoft
The warped worlds inside people's minds are yours to explore in a bold and beautiful sequel that never fails to surprise

The unlikely sequel to a 16-year-old game about going inside people's heads to rummage around in all their mental baggage, Psychonauts 2 is wonderfully anachronistic. It's a missive from a time when practically every game was about running and jumping and collecting things in some cartoonish otherworld, and every developer was trying to find ways to make those actions feel fresh and exciting. This game's novelty is its bold, beautiful, confident weirdness - it's funny, unselfconscious and excellent fun. Psychonauts 2 touches on some mental health topics that might be triggering for some, but though this is not the most nuanced portrayal of the complexities of real-world mental heath ever committed to code, its themes and metaphors are never as straightforward as I expected them to be.

We play as Razputin, a resourceful, psychic 10-year-old from a family of travelling acrobats, who ran away from home to join a team of gifted mind-hopping spies. Surprisingly, the acrobat stuff is just as fun as the psychic stuff: lifting things with telekinesis and zapping figments of the imagination with mind-lasers is cool, but Raz is so nimble and light that leaping him around people's freaky mental architecture is joyful in itself, even when it's fiddly.