People are strange. And somehow, strange people always end up gravitating towards each other. One day, a bunch of those strange people got together and formed a team called Double Fine. After getting together, they worked for a few years and put out their first game: Psychonauts. You’ve probably heard of it. High-concept game design. Massive cult following. Crushing financial loss at the time of release. That’s the one. But despite its setbacks, this game has legs. Take a look at any online discourse about the greatest game ever made. Before long, some millennial with an ironic portmanteau username combining “The Sopranos” with “avocados” will start uppercase posting about Psychonauts, probably in-between recommending everyone go watch Twin Peaks. And I want to be careful here. It’s always easy to look at a financially underperforming title that has a cult following and declare it a victory for art or a project of passion. But in this case, I can’t help it. There’s something special about Psychonauts and I think that’s what has held the public’s attention. It’s a mixed kind of work. There’s something wholesome about it. There’s something sad about it. There’s something eager about it. Psychonauts tries. And I think that’s what resonates to this day.
Welcome to Basic Braining
Psychonauts is about a ten-year-old kid named Raz, who runs away from his home at the circus to go to Whispering Rock Summer Camp. This camp trains kids to harness their psychic powers in order for them to become world-traveling superspies known as psychonauts. But of course, Raz figures out pretty quickly that something sinister is unraveling around this camp and he sets out to make everything right. From there, a whole lot of stuff happens. Brains get stolen, lake monsters start abducting people, and disco parties, despite everyone’s best efforts, happen. And while the basic concept may sound like a pretty standard young adult plot (kids go missing, adults are incompetent, one lone exceptional kid steps up to save the day), this basic foundation stretches in so many directions over the course of the ten-or-so-hours of play-time. Psychonauts isn’t so much about what happens. It’s more about how it happens.
Psychonauts takes its cues from a lot of sources. Every person seems stuck out of time. You’ve got people from all corners of the world and all different walks of life. The setting is vaguely Cold-War era with its lean towards spies and the TV programs that you catch glimpses of. You’ve got one teacher who wouldn’t look out of place in an Austin Powers film, one that probably played patty-cake with J. Robert Oppenheimer, and another that’s wearing a helmet that looks straight out of Germany circa-WW1. This stylistic-smorgasbord is spread across the whole game and ironically helps to unify a lot of the outlandish stuff that you see. How can anything look out of place when everything is out of place? Psychonauts comfortably remains as the “Island of Misfit Toys” of videogames. All things that were outdated just end up here and make up the language of the world. Despite, or maybe because of, that smashing together of cultures, the language here ends up being incredibly colorful.
Oh My God! The Puppy Orphanage!
The gameplay in Psychonauts is probably the most ordinary thing about it. This is an adventure platformer, where you jump around and smack enemies with pretty basic combat opportunities. Things like jumping and swinging off poles feel fine enough. And your aerial control has a sort of “Looney Tunes” momentum to it. Whenever you jump in the air, you have a whole lot of hang-time and can even change your trajectory mid-flight. But after the honeymoon period’s over, it’s like Raz remembers gravity exists and he plummets to the ground at an almost ludicrous speed. Pretty early in the game, you get a levitation power that adds some depth to your movement options and really shouldn’t ever be unbound from your left bumper. On that note, we have to talk about one of the jankiest aspects of this game: the psychic powers themselves. Accessing your psychic powers slows the game down a bit since you need to open a quick menu to set it to a shoulder button. Then, once you set a power to one of three hotkeys, you can use it at will. While this sounds alright, if not clunky, the bigger issue is the design of the powers. A lot of the powers are situational, like using pyrokinesis to set a stack of boards on fire so you can pass. Aside from getting rid of the three-ish piles of mahogany I found in the game, there’s not much else for pyrokinesis to do. There are a handful of powers that get a lot more love, like the aforementioned levitation ball, the projectile psy-blast, and the clairvoyance. But only a handful of the powers are actually fun to use. Add that on top of the hassle that it takes to constantly be swapping them out, and you’ll generally keep the same three bound for the entire game.
Basic gameplay gripes aside, the core gameplay loop of Psychonauts is such an interesting concept that you can easily forgive any moment-to-moment shortcomings. Having powers and levitating things is all well and good, but it’s only as interesting as where you do it. And thankfully, where you do it is incredibly interesting. You’re introduced to the concept of entering the minds of teachers early in the game, going through their individual psyches and completing their mind-obstacle courses. Each course reflects the user but since you are only going through the minds of teachers, everything is pretty sanitized and kept together. However, at the halfway point of the game, you gain the ability to enter the minds of several broken and unfettered people. And it’s here that the level designers really showed their hogs. You go the gamut, from a schizophrenic milkman’s cul-de-sac nightmare to a bipolar actress’s unending stage play. The gameplay switches at this point. Whereas before, you were just attempting to get through levels and get your camp badges, in these newer levels, you use much more puzzle-solving to fix the issues that you see inside the mind. Not only is this an incredible template for almost any kind of level you can think of, but it also allows each level to play out completely differently. In Mario, you win by running from left to right and touching a flagpole at the end. But sometimes in Psychonauts, you win by maneuvering a towering soldier piece on a board game of Waterloo in order to exorcise Napoleon from a man suffering from very acute anxiety and imposter’s syndrome. It’s quirky like that.
Cute Little Runt of a Bunny
Humor is something that’s pretty hard to get right in most forms of media but especially games. Just writing a funny joke isn’t enough. It’s not even the most important part. You have to make sure the pacing is on-point, the characters can emote on-screen accordingly, the energy from voice actors line up so it’s not jarring from one line to another. And to cap the list off, games are made by gamers, the least funny breed of ferret. All considered, it’s little wonder that most video games just aren’t very funny. Psychonauts is different though. This is a very funny game. From bit gags to little side banter, Psychonauts consistently delivers on the laughs. Humor usually has the shelf life of already-bad milk, but the haw-haws in this game still hold up today. Double Fine founder Tim Schafer is an industry veteran and he’s worked on some funny games before this one. Although you can tell this game was a combined effort from a lot of talented people, Tim has the good sense to tie everything together in a creative and cohesive way. And when you end up laughing at almost everything that every character has to say, it’s hard to argue with the results.
But beyond the laughs, there’s a heart here. The gameplay is empathy. As you might have picked up on, in Psychonauts you go about soothing the psyches of hurting people. Raz as a character is a fun mixture of tryhard-seriousness, smug sarcasm, and complete earnestness. But at the core of it all, he is still a kid. He seeks to understand the world and people around him and the people he comes across. So even with all the funny ha-ha jokes that he tells, the people in need are never the butts of jokes. That’s the main throughline with Psychonauts. The humor of the game is not pointed at any individual, save from clear antagonists: most of the humor on offer here is just situational. Psychonauts, through its writing, does not seek to punch down, but instead just to marvel like, wow, it’s crazy just how weird life is sometimes, right? And even with the outlandish situations and strange circumstances, there’s something in the murk of Psychonauts that resonates, that calls out to a sense of “otherness” in its players. And it tells them that it’s alright. That sometimes people hurt and break, but that they still matter, that they still have a place in the world. And as far as videogames starring the embodiment of Barry White as a turtle go? I’d say that’s not too bad of a message.
I Am Part Of The Road Crew
Now, I usually stay away from art critique in my reviews-analyses-shitposts. I’m not qualified at all to talk about colors and I don’t know nearly enough French names. but in Psychonauts’s case, I just cannot help myself. This game is something special. Although it’s very clear that this is a game from the PS2 era, the art direction carries this title regardless of any technical limitations. The aesthetics of Psychonauts are abstract, maybe speaking to the fractured psyche of its inhabitants or maybe my farts just smell that good. The characters often look like they were constructed from malformed potatoes, only suggesting the anatomy of a human body. Heads are huge, limbs are spindly, and a lot of personality is placed in the actual shape of a character. Scott C. brought his lumpy yet serene style to Psychonauts and crafted characters that read well from a distance and also tell a story before the character has ever said a word. And that’s to speak nothing of the worlds that these characters inhabit. Peter Chan designed the background art that the worlds of Psychonauts were based on. And as I’ve mentioned before, I hold these worlds in very high regard. The off-kilter art style speaks to the aforementioned “otherness” in the players and that’s probably why if you went up to a person with a Nightmare Before Christmas shirt and asked, they might have an opinion on how cool Raz’s googles are.
Also, since I’ve got you here, let me say: this soundtrack fucking bops. Peter McConnell is an industry legend and for very good reason. With games like this, Grim Fandango, and Brutal Legend, Peter has proven that he could probably set a score to Tim Schaefer eating a sandwich. The music generally uses only a few instruments at a time, giving each track a sort of small-band feeling, but you’ll get variety. From laid-back twang around the campfire to bombast surrounding the drama of the theater, the music sets the scene wonderfully. There’s a lot of range in this soundtrack and each track really does lend itself to the character of the world it’s playing in. So for example, Sasha is a somewhat aloof man of complete control over his emotions. So the song that plays inside his mind is composed in a technical style known as twelve-tone. This style of music treats every note as equal and thus avoids being in any key at any point. Besides being insane, this demonstrates the character’s personality through the song itself. The music epitomizes the care and level of craftsmanship that went into this game. This attention to detail is pretty consistent across the board. And it bleeds through. You can tell that the people who made Psychonauts believed in it as a piece of interactive art.
What Color Is The Sky In Your World?
So that’s Psychonauts. It may not be the best platformer in the world, but to the people who think about it from time to time, it’s important. The cartoon exterior and funny script are immediately striking and pull folks in. And once you’re in, the empathy machine kicks in and you’re shown the deep psyche and insecurities of these characters. You proceed through the game by caring about others. That’s the kind of stuff that makes this game unique. No matter how deep or how shallow you want your experience, Psychonauts has something that can appeal to you. This is an outsider’s game. But not just in a superficial way. Everyone, no matter what kind of face you put on in public or even in front of loved ones, has something inside them that makes them feel different. To feel out. And through Psychonauts, they can see othered characters being cared about and treated fairly. That belonging. That compassion. That’s the true gift that this game gives. Also, the power of pyrokinesis. Everyone should get to experience lighting some squirrels on fire with their minds.
If you want to show Bobby Zilch what’s what, you can grab Psychonauts for almost everything nowadays. There’s the PS2 and Xbox originals, then all the countless re-releases on current consoles and Steam. Really, if you have something that plays games, you can play Psychonauts. Just treat yourself and give it a go.