The story takes off where the previous one landed. Plus, the Pelican is back: the agency’s groovy brain-powered jet, its shell painted with a peppermint swirl. We get whiskey tumblers and dark wooden desks, chess sets and geodesic domes, and the soundtrack is still fried by the twang of an electric guitar. And surely his colleague Milla Vodello, whose bright bell-sleeve dress has rang in my memory ever since, would return with her mobile-size earrings intact? I needn’t have worried.

Going into the sequel, I prayed that we would still find Sasha Nein sporting his close-fitting turtleneck, with a cigarette cocked between his fingers. My prevailing impression of Psychonauts is of its furnishings. Or of Grim Fandango, his masterwork, which feasted on the forties, wrapped in the knowing shadows of film noir.

Think of Brütal Legend, his light-humoured ode to the joys of heavy metal. No director has tended so intimately to the trappings of the twentieth century. I hoped that this would still be the case. What obsesses Schafer (who serves as director and writer) more than the plot, which sees the looming of a long-dead foe more than the psyched-up platforming that governs the action and more, funnily enough, than the jokes jammed into every conceivable nook-is the nineteen-sixties. But there is something else here, more deeply embedded. What we find in its chambers, over the course of Psychonauts 2, is the continuing story of Raz, a junior psychic-in-training, who dreams of joining the eponymous organisation: a government echelon whose operatives are imbued with extrasensory powers. Sixteen years after the release of Psychonauts, Tim Schafer is inviting us back into his mind.

Psychonauts 2 genres