Raz’s jump can feel slow to start and distances can be tough to properly judge. From moment to moment, Psychonauts can be a bit of a slog. The game proper is split between the hub world of the summer camp, and the proper levels of individual minds that Raz enters with his psychic powers. However, sinister things are at work, and Raz quickly finds himself alone, fighting against forces that imprison and weaponize psychic minds like his. He runs away from home to Whispering Rock Summer Camp, determined to become a psychic super spy, a psychonaut, before his father comes to take him home. Psychonauts follows Raz, a young circus performer and secret psychic. It offers up an empathetic, if goofy, portrait of mental health that overcomes its more superficial shortcomings. Most surprisingly, the game’s heart is firmly in the right place. The writing is dense with jokes, often triggered by obscure mechanical interactions, which weaves the zany play and the cartoonish writing together. While the game offers up a ton of abilities and points of interaction, all of them are useful and the game readily rewards clever play and experimentation. However, all the markings of a cult classic are also here. While never truly mean, its sense of humor is sometimes insensitive. It’s clunky to play, reflective of a troubled development and a lack of institutional support. What I found when I recently revisited Psychonauts shows its age. Though Psychonauts 2 opens with a succinct and accurate summary, it is always worth it, to my mind, to look over what came before. Despite being a serious commercial failure upon its first release, Psychonauts eventually solidified itself as a cult classic and now has a critically acclaimed sequel.
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