Psychonauts at 20: how the inventive Double Fine game took us inside other people’s minds

Everyone’s afraid of something. Snakes, spiders, heights, water, your dad. They squat in your head, these malignant ideas. Pester you and panic you, turn the screws, then clog the workings.

Mental health isn’t mechanical. But there’s a lot of joy to be had in the idea that it could be. Twenty years ago, the video game Psychonauts imagined a world where psychic adventurers could project themselves into the brain of another, then run around in their subconscious, bashing, zapping and stomping the issues out of there.

Released by Double Fine Productions and directed by adventure game legend Tim Schafer as his debut after working at LucasArts, Psychonauts is a gob-smackingly inventive platformer. Thematically it blends Being John Malkovich (1999) with 60s spy capers, Twin Peaks with The Jetsons.

You play as Raz, a 10-year-old kid who’s run away from his father’s circus to join the Psychonauts training programme. By leaping into the heads of his teachers, Raz picks up psychic skills or ‘PSI-Powers’: telekinesis, clairvoyance, zoolinguilism. Each one helps Raz delve deeper into his subjects’ thought processes, winding his way through the tangled mess that life has made of their minds.

The game’s levels are as distinct – narratively and mechanically – as their hosts. As with many Double Fine games, scratch the surface zaniness and you’ll find thoughtful takes on everything from grief to imposter syndrome. So, there’s a Godzilla pastiche, set inside the head of a terrifying mutated lungfish who kidnaps children. Yet the lungfish – who’s called Linda, by the way – is being coerced into being a baddie and needs Raz’s help to release her captor’s hold.   

Raz’s levitation teacher, the party-loving Milla Vodello, has a mind full of 60s psychedelia – oranges and greens and yellows and pinks, disco balls and bubble machines. She’s fun and lively, so the player, as Raz, must learn to leap and float up through the level to match Milla’s high spirits. Then, just as the good times start to grate, you find – so close to the heart of the party – a small door. Behind the door is a vault and in the vault is Milla’s back story: a heartbreaking tale of death and loss that she’s locked up tight, well away from the dancefloor. 

It’s this nuance, in a game that is cartoonish, that’s seen Psychonauts endure. What’s remarkable about it is how prescient Schafer and co were in their thoughtfulness about mental health. It’s not perfect, but it navigates tricky territory with care. The game was released at a snarky time in pop culture, one in which it didn’t do to be too earnest or vulnerable. Reality TV had started to bite, leaving contestants chewed up by the burgeoning industry of internet criticism. Nu-metal was offering teenage boys boneheaded role models who made careers shaming their female contemporaries. Eminem, the decade’s pop culture genius, made a show of his vulnerability by revelling in the violence, misogyny and homophobia that formed the darker part of his own psychic sprawl. Post-9/11, fear was buried, emotional transparency co-opted or laughed at.

Yet Psychonauts carries a complete lack of judgement and an absence of stigma. Raz approaches each character’s mind (even Linda’s) with friendly curiosity – a can-do freshness that is representative of his naivety and his decency. Raz may be frightened by what he finds in the depths of the host minds, but he’s never repulsed. The game – being a game – suggests that complicated mental health issues can be ‘fixed’. Still, it’s an honourable and creative attempt to explore the wide range of states that make up the human mind.

The business side of the games industry – then and now – likes a format, a structure, something easy to know and easier to sell. Yet Psychonauts subverts the traditional structure of most games by never really settling on being one thing. It’s Double Fine’s habit of working relentlessly hard to sustain their idiosyncrasy that sustains them, creatively and financially.

Shortly after the release of Psychonauts, Schafer introduced a new tradition – Amnesia Fortnight. This is a two-week break from whatever big project the studio is working on, where everyone, in whichever role, can pitch a new game, swap jobs and work together to develop a prototype. Amnesia Fortnight was inspired by the production of filmmaker Wong Kar Wai’s Ashes of Time (1994), which was lengthy and difficult and left the director’s crew creatively exhausted. During a hiatus, Wong decided to take his lead actors and cinematographer to shoot new scenes, unrelated to the film they were making, to re-energise the creative process. For Wong, two new films, Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995), were the eventual result. Similarly Double Fine have seen some of their most interesting work evolve out of Amnesia Fortnight. Stacking, in which you play Charlie, a tiny Russian doll who must disguise himself inside a series of larger dolls to rescue his family, is a particular highlight.

In January 2023 Double Fine released a documentary, Double Fine Psychodyssey, charting the development of Psychonauts’s long-awaited sequel. The documentary, 30+ hours split into bingeable episodes, was a fascinating look at the conflicts inherent in making art while hitting deadlines, following schedules and keeping within the budget. The team struggle to work through the Covid pandemic, struggle to define what an updated take on Psychonauts’ world might look like, and struggle with internal conflicts that drive core members to reassess their relationship with a workplace that they’ve come to love. It’s a bold business move to feel confident showing the world how dysfunctional your creativity can be. But it’s also part of the rare appeal of Double Fine: that devotion to ideas, to story, to creating an experience that is singularly fascinating.

In the final level of Psychonauts, Raz faces a projection of his greatest fears – a boss known as the Two-Headed Dad Monster. One dad is Raz’s own, a sadistic spin on his father’s desire for Raz to excel in the circus. The other is the product of Raz’s head teacher – Coach Oleander – whose father’s trade as a butcher traumatised the coach as a boy. The two dads form a chimera of childhood terror. Raz, faced with his greatest fear, is told:

“This is your mind. You are the strong one here.”

It’s a moment of quiet and some clarity before the final bout of bashing and zapping and stomping – the gamey stuff that makes games fun. Yet that small bit of dialogue reminds Raz and the player why you’re fighting, what being in this story is for. Back in 2005 it was still unusual for games to offer players reasons for pushing buttons that were much deeper than ‘achieve this’ or ‘fetch that’. Rich and beautifully written, Psychonauts remains a wonderfully thoughtful game.