Three and Out – ‘Psychonauts’

It is Ben’s recommendation that you listen to Peter Mcconnell’s score while you read the review.

Playing Psychonauts felt like being sucked through a time portal to the portion of my life where I would wake up an hour before school to watch shows like Jimmy Neutron or Rocket Power, with an extra hit of melancholy. The game moves swiftly from one joke to the next with confidence. All the while, its writing has just enough edge that it manages to crawl beneath your skin when you’re least expecting it. Psychonauts isn’t an overtly long game, but it felt just like something that had been with me my whole life. It has the style, humor, and boldness of games like Majora’s Mask and Portal. Playing off its central motif of recognizing and attending to our own mental imbalances, Psychonauts is relentlessly meaningful and interesting.

The game wastes precious few seconds introducing its multi-layered concepts and characters. Raz, the game’s protagonist, has run away from his father’s circus to realize his true powers as a psychic at the Psychonauts’ camp – a place where young psychics go to harness their abilities and later become trained soldiers. Within minutes of starting the game, I was presented with characters that all looked, sounded, and acted differently from one another. For instance: Dogen, a stumpy blue boy who looked more like a potato than human, is one of the game’s featured characters. In contrast, there are other characters (like Elka Doom, who looks right out of something like Recess) that don’t even look as if they’d be in the same game. It feels odd at first, until ultimately the game’s multiple sub-worlds, storylines and gameplay elements all feel equally extraordinary. In Psychonauts, I took on levels that allowed me to live out a personal Kaiju fantasy that I haven’t partaken in since Rampage. Moments later, I found myself in the midst of a fever dream trying to track down a milkman with a touch of pyromania. Psychonauts looks like a hodgepodge of material from afar, but its theme of mental trauma manages to tie it all into a satisfying bow. As an example, Boyd (the catalyst for the milkman conspiracy sequence) is revealed to be the milkman in his own state of conspiracy filled psychosis.  

In the midst of all of these whacky levels, Raz has the ability to collect things like “Emotional Baggage” and “Mental Cobwebs”. If there is a flaw with Psychonauts’ storytelling, it’s that it often feels too on the nose. Thankfully, the game’s sense of humor is plenty self-aware and doesn’t dance around its exactness. Many of Psychonauts’  best moments come in its brevity, like the many stick-men parading around the “Milkman Conspiracy” level. One of the requirements to proceed from the level is to pretend as if you’re a widow. The Government Men (G-Men), which are just a figment of another character’s own mental disarray, declare things like “I wish my loved one was not dead, but alive” and “I wish my loved one had remembered to indicate me as the beneficiary of his 401k plan.” Psychonauts uses its ability to make you laugh by hitting you with a gut-punch the next moment. Everything is sad and hilarious, all at once.

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