How to play Psychonauts on Linux

Psychonauts is a platforming game developed by Double Fine Productions and published by Majesco Entertainment in 2005 and later made its way to Linux and Mac OS in 2011. It follows the character Raz, a boy gifted with psychic abilities who runs away from the circus. Here’s how to play it on Linux.

Getting Psychonauts working on Linux

Psychonauts is a native Linux game, and it was ported over during the early days of the Humble Bundle. However, while it is possible to buy this game DRM-free for Linux on the Humble Store, the Steam installation method is much easier, and we’ll be focusing on it for this guide.

Install Steam

To get Psychonauts working on Linux through Steam, you must install the client on your system. To do that, open up a terminal window on the Linux desktop. You can do this by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T on the keyboard or search for “Terminal” in the app menu.

With the terminal window open, follow the operating system installation instructions below that correspond with the OS you use.

Ubuntu

To get Steam working on Ubuntu, you can use the apt install command down below.

sudo apt install steam

Debian

To get Steam working on Debian, start by downloading the DEB package from the Steam website using the wget download command. This command will place Steam in your home folder.

wget https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/client/installer/steam.deb

After downloading the Steam DEB package to your computer, the installation can begin. First, using the dpkg command below, load up the Steam DEB package to your computer.

sudo dpkg -i steam.deb

Now that the DEB package is installed on your system, you will need to correct any dependency errors that may have occurred during the installation.

sudo apt-get install -f

Arch Linux

Steam is available for Arch Linux through the “Multilib” software repository. You will need to enable this before attempting to install the software. To enable the repo, open up the /etc/pacman.conf file in your favorite text editor (as root.)

In the text editor, locate “multilib” and remove the # symbol from in front of it, as well as the lines directly below it. Then, save the edits for the text file and close it. After that, re-sync Arch with the official repos.

sudo pacman -Syy

Finally, install the latest release of Steam onto your Arch Linux system using the following pacman command.

sudo pacman -S steam

Fedora/OpenSUSE

If you’re on Fedora Linux or OpenSUSE, it is possible to get Steam working through software repositories included with the operating system. That being said, Steam works much better on these OSes via Flatpak, and we suggest using those instructions instead to get Steam working.

Flatpak

To set up Steam on Flatpak, you’ll first have to set up the Flatpak runtime on your computer. Set up the Flatpak runtime on your Linux PC by following our in-depth guide on the subject.

When the Flatpak runtime is configured and set up on your Linux PC, you can install Steam. Then, using the two commands below, get Steam working on your system.

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

flatpak install flathub com.valvesoftware.Steam

Install Psychonauts on Linux

Now that Steam is installed follow the step-by-step instructions down below to get Psychonauts working on your Linux PC.

Step 1: Find the “Store” button, and click on it with the mouse. When you select this button, you’ll access the Steam store. Inside the Steam store, find the “Search” box, and click on it with the mouse.

Inside the search box, type in “Psychonauts” and press the Enter key with the keyboard to view the search results. Then, look through the search results for “Psychonauts.”

Step 2: After clicking on “Psychonauts” in the search results, you’ll be taken to the game’s Steam Storefront page. Look at the “Psychonauts” Steam Storefront page, and locate the green “Add to cart” button.

Select the “Add to cart” button to add the game to your Steam cart. Then, select the Steam cart icon to go through purchasing the game so you can add it to your Steam account.

Step 3: Find the “Library” button, and click on it with the mouse to access your Steam games library. Once inside the Steam games library, find the search box, and click on it with the mouse.

Type “Psychonauts” into the search box to locate the game’s Steam library page. Once on the Psychonauts page, find the blue “INSTALL” button, and click on it with the mouse to start the installation process.

Step 4: The installation process won’t take too long as it is a small game. When the process is complete, the blue “INSTALL” button will become a green “PLAY” button. Select the green “PLAY” button to start up the game.