Psychonauts 2 turns five years old this month. Its existence, and Double Fine's story, are inextricably tied to Xbox for better, as Microsoft funding let Double Fine finish the game, but mostly for worse. Double Fine is once again independent after Xbox mismanaged its brands for years and its leadership ultimately decided that its studios, rather than its executives, should pay the price. It's a shortsighted move on many levels, not least because Double Fine and Psychonauts 2 represent a better, or at least a more enjoyable, future for big-budget games that Xbox and PlayStation are ignoring.

Psychonauts 2's best features are its writing and world design. I've extolled the virtues of the former in the not-too-distant-past, but the latter often gets overlooked or oversimplified as just psychedelic or "cool" (Rick Lane's deep dive from 2021 aside). It is psychedelic, but it's also a loud statement about what makes good video games good.

Because the answer to that isn't adding more pixels or making things seem as close to lifelike, or some bizarre approximation of lifelike, as possible — something as Nvidia recently discovered, with its disastrous attempt at "upscaling" character models. The answer is........

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