Inside people’s heads, we explore bizarre mental landscapes that prod at characters’ obsessions, passions and past mistakes. Outside people’s heads, we run around the Psychonauts’ headquarters, the Motherlobe, and the campsites, forests and quarries of its surroundings. 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. 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. 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. This game’s novelty is its bold, beautiful, confident weirdness – it’s funny, unselfconscious and excellent fun. 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. T he 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.
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