Psychonauts 2 Is Still One of the Best Games on Game Pass, Four Years On

Psychonauts 2 launched on August 25, 2021, scored 89 on Metacritic, got nominated for Game of the Year at The Game Awards, and still sits on Xbox Game Pass four years later.

You play as Razputin Aquato, a teenage psychic acrobat who joins an elite spy organization called the Psychonauts. The core move is diving into other people's minds. Each level is a fully self-contained surreal world built around one character's mental state: their memories, fears, obsessions, or trauma. One level might put you inside a cooking show hosted by a paranoid chef. Another drops you into a fragmented courtroom where the judge is the defendant and the jury are all ghosts. Every level is different, and every level is trying to say something specific about the person whose brain you are inside.

The platforming holds up. Raz moves with the snappy, physical weight of a 2000s-era collectathon, with a levitation ball for gliding, telekinesis, and a flaming fist. The combat is light and mostly in service of the puzzles and exploration. This is not a mechanically demanding game. The challenge is reading each mental world and figuring out what it is trying to tell you.

What Double Fine built here is one of the better-written games of the last decade, and the community has not been shy about saying so. Polygon called it "one of the best stories games have ever told." The subreddit regularly brings up the segment dealing with addiction as one of the most affecting sequences in any game, full stop. Tim Schafer, Double Fine's founder and the game's director, has spent 16 years with this universe, and it shows in how precisely every character is drawn.

The context matters for appreciating what Psychonauts 2 actually is. The original 2005 game was a critical darling that sold poorly and nearly ended Double Fine. A crowdfunding campaign on Fig raised close to 4 million dollars in 2016 to bring the sequel to life. Then Microsoft acquired Double Fine in 2019, and the game got the budget it needed to finish properly. By the time it shipped, the fan anticipation had been building for 16 years. The reception reflected that: Psychonauts 2 is Double Fine's highest-rated and best-selling game, with at least 1.7 million copies sold.

On awards: The Game Awards 2021 nominated it for Game of the Year alongside Deathloop, It Takes Two, Metroid Dread, and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. The 2022 BAFTA Games Awards gave it a nomination for Best Animation. Five total nominations at The Game Awards, and it still lost most of them to It Takes Two. A vocal part of the community believes it deserved more.

Where to play it: PC and Xbox on Game Pass (included at no extra cost with Xbox Game Pass Essential, PC Game Pass, or Ultimate). PS4 physical edition exists under the Motherlobe Edition label, released in late 2022 by Skybound Games. No Switch version and no Switch 2 version has been announced. The game is backwards compatible on PS5 via the PS4 version.

The honest take: if you have Game Pass, there is no reason not to try it. The first two hours do enough work to tell you whether you are the audience. If surreal platformers with heavy writing appeal to you at all, you probably are. If you want pure mechanical challenge, this is not the game for that.