There’s something great about moving objects with nothing but the sheer, focused power of your mind. Games have always dabbled in the idea of psychic power, of course. But then there are the special ones. A select few titles that go so much further, the ones that truly, genuinely make you feel like you could rip reality itself apart at the seams with your own willpower.
These gamesdon’t treat telekinesisas just a side-ability; it takes center stage. Whether you’re hurling screaming enemies into walls, twisting the very environment into a weapon, or just bending entire battles to your psychic will,these are thesix games that get it right.
Control
The Glorious Bureaucracy of Telekinetic Power
Office desks. Filing cabinets. Fire extinguishers. In the world of Control, these are not mundane, everyday objects. They are lethal weapons. And Jesse Faden’s incredible psychic arsenal is exactly what makes Remedy’s paranormal thriller so ridiculously, intoxicatingly fun. The simple act of ripping a chunk of concrete from the floor and hurling it across a room at a monster made of pure hiss… it just never, ever gets old.
But what really makes it all resonate is how the story is so perfectly tied into that feeling. Jesse isn’t just some random person with superpowers; she’s the new Director of the Federal Bureau of Control, a role that doesn’t just grant her this incredible power, but also the immense responsibility for forces that are far beyond human comprehension.
Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy
The Forgotten Psychic Powerhouse of the 2000s
This is one of those brilliant, mid-2000s action games that just felt years ahead of its time. You’re playing as Nick Scryer, a psychic supersoldier, and you can just toss enemy soldiers around like they’re weightless ragdolls. You can mind-control them and make them shoot their own allies. Or you can just… crush them with raw, invisible psychic force. It had gunplay, sure. But the real, pure, unadulterated fun came from just creatively, chaotically mixing your telekinetic powers with the environment.
Psi-Ops stands out, even today, for its sheer, gleeful willingness to just embrace the most absurd psychic chaos imaginable. Few things in gaming feel quite so mischievous as hurling an enemy into a conveniently placed pile of explosive barrels, or using your mind control powers to make them just casually walk off a ledge to their doom. A true cult classic that showed just how satisfying unrestrained telekinetic power could be, long before it became mainstream.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Swinging Lightsabers With the Power of Your Mind
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
- Released
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September 16, 2008
In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, players take control of Starkiller, Darth Vader’s secret, and ludicrously powerful, apprentice. And that means you’re not just wielding a lightsaber; you’re wielding the Force itself as a weapon of mass destruction. Enemies aren’t just defeated; they’re flung across rooms with bone-crunching force. Entire Star Destroyers are dragged from the sky. And legions of Stormtroopers are sent tumbling helplessly with a single, contemptuous flick of your wrist.
There’s a sheer, unbelievable scale of the destruction tied to your power. Every single battle just pushes the fantasy of being a Force prodigy with absolutely no limits, far beyond anything the films ever dared to show. It’s messy, ridiculously over-the-top, and gloriously, wonderfully indulgent. The ultimate power trip.
Scarlet Nexus
The Beautiful, Brainpunk Future
Scarlet Nexus takes the core concept of telekinetic abilities and fuses it with some beautiful, fast-paced action. Both of the game’s protagonists, Yuito and Kasane, fight with these incredible psychic powers that let them just grab cars, telephone poles, and chunks of debris from the environment and weave them into their flashy melee combos.
And where the game truly shines is in its unique, wonderful combat rhythm. Just hurling objects at your foes is only part of the flow. You’re constantly swapping between your own telekinetic strikes and the unique abilities that you can borrow from your teammates, turning every single battle into this fast-paced, beautifully choreographed dance of pure psychic synergy.
Lucius
The Child Who Weaponized His Own Innocence
This is the dark side of telekinesis. A much, much darker side. In Lucius, you’re playing as the son of the devil, a creepy little kid who uses his burgeoning psychic powers not in open combat, but to engineer a series of grisly, “accidental” deaths within a sprawling, gothic mansion. Candles will just… fall over. Objects will move at just the right, or wrong, moment. And the mansion’s poor, unsuspecting servants will meet a series of unfortunate, and often hilarious, ends, all thanks to your invisible, malevolent manipulations.
It’s a game that leans hard into horror rather than pure spectacle. The power here comes not from throwing boulders or wrecking armies, but from the subtle, terrifying control you have over the environment and the sheer dread that it creates. It’s a chilling, brilliant reminder of just how terrifying invisible power can be.
Galerians
When Telekinesis Becomes a Fight for Survival
Galerianscarved out its own unique, and deeply weird, space as a kind of horror-tinged, psychic thriller. You’re Rion, a young man who awakens in a strange medical facility with no memory, but with a whole suite of incredible psychic powers that let him hurl his enemies across rooms, set them on fire with pyrokinesis, or just fry their minds outright.
But these incredible abilities all come at a cost. A real, tangible cost. They drain his body, they cause him intense pain, and they often leave him completely vulnerable, which makes using them both an incredible thrill and a constant, terrifying risk. The deeply unsettling tone of the game just makes its telekinesis feel so dangerous, rather than liberating. A really unique and often forgotten, gem.
