Psychonauts 2

Double Fine's 2021 sequel arrived sixteen years after a cult original that never sold, funded by crowdfunding and finished under Microsoft, and it is startlingly good. Raz is now an intern at Psychonauts headquarters, and the structure is unchanged: enter someone's mind, and the level is built out of their psychology. A former agent's dementia becomes a hospital where rooms rearrange, a rock star's addiction becomes a psychedelic concert, and a bureaucratic mailroom is a genuine platforming space about anxiety. Tim Schafer's writing is the reason to play it - it handles mental illness with specificity rather than metaphor-as-decoration, and it is funny throughout without undercutting itself. Mechanically it is a solid 3D platformer with a combat kit of psychic powers that combine, considerably tighter than the 2005 game and still not its main attraction. Twenty hours, no padding, and one of the few sequels that is unambiguously better than the game people spent fifteen years asking for.