The best family games like Psychonauts are Psychonauts 2, A Hat in Time and Super Mario Odyssey. Below are 5, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to family costs you.
Filtering to family means the game has to work for a child and an adult at the same table without either of them being bored. That is a much harder design problem than a difficulty slider.
What you get: Something you can put in front of anyone. The best family games make the skill gap not matter rather than pretending it is not there.
What made Psychonauts worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the family part of that answer, and only the family part.
Everything the first did, with controls that finally match the ideas.
The closest indie game in tone and structure.
For the one-new-idea-per-level design at its best.
The collectathon Psychonauts is built on.
Every chapter is a completely new mechanic, and it is superb.
Edge. Family games rarely go anywhere uncomfortable, and a few of them are too generous to hold an experienced player for long alone.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Psychonauts that are not family games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Psychonauts — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Psychonauts 2. Everything the first did, with controls that finally match the ideas.
No. Psychonauts released on the Microsoft Xbox, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Age ratings cover content but not difficulty or frustration, which is what actually ruins a family session. Five minutes of unedited play footage tells you more than any rating.
With mixed ages, co-operative usually wins. The competitive ones that work are the ones where being in last place is still entertaining.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Psychonauts list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is family — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the family guide for where to start in the genre generally.