In which mental tangles get unraveled

Final Psychonauts Update:

So I finally finished the game. It's a pretty awesome game, and lots of fun. But before I talk about the final parts of the game, a few quick criticisms. The controls are a little goofy, especially when you're expected to navigate irregular paths and it's difficult to tell when you might fall into some chasm or something. I guess that ties into the other criticism, which is that the graphics are somewhat muddy. This might be unique to the Playstation 2 version of the game, as the Xbox and Gamecube (as well as the PC, if it's up to date) are a bit more powerful and might have better-defined visuals. These aren't dealbreakers by any means, but there were sections that were frustrating to get through due to these issues.

But enough negativity! Let's talk about the cool stuff! (by the way, SPOILERS for the end of the game in pretty much the rest of this post. And if you want to get caught up on my previous posts about the game, click the "Psychonauts" tag at the bottom of this post.) Since my last update, I was able to scale the tower of the insane asylum, free the kidnapped Psychonauts, and confront the evil mastermind who was planning to take over the world. After an explosive psychic battle, I had to confront him in his new form, a battle tank controlled by his disembodied brain. After defeating the tank, Raz's brain also gets separated from his body, and then the two brains end up intermingled, plunging you into a mental world that is a combination of both characters' psyches. Raz, as I might have mentioned earlier, has run away from his family's circus, so his mind is filled with tents, tightropes, trapezes, and other circus-related paraphernalia. It turns out that the bad guy, Coach Oleander, had some childhood trauma due to his butcher father's slaughter of his pet rabbits. So, his mind is filled with images of meat. Thus, we end up with a circus constructed of meat and filled with grinders that spit out monstrous versions of the Coach's rabbits. It's delightfully surreal. Unfortunately, the only picture I could find of the meat circus is not an especially good representation:



After some platforming sequences in which you have to protect a childhood version of the Coach, you end up fighting a gigantic version of his father the butcher:



Yikes. After defeating him, Raz's own nightmares make an appearance, as a freakish version of his father appears and taunts you into following him through a maze of tightropes, trampolines, and trapezes while flinging flaming juggling clubs at you. As we learned earlier, Raz's father forbade him from using psychic abilities, but Raz ran away to the psychic summer camp. He doesn't understand why his father is mean to him like this, since he suspects his father is also psychic.

Eventually, you make it through the obstacle course (which seems to be plagued by a some sort of ghost or apparition that keeps calling your name), only to get sucked back into the tent where you fought the butcher, where you discover that the two fathers have been conferring. They decide to team up against you, forcing you to fight the butcher again, but now he has flaming knives and you also have to dodge the explosive clubs that Raz's father throws from the sidelines. After defeating the butcher (he falls into a huge meat grinder), the apparition that you saw earlier breaks through into your (and Oleander's) psyche; it's Raz's father! As Raz suspected, he's also a psychic, and he was just trying to protect Raz. He defeats the evil mental version of himself, flinging it into the grinder as well. But then a freakish amalgamation of the two fathers rises from the grinder and renews the attack! Raz's father assures him that since it's his own mind, he's the powerful one here, and lends him all his psychic energy for the battle. So as you fight the combo-father, you assume a giant form of yourself consisting of mental energy. It's very cool. You're easily able to defeat the monster, and then disentangle yourself from Coach's mind. It's the end of the game, but, in a good scene that sets up future sequels that will probably never happen, the agents decide to ask Raz to become a Psychonaut.

It's a great ending to a fun game, and the scenes between Raz and his father are actually rather touching. His father had seemed mean and overbearing from what Raz said earlier in the game, but it turns out he just wants what's best for his son. That's one of the great things about this game: while it's incredibly enjoyable to use and develop your powers, and the script is very funny, the characters are very well drawn, such that you relate to them and come to care about them. That's something at which games can excel, since they place you in direct control of a character. It's good to see a game which uses this aspect so well. I highly recommend it.
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Bonus: Since this is my last Psychonauts post, I figured I would show a couple more cool pictures:



This is the "collective unconscious", from which you can enter any of the minds you previously visited.



And here's Raz blasting a "censor" with his mind. Cool!

These people are not quite right in the head

Psychonauts update:

Check out that cool banner I found. Now I have a logo for my Psychonauts reviews. Of course, I think I'm getting pretty close to the end of the game, so I'll probably only get to use it once or twice more.

So, I played a few more "levels", but before I get to those, I want to show off a few pictures I found around the 'net of stuff I talked about in my first couple reviews.

Here's a shot of the "blueprint tank" that you fight when you discover the evil scheme:



Here's a good shot of Raz terrorizing the denizens of Lungfishopolis:



And here's Raz fighting the critic in the elderly actress's mind:



I love the way he shoots critical words at you.

The next level I played (or, I should say, the next mind I invaded) was that of Fred Bonaparte, a descendant of Napoleon's who kept losing and giving up (when playing games, I guess). So the genetic memory of his diminutive ancestor awoke in his mind and began to struggle for control. When you enter his mind, you see that Fred and Napoleon are locked in struggle, playing a war game, with Napoleon trying to teach Fred to persevere and not give up. So, of course, you have to help Fred win, by jumping into the board and manipulating the pieces (which are alive).





It's a lot of fun, and a great level design. You shrink down to the size shown in those pictures, where you can stomp around and move things, but then you have to recruit troops, so you shrink down again to the size where you can enter the buildings and talk to people. It's also very funny, with the people all sure they're going to die with Fred in charge. Good times.

The next brain to enter was that of Edgar, a Mexican artist obsessed with bullfights. In his mind, he's trying to build a house of cards to reach the image of his lost lady love.



It's a really cool-looking level, with everything seemingly made out of velvet and glowing like it's under a black light. You have to explore his mind and find the four queens for him to use to build his structure. There's also a giant pink bull rampaging throughout his mind, so you have to avoid it, or it will pick you up and throw you in some random mental location.



To get each of the cards, you end up fighting an animal-themed luchadore (and exchanging some funny dialogue with them).



I love the way Raz's costume changes to look more like a matador's outfit in this level. As you explore, you come across several art dealers in the form of dogs, which I guess Edgar drew playing cards in one of his paintings. Talking to them, you learn that all this bullfight stuff is a fantasy that Edgar concocted to get over a teenage trauma; he was on the wrestling team in high school, but when his girlfriend dumped him, he ended up losing the big match, and was disgraced. His mind turned this into a story about a matador stealing his lady love. Eventually, you end up fighting Edgar in the form of the bull, then having to defend the bull from the matador, showing Edgar that these people were silly teenagers and have no power over him.



It's really a pretty good bit of storytelling for a game, and it emerges through gameplay, rather than just being told in a cut scene.

I think I'm getting pretty close to the end. Next, I have to go face the evil scientist who is running the asylum. I'll keep you posted!

I hope Cecil B. DeMille doesn't give this lady false hope

Psychonauts update:

Go here for part 1 of my look at the game.

I played through another "level" of the game, entering the mind of an aged actress. Her mind takes the form of a theater, with performers acting out scenes from her life. The performers are weird flower children (literally; they seem to be animated flowers) with acting skills at the level of an elementary-school play. The object is to get her "inner muse" to reappear; the muse has gone into seclusion since every time she comes out to perform, a phantom will strike, ruining the performances. Plus, there's a rude critic sitting in the wings, ridiculing the scenes. It's good adventure game stuff, with you switching out the sets and scenes (and the mood of the scenes) to find a way up into the catwalks to fight the phantom. You end up battling the critic, who hurls lethal words at you and mocks your fighting abilities. Lots of fun.

Next up: Napoleon! Or at least an inmate who has a second personality that thinks it is Napoleon.

This game is psycho...NOT!

Wow, that's a really lame post title. Sorry. Anyway, I wanted to talk about the PS2 game I've been playing, Psychonauts:



It's a really fun game, from, as the cover says, "the mind of Tim Schafer", who was the creative force behind classic adventure games like Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. I haven't played either of those, but I might like to try them out after the enjoyable experience I'm having with Psychonauts. I'm not sure how easy it would be to find them, let alone get them to run on current computer hardware. Well, it's something to consider.

Psychonauts takes the form of a "platform game", similar to Jak & Daxter or Super Mario 64. It takes place at a "psychic summer camp" which acts as a training ground for the elite force of the title. You play Rasputin (Raz for short), a young escapee from the circus who is a budding psychic. As the game goes on, you develop several psychic abilities, such as levitation, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and clairvoyance (which allows you to see through other characters' eyes). It's tons of fun to use these powers as you explore the camp, but the real enjoyable part of the game is when you get to enter other characters' minds. This is where the creators really let their imaginations run wild, coming up with all sorts of crazy ideas for what people's psyches might look like.

The first "level" that you enter is the mind of Coach Oleander, an ex-military man who teaches "Basic Braining." His mind is like a war zone, filled with barb wire, explosions, tanks, aircraft, and other army paraphernalia. Next is Sasha Nein, a Psychonaut secret agent whose mind is very controlled, appearing as a near-featureless cube. That is, until an experiment goes awry and his subconscious chaotically explodes out from below the surface:



Then comes Milla Vodello, another secret agent who evokes mod 60's style. Her mind is like a giant dance club, filled with disco balls, TV screens, lava lamps, and go-go dancers. She refers to everyone as "dahling", in a Zsa Zsa Gabor accent. However, at one point you discover a room containing the memories of her children, who died tragically in a fire; it looks like the party-girl personality is a facade to hide her pain. That's good, subtle writing in my opinion. Especially for a video game.

Those levels mostly serve as an extended training sequence, allowing you to accrue psychic powers and get used to the game's atmosphere. Then the real plot kicks in: Someone is kidnapping campers and extracting their brains, planning to use them to control an army of psychic tanks and take over the world! So, you've got to rescue everyone and defeat the evil mastermind.

I estimate I'm only about a third of the way through the game, with a long way to go. So far, the game's been excellent, with some incredibly creative levels. When you discover the evil scheme, you have to fight one of the tanks in a dreamscape made of blueprints. When the tank locks onto you, it looks like a pencil has drawn a dashed line and arrow from the tank to you. Later, you have to enter the mind of a mutated lungfish (really!), and you become a Godzilla-style monster, rampaging through a cityscape filled with miniature lungfishes. It's hilarious. Another level has you entering the mind of a conspiracy-obsessed security guard (or is he a milkman?). It's a warped view of a normal suburban neighborhood, with the streets twisting and turning in different directions (and dimensions), and cameras popping out of every feature (bushes, mailboxes, fire hydrants) to keep an eye on you:



Plus, there are what look like spies everywhere, posing as workers.



They crack me up, saying things like, "That woman's breasts are of above-average size," or "Although I often smell of excrement, I should not be discriminated against as I provide a valuable service," all delivered in a monotone.

So, I'm really digging the game. I'll be doing updates of future levels as I play them. Right now, I'm in an insane asylum, and there are three characters whose minds I'll enter next: an aging actress (like the lady in Sunset Boulevard), a man with a split personality (the second personality is Napoleon), and a man obsessed with bullfights. They should all be fun. Plus, there's an orderly whose mind I'll have to try to infiltrate. In fact, there's several minor characters who I could try that on; I wonder what will happen if I do? Well, I'll see. Stay tuned for more news of my exploits!