Psychonauts 2 gameplay footage takes you inside a dental nightmare

Of all the brains to explore, my last choice would probably be Dr. Loboto's. That's where Psychonauts 2 begins, with an Inception-like mindheist taking place inside the brain of the deranged dentist. Raz, along with some of his friends from the original game, are attempting to find out who hired Dr. Loboto to kidnap Truman, Lili's father and the Grand Head of the Psychonauts.

I wasn't given hands-on time with Psychonauts 2, but you can see some gameplay footage from the game's first level above. The trailer, revealed today at E3, is below. There's also a screenshot gallery further down the page.

You might need a bit of a Psychonauts refresher: it's kind of hard to believe but it's already been 15 years since the first Psychonauts was released. In the original platformer from Tim Schafer and Double Fine Productions you played as Raz, a kid with psychic powers who can enter the minds of other characters, which form mental 3D worlds with different themes. Psychonauts ended with Truman being kidnapped, and Psychonauts 2 picks up right where it left off.

Loboto's mind, as you can see, is a twisted world of teeth, tongues, and gums, and filled with enemies that represent doubt and regret who try to pound you with a big bureaucratic 'No' stamp and drop weights on you from above.

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Raz has several powers to help him navigate and fight inside people's minds. He can double jump and wall-climb. He uses abilities like telekinesis to pick up and throw objects, pyrokinesis to set enemies on fire, he uses psychic blasts and he can summon a psychic ball to roll around on quickly or to float from when falling.

After tailing Loboto to his tower, we get a glimpse of who hired him to kidnap Truman, as well as someone even more disturbing. Fans of Psychonauts may remember that the members of Raz's family were all cursed to die in water, and that whenever Raz fell into water, a giant, spooky hand would try to grab him and pull him under.

It looks like we might finally get to face the power behind that curse. Psychonauts 2 is due out later this year.

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Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.