Psychonauts
Just want to +1 this. Controller input is shaky at best - and unresponsive otherwise. The only way to reliably control the game is to map everything to mouse and keyboard despite the game supporting controllers. Both native and Proton exhibit this same behavior.
Edit:
I was able to get the onscreen error message Attention: There were one or more important but non-fatal problems. to go away by setting the Proton version to 6.3-8 or earlier.
Can confirm everything happening exactly as described, followed your same steps but with newer version of GE as-well on top of standard proton.
Standard proton behavior is unchanged and leaves the error message, while GE laments lack of compatibility due to missing DirectX 9.0
Bumping for same issue as Blitzy
Someone has actually developed a patch that fixes this issue. However, you won't be able to use mouse and keyboard after installing it.
https://www.gog.com/forum/psychonauts/psychopad_xbox_360_controller_gui_unofficial_patch/page1
Someone has actually developed a patch that fixes this issue. However, you won't be able to use mouse and keyboard after installing it.
https://www.gog.com/forum/psychonauts/psychopad_xbox_360_controller_gui_unofficial_patch/page1
those links all appear to be dead. controllers kind of work. for whatever reason the game has two sets of controls bound at all times. for whatever reason proton unbinds the main controls. you can rebind them for the current session and they'll work however if you close and relaunch the game the controls will be unbound again
I can't get controller input to work at all. The best anyone seems to be able to do so far is map keyboard inputs to the controller, which is obviously not acceptable for a platformer. Upon inspecting this issue, I believe I've found a clue. See these garbled bindings?
They don't make sense, do they? But if you open the game, that's what you'll see. Clicking 'defaults' restores it to a reasonable default (if playing on keyboard is considered reasonable) but this default is replaced by nonsense again on restart (thanks @powerpuffboysz for noticing this). This gave me a hunch. Here's what happens when I copy the ini file from my Windows install (which is set up for controller input) into the game files instead:
Garbled again, but not the same way. I believe something is wrong with the ini parsing when running Psychonauts under Proton. Would fixing this solve the controller problem? Hard to say, but it's a place to start. As is, even keyboard controls are bugged due to this.
@NotSoCheezy hit similar issues when playing on Linux and/or Steamdeck and had to reset settings every launch. Although I doubt it's proton issue and related to ini parsing at all. The game runs on really old and bugged engine and controller input always has been broken on PC even under Windows. Eg. it would read xbox gamepad triggers as moving axis and spin camera non-stop until settings reset or fixing something in ini file externally.
@kapsh Xbox 360 gamepads have worked on Windows since the game was patched nearly a decade ago. Pre-patch, I believe the game used DirectInput (hence the trigger/stick mixup), and it's been suggested that the current version uses Xinput but I don't have a solid source for that.
I suspect that this Xinput implementation is out of spec somehow and works on Windows via undocumented behavior, but I wouldn't know how to dig into that. Weirdly, though, on my Steam Deck I experienced that trigger bug on the latest patch in Proton. Maybe the game reverts to DirectInput in the absence of a specific device it's looking for, but that problem would be out of scope for Proton anyway.
After further investigation, I have discovered two things:
- Psychonauts (latest patch) uses Xinput 1.3 (xinput1_3.dll). Confirmed with Process Monitor.
- Installing the Windows version of the dll fixes the garbled default controls bug.
The game still won't detect controller input this way, but unless I'm mistaken, this indicates a bug in Proton's implementation of the library.
Check out https://github.com/jdaniellee/psycho_fix
DLLs
xinput1_3.dllx1 2025-09
Compatibility Report
System Information
I confirm:
steam-3830.log
Symptoms
Controller button prompts do not work at all, only keyboard/mouse prompts are ever shown regardless of controller type (Xinput, Dinput, Xbox, PS5, PS4, 8BitDo, etc). This applies to the Linux native version as well. Running the Windows version with Proton is preferable however since the game does not have cross-platform save files, so users of Windows PCs and a Steam Deck need to run the Windows version to have the same save file on both systems. Controller input are inconsistent at best, with some Proton versions accepting inputs and others ignoring them all with the same Steam Input settings.
Additionally an error message is show on top of the game when using proton, though it doesn't seem to actually affect anything other than being an eyesore. the error is as follows:
Reproduction
UPDATE: added system info gist
UPDATE 2: fixed gist info