Psychonauts in Review 2: Narrative
Last time I focused more on Psychonauts' incoherent, frustrating gameplay, with only some passing references to the narrative elements. This time I'm going to be focusing on the story, with a secondary focus on talking about the background elements that aren't strictly part of the story but aren't gameplay either.
My first impression of Psychonauts was that it was a game made by people who were trying to create a Saturday morning cartoon, and for some reason had decided to do so in the form of a video game. Having completed the game, I suspect this impression was highly accurate, and it's a notable element of why the game managed to have a strong first impression... and also why the game's narrative largely lost me past said strong first impression.
The game opens on a military-sounding man providing an explanation of what a Psychonaut is and what they do: they're basically the CIA or FBI, only they psychically delve into people's minds to pull off their stuff and also the overall vibe is that the stealthy shenanigans Psychonauts engage in are more James Bond than, you know, real-life spywork. Then the game pulls a bit of a twist by revealing the military man is speaking to a crowd of kids in the woods: Psychonauts in training are basically kids at summer camp. This goes weird places if you take it seriously and try to figure out how this government-run program for training secret agents in their psychic abilities is operating in secret, let alone an even vaguely moral way (A government program that picks out and starts training candidates when they're ten is edging into child soldier territory, even if they don't go into their actual duties until they're 18), but normally I'd ignore that whole thing because Psychonauts is clearly meant to be a fantastical and fairly silly story/setting... if it weren't for something about the ending I'll be getting into later.
The next twist-ish thing is when another kid, one who's not part of the program, breaks into the proceedings: this is Razputin (Usually called Raz), the protagonist of the game/story, and he thinks Psychonauts are the coolest thing since sliced bread, he's read up on everything, he can quote people, and he desperately wants to be a Psychonaut, but his father won't let him so he ran away from the circus and came here to try to get training anyway. Initially, the adult Psychonauts have no intention of going along with this, but then it turns out that Raz has an unusually difficult mind to penetrate, and they decide to give him a chance while they're getting into contact with his father and waiting for the man to show up and pick him up.
This thing about Raz having an unusually difficult mind to get into never crops up again, by the way. It's a one-off explanation for making an exception for Raz so he can actually participate in the plot/be the protagonist of this game. It's not an actual trait Raz actually has in the story.
Once all this is established, the main thing going on is exposing the player to Psychonauts' colorful -quite literally, in addition to figuratively- cast of people. There's something like twenty different other campers/Psychonauts-in-training, and they're almost all reasonably distinct from each other, with a handful of pairs of characters that are basically the same aside from one being a boy and one being a girl. (eg there's a couple that are both into each other and both trying to make the other jealous by claiming they totally have some other boyfriend/girlfriend) Well, that and gameplay, but in narrative terms, the plot basically doesn't go anywhere while the player gets to interact with all these weird kids and weird adults.
You might notice I'm not bothering to describe said colorful cast except in general terms. That ties into what I alluded to in the previous post about the story going 'sideways': the fact is, this huge cast of diverse characters doesn't matter to the actual story.
I mentioned earlier that Psychonauts came across to me like a Saturday morning cartoon inexplicably squished inexplicably into video game form. The thing is, I'm almost completely certain the developers plotted out Psychonauts by working out a premise and a core cast in a manner that, if this were actually a Saturday morning cartoon, would provide a foundation for dozens of different episodes that could focus on different sets of these characters. There's a bully character: he could be an ongoing antagonist character who is relevant to most episodes, but not all. There's a character who tells boring stories in a boring way: he'd probably be a background gag character in most episodes, and then some episode or another would focus on him and either reveal new depths to him or have the punchline of the episode be that he really is just that boring. One teacher comes across like a creepy mad scientist with no emotions, while another is a dance fanatic lady who's cheerful and friendly and open about her feelings, and each of them could be used to different effects in different episodes.
But a colorful cast of characters isn't a story with stakes and an actual endpoint to the plot, and my suspicion is that somewhere partway through the development of Psychonauts the team realized this, and scrambled to attach an actual plot to their wannabe-Saturday morning cartoon. A plot that wasn't an organic outgrowth of what had been previously developed, as it happens.
See, once the plot kicks in -you spend a decent chunk of the game earning merit badges/new psychic abilities without any real plot advancement- what happens is it turns out the military man from the beginning (Coach Oleander) is an evil bad guy who arranges to steal all the brains of the kids because he plans to plug them into special tanks (In the military sense) that will then... do... something... to help him conquer the world. Somehow. The logic is zany, but whatever: the important point is that the other characters almost all vanish from the game world, and when they show up again it's in the form of their brains acting as Heart Containers, with absolutely no dialogue from them or any form of interaction with them. Raz just collects their brains to fix them later, and in the meantime collecting other people's brains somehow makes Raz harder to kill. As far as I can tell, the game doesn't really make any effort to justify this.
Now, before we find out Oleander is the bad guy, Raz has psychic visions of one Dr Loboto doing the actual brain removal. Because this is a silly game, brain removal involves sneezing powder. 'Super sneezing powder' in the world of Psychonauts is apparently able to cause you to sneeze your brain out through your nose. How the brains get put back in later gets glossed over by the game, and I don't mean it just ignores it outright, I mean we get a specific character credited for handling it but no explanation for how the heck you stuff a brain back in after it's been sneezed out. More importantly, Dr Loboto himself is handled... weirdly by the game. You spend a pretty good chunk of the game with it looking like he's going to be the primary antagonist, what with him being our first villainous force in the game and just being cacklingly evil in general, but when you finally confront him he's pretty unceremoniously kicked out of the plot. You don't go into his mind and defeat his inner demons. You don't fight him in a boss fight in the physical world. You 'solve' a 'puzzle', he gets struck by a mindbullet from the brain of a turtle (It's not worth getting into), and he instantly vanishes from the plot with no effort to even actually confirm that he died when the mindbullet knocked him from the top of a building that's probably twelve or maybe even twenty stories tall.
The story just shifts gears to fighting Oleander, who hasn't shown up in the plot for hours after the game claimed he was the bad guy and not Dr Loboto.
The boss fight against Oleander is actually probably the best boss fight in the game (And it's still not actually a good boss fight), but once you've beaten Oleander('s brain in a tank), for contrived reasons Raz proceeds to sneeze his brain out... at which point your goal is to use Telekinesis to hurl your brain into busted-open tank of water in Oleander's braintank. Why? Because the writers decided the next part of the game is Raz's mind intermixing with Oleander's.
This requires backing up to when Raz saw a vision of Dr Loboto for a second.
See, the vision Raz saw occurred in the form of him using a device to delve into his own mind. He went in, fought some weird monster, wandered through an environment that he specifically commented on how weird it was that it had a recurring aspect of meat as a thing (Including the hunk of meat I mentioned needing to punch to be able to Levitate up on the bubbles said chunk of meat inexplicably produces when punched), and ultimately climbed a tower and saw Dr Loboto removing the brains of kids in the camp. The important part here is the meat thing in Raz's brain...
... because it's a plotpoint when Raz's mind is mixing with Oleander's that one of the clear signals that they are mixing is the meatifying effect. Raz's mind contributes circus stereotypes, while Oleander's mind contributes raw meat, bunnies, and messed-up bunny monsters that come out of some kind of meat strainer.
So hold up a moment: what was the story even going for with this foreshadowing-ish thing of Raz's mind containing meat for no good reason way back in the beginning of the game? If the meat effect is a product of Raz's mind mixing with Oleander's, why was Raz delving into his own mind, Oleander completely uninvolved, already having this meat effect happening? It feels like the writers came up with the foreshadowing with one thing in mind, then changed what it was foreshadowing and didn't notice that the foreshadowing no longer made any sense.
But that's not even the most frustrating thing about the end portion of the game, narratively. The meat and bunnies thing is a product of Oleander's childhood, specifically that his father was a butcher who apparently raised rabbits for meat, and when kid Oleander got emotionally attached to the rabbits his father didn't care and butchered the rabbits anyway, traumatizing Oleander. Which... is all well fine and good, being a reasonable motive for trauma, but what does it have to do with Oleander's plan to conquer the world? After you've beaten the game, you get to see that Oleander is no longer a bad guy, and the story explicitly claims that it was the psychological issues growing from this trauma that caused Oleander to be evil, but that explains nothing. It'd be one thing if Oleander's father had been a harsh taskmaster who was never impressed with kid Oleander's efforts and so Oleander had ended up with an obsession with proving he really could do 'great things', or something of the sort. That would actually hook up with his ridiculous Bad Guy Plan. Psychonauts seems to have been focusing more on making Oleander's backstory sympathetic than on making it explain anything.
Worse yet is Raz's end of things. Over the course of the game, Raz has talked about his father: his father hates psychics, doesn't want Raz to become a psychic, and the reason he hates psychics is that a psychic cursed his family to die in water. (This last bit seems to be primarily a justification for why Raz has video-game-typical Super Drowning Skills) This is why Raz ran away to the Psychonauts camp, and why he's so desperate to rapidly learn all the Psychonaut skills, because he feels he needs to become a Psychonaut before his father catches up with him or he'll never become a Psychonaut, which he desperately wants to be. During this whole Oleander mind-meld thing, we get to see Raz's internal perception of his father, and said representation is an abusive nutcase.
Then his actual father astrally projects into the mindmeld, and Raz's entire version of events is instantly thrown out. Turns out his father is a Nice Guy who Just Wants What's Best For His Son, and doesn't hate psychics at all, and in fact is quite competent with his own psychic powers. The game never tries to explain how Raz came up with the interpretation of his father he had if it's so completely wrong, and the closest to a suggestion of a way to reconcile the two is one line from his father about wanting Raz to be safe, which if you stretch it can be combined with Raz's story to produce the explanation that Raz's father did tell Raz he didn't want him becoming a Psychonaut, didn't properly explain why (With said reason being that being a Psychonaut is dangerous and he wants his son safe), and Raz guessed based on the lack of a proper explanation that his father's motive was emotional. (Specifically: a hatred of psychics) This is very much a stretch, though, and the overall handling of the ending is a complete dismissal of Raz's interpretation of events. I always find it disheartening when a story has an adult and a child's interpretations conflict and then declares that the adult's interpretation is 100% correct and the child's is 100% wrong, but it's especially striking to be doing so when the child in this case is the player character. Especially since the story has done nothing before this to suggest that Raz is an unreliable narrator!
It's also weird, because it's thematically inconsistent with a whole other, dumb thing about the ending: prior to Raz fighting Oleander, there was a whole thing with the other teachers insisting Raz wasn't ready for such a high-level fight, to the point that they use Telekinesis to physically remove him from the area. Then they're all conveniently knocked out so that only Raz is in a position to fight Oleander. Then, after you've beaten the final boss of the game (Which is a ridiculous amalgam of Oleander and Raz's respective Daddy Issues), part of the ending cinematic is Raz being instantly promoted to a full Psychonaut, uniform and all, and promptly going on a mission with the adults, because Raz is Just That Awesome.
So on the one hand Raz's understanding of the world is being dismissed in its entirety as Blatant Lies Raz inexplicably told to himself and everyone else, and on the other hand the ending is a Raz-centric wish fulfillment fantasy thing, up to and including him getting with a girlfriend character I haven't bothered to mention because she doesn't matter to the story at all. (Why is Psychonauts even doing romance between 10-year-olds, anyway?) Which is it? Is Raz a delusional moron, or is he the best thing since sliced bread?
Psychonauts' plot is a mess. It's such a mess there's still more problems I'm skipping over because getting into them would overcomplicate this already meandering, probably-confusing post.
It's really too bad that Psychonauts wasn't made as an actual cartoon, as I could see it being a pretty interesting cartoon. I'd also have been happy to see the team manage to meld 'Saturday morning cartoon' with 'platformer game' properly, but that would require a whole different headspace from what Psychonauts' was clearly operating from, and I couldn't really guess what this hypothetical game would look like.
My first impression of Psychonauts was that it was a game made by people who were trying to create a Saturday morning cartoon, and for some reason had decided to do so in the form of a video game. Having completed the game, I suspect this impression was highly accurate, and it's a notable element of why the game managed to have a strong first impression... and also why the game's narrative largely lost me past said strong first impression.
The game opens on a military-sounding man providing an explanation of what a Psychonaut is and what they do: they're basically the CIA or FBI, only they psychically delve into people's minds to pull off their stuff and also the overall vibe is that the stealthy shenanigans Psychonauts engage in are more James Bond than, you know, real-life spywork. Then the game pulls a bit of a twist by revealing the military man is speaking to a crowd of kids in the woods: Psychonauts in training are basically kids at summer camp. This goes weird places if you take it seriously and try to figure out how this government-run program for training secret agents in their psychic abilities is operating in secret, let alone an even vaguely moral way (A government program that picks out and starts training candidates when they're ten is edging into child soldier territory, even if they don't go into their actual duties until they're 18), but normally I'd ignore that whole thing because Psychonauts is clearly meant to be a fantastical and fairly silly story/setting... if it weren't for something about the ending I'll be getting into later.
The next twist-ish thing is when another kid, one who's not part of the program, breaks into the proceedings: this is Razputin (Usually called Raz), the protagonist of the game/story, and he thinks Psychonauts are the coolest thing since sliced bread, he's read up on everything, he can quote people, and he desperately wants to be a Psychonaut, but his father won't let him so he ran away from the circus and came here to try to get training anyway. Initially, the adult Psychonauts have no intention of going along with this, but then it turns out that Raz has an unusually difficult mind to penetrate, and they decide to give him a chance while they're getting into contact with his father and waiting for the man to show up and pick him up.
This thing about Raz having an unusually difficult mind to get into never crops up again, by the way. It's a one-off explanation for making an exception for Raz so he can actually participate in the plot/be the protagonist of this game. It's not an actual trait Raz actually has in the story.
Once all this is established, the main thing going on is exposing the player to Psychonauts' colorful -quite literally, in addition to figuratively- cast of people. There's something like twenty different other campers/Psychonauts-in-training, and they're almost all reasonably distinct from each other, with a handful of pairs of characters that are basically the same aside from one being a boy and one being a girl. (eg there's a couple that are both into each other and both trying to make the other jealous by claiming they totally have some other boyfriend/girlfriend) Well, that and gameplay, but in narrative terms, the plot basically doesn't go anywhere while the player gets to interact with all these weird kids and weird adults.
You might notice I'm not bothering to describe said colorful cast except in general terms. That ties into what I alluded to in the previous post about the story going 'sideways': the fact is, this huge cast of diverse characters doesn't matter to the actual story.
I mentioned earlier that Psychonauts came across to me like a Saturday morning cartoon inexplicably squished inexplicably into video game form. The thing is, I'm almost completely certain the developers plotted out Psychonauts by working out a premise and a core cast in a manner that, if this were actually a Saturday morning cartoon, would provide a foundation for dozens of different episodes that could focus on different sets of these characters. There's a bully character: he could be an ongoing antagonist character who is relevant to most episodes, but not all. There's a character who tells boring stories in a boring way: he'd probably be a background gag character in most episodes, and then some episode or another would focus on him and either reveal new depths to him or have the punchline of the episode be that he really is just that boring. One teacher comes across like a creepy mad scientist with no emotions, while another is a dance fanatic lady who's cheerful and friendly and open about her feelings, and each of them could be used to different effects in different episodes.
But a colorful cast of characters isn't a story with stakes and an actual endpoint to the plot, and my suspicion is that somewhere partway through the development of Psychonauts the team realized this, and scrambled to attach an actual plot to their wannabe-Saturday morning cartoon. A plot that wasn't an organic outgrowth of what had been previously developed, as it happens.
See, once the plot kicks in -you spend a decent chunk of the game earning merit badges/new psychic abilities without any real plot advancement- what happens is it turns out the military man from the beginning (Coach Oleander) is an evil bad guy who arranges to steal all the brains of the kids because he plans to plug them into special tanks (In the military sense) that will then... do... something... to help him conquer the world. Somehow. The logic is zany, but whatever: the important point is that the other characters almost all vanish from the game world, and when they show up again it's in the form of their brains acting as Heart Containers, with absolutely no dialogue from them or any form of interaction with them. Raz just collects their brains to fix them later, and in the meantime collecting other people's brains somehow makes Raz harder to kill. As far as I can tell, the game doesn't really make any effort to justify this.
Now, before we find out Oleander is the bad guy, Raz has psychic visions of one Dr Loboto doing the actual brain removal. Because this is a silly game, brain removal involves sneezing powder. 'Super sneezing powder' in the world of Psychonauts is apparently able to cause you to sneeze your brain out through your nose. How the brains get put back in later gets glossed over by the game, and I don't mean it just ignores it outright, I mean we get a specific character credited for handling it but no explanation for how the heck you stuff a brain back in after it's been sneezed out. More importantly, Dr Loboto himself is handled... weirdly by the game. You spend a pretty good chunk of the game with it looking like he's going to be the primary antagonist, what with him being our first villainous force in the game and just being cacklingly evil in general, but when you finally confront him he's pretty unceremoniously kicked out of the plot. You don't go into his mind and defeat his inner demons. You don't fight him in a boss fight in the physical world. You 'solve' a 'puzzle', he gets struck by a mindbullet from the brain of a turtle (It's not worth getting into), and he instantly vanishes from the plot with no effort to even actually confirm that he died when the mindbullet knocked him from the top of a building that's probably twelve or maybe even twenty stories tall.
The story just shifts gears to fighting Oleander, who hasn't shown up in the plot for hours after the game claimed he was the bad guy and not Dr Loboto.
The boss fight against Oleander is actually probably the best boss fight in the game (And it's still not actually a good boss fight), but once you've beaten Oleander('s brain in a tank), for contrived reasons Raz proceeds to sneeze his brain out... at which point your goal is to use Telekinesis to hurl your brain into busted-open tank of water in Oleander's braintank. Why? Because the writers decided the next part of the game is Raz's mind intermixing with Oleander's.
This requires backing up to when Raz saw a vision of Dr Loboto for a second.
See, the vision Raz saw occurred in the form of him using a device to delve into his own mind. He went in, fought some weird monster, wandered through an environment that he specifically commented on how weird it was that it had a recurring aspect of meat as a thing (Including the hunk of meat I mentioned needing to punch to be able to Levitate up on the bubbles said chunk of meat inexplicably produces when punched), and ultimately climbed a tower and saw Dr Loboto removing the brains of kids in the camp. The important part here is the meat thing in Raz's brain...
... because it's a plotpoint when Raz's mind is mixing with Oleander's that one of the clear signals that they are mixing is the meatifying effect. Raz's mind contributes circus stereotypes, while Oleander's mind contributes raw meat, bunnies, and messed-up bunny monsters that come out of some kind of meat strainer.
So hold up a moment: what was the story even going for with this foreshadowing-ish thing of Raz's mind containing meat for no good reason way back in the beginning of the game? If the meat effect is a product of Raz's mind mixing with Oleander's, why was Raz delving into his own mind, Oleander completely uninvolved, already having this meat effect happening? It feels like the writers came up with the foreshadowing with one thing in mind, then changed what it was foreshadowing and didn't notice that the foreshadowing no longer made any sense.
But that's not even the most frustrating thing about the end portion of the game, narratively. The meat and bunnies thing is a product of Oleander's childhood, specifically that his father was a butcher who apparently raised rabbits for meat, and when kid Oleander got emotionally attached to the rabbits his father didn't care and butchered the rabbits anyway, traumatizing Oleander. Which... is all well fine and good, being a reasonable motive for trauma, but what does it have to do with Oleander's plan to conquer the world? After you've beaten the game, you get to see that Oleander is no longer a bad guy, and the story explicitly claims that it was the psychological issues growing from this trauma that caused Oleander to be evil, but that explains nothing. It'd be one thing if Oleander's father had been a harsh taskmaster who was never impressed with kid Oleander's efforts and so Oleander had ended up with an obsession with proving he really could do 'great things', or something of the sort. That would actually hook up with his ridiculous Bad Guy Plan. Psychonauts seems to have been focusing more on making Oleander's backstory sympathetic than on making it explain anything.
Worse yet is Raz's end of things. Over the course of the game, Raz has talked about his father: his father hates psychics, doesn't want Raz to become a psychic, and the reason he hates psychics is that a psychic cursed his family to die in water. (This last bit seems to be primarily a justification for why Raz has video-game-typical Super Drowning Skills) This is why Raz ran away to the Psychonauts camp, and why he's so desperate to rapidly learn all the Psychonaut skills, because he feels he needs to become a Psychonaut before his father catches up with him or he'll never become a Psychonaut, which he desperately wants to be. During this whole Oleander mind-meld thing, we get to see Raz's internal perception of his father, and said representation is an abusive nutcase.
Then his actual father astrally projects into the mindmeld, and Raz's entire version of events is instantly thrown out. Turns out his father is a Nice Guy who Just Wants What's Best For His Son, and doesn't hate psychics at all, and in fact is quite competent with his own psychic powers. The game never tries to explain how Raz came up with the interpretation of his father he had if it's so completely wrong, and the closest to a suggestion of a way to reconcile the two is one line from his father about wanting Raz to be safe, which if you stretch it can be combined with Raz's story to produce the explanation that Raz's father did tell Raz he didn't want him becoming a Psychonaut, didn't properly explain why (With said reason being that being a Psychonaut is dangerous and he wants his son safe), and Raz guessed based on the lack of a proper explanation that his father's motive was emotional. (Specifically: a hatred of psychics) This is very much a stretch, though, and the overall handling of the ending is a complete dismissal of Raz's interpretation of events. I always find it disheartening when a story has an adult and a child's interpretations conflict and then declares that the adult's interpretation is 100% correct and the child's is 100% wrong, but it's especially striking to be doing so when the child in this case is the player character. Especially since the story has done nothing before this to suggest that Raz is an unreliable narrator!
It's also weird, because it's thematically inconsistent with a whole other, dumb thing about the ending: prior to Raz fighting Oleander, there was a whole thing with the other teachers insisting Raz wasn't ready for such a high-level fight, to the point that they use Telekinesis to physically remove him from the area. Then they're all conveniently knocked out so that only Raz is in a position to fight Oleander. Then, after you've beaten the final boss of the game (Which is a ridiculous amalgam of Oleander and Raz's respective Daddy Issues), part of the ending cinematic is Raz being instantly promoted to a full Psychonaut, uniform and all, and promptly going on a mission with the adults, because Raz is Just That Awesome.
So on the one hand Raz's understanding of the world is being dismissed in its entirety as Blatant Lies Raz inexplicably told to himself and everyone else, and on the other hand the ending is a Raz-centric wish fulfillment fantasy thing, up to and including him getting with a girlfriend character I haven't bothered to mention because she doesn't matter to the story at all. (Why is Psychonauts even doing romance between 10-year-olds, anyway?) Which is it? Is Raz a delusional moron, or is he the best thing since sliced bread?
Psychonauts' plot is a mess. It's such a mess there's still more problems I'm skipping over because getting into them would overcomplicate this already meandering, probably-confusing post.
It's really too bad that Psychonauts wasn't made as an actual cartoon, as I could see it being a pretty interesting cartoon. I'd also have been happy to see the team manage to meld 'Saturday morning cartoon' with 'platformer game' properly, but that would require a whole different headspace from what Psychonauts' was clearly operating from, and I couldn't really guess what this hypothetical game would look like.
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