Psychonauts

Psychonauts was made by Double Fine Productions under Tim Schafer and released in 2005 on PlayStation 2 and Xbox as a platformer in which the player, as young psychic Raz from a summer camp, dives directly into other characters' minds. Each level was a surreal visualization of someone's psyche — from a paranoid mind full of surveillance cameras to the canvas of an impressionist painter — and critics at the time praised its imaginative level design, humor and writing, even though it sold far worse than it deserved, a mismatch that critics themselves often pointed out at the time.

That weak commercial start, paired with a steadily growing reputation among players, turned it into a cult classic remembered for years as an underappreciated gem. The sequel, Psychonauts 2, was consequently over fifteen years in the making — its funding was helped along by a campaign on the Fig platform, and development later gained support from Xbox Game Studios after Microsoft acquired Double Fine. The game finally arrived in 2021 on Xbox One, Xbox Series and PlayStation 5, continuing Raz's story inside the Psychonauts organization with the same inventive dives into human minds.

Psychonauts 2 was very warmly received and is often held up as proof that a sequel delayed by more than a decade, and shaped by both crowdfunding and a corporate acquisition, can still live up to fans' expectations. The series as a whole is valued above all for its willingness to explore mental health and the human psyche through a genre that usually settles for simpler fantasy.