“Demo Disk” – Psychonauts (2005) [PC]

Demo Disk is a series of first impressions posts for new releases and quick opinions.

Psychonauts originally released in 2005 on Xbox and Windows. A year later it came out on PS2 and has since been ported many times, so there’s no shortage of ways to play this classic from Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Productions. If Psychonauts has been popping back up in the news lately, it’s due to the major sequel, Psychonauts 2, that dropped last year to general acclaim. But it also speaks to how well the original game holds up.

Gameplay-wise, Psychonauts is a relatively straightforward platformer (so far, at least–I’m about four hours in). Given its setting–a summer camp for kids with psychic powers–it feels right that the game provides a satisfying balance of relaxation and sparks of intrigue. In the course of the opening sequence and first few levels, we are introduced to our hero, Raz, and a cast of supporting characters with a surprisingly rich web of relationships. Lively personalities and story beats come thick and fast, conveyed through optional dialogue and brief cutscenes. Each of the different levels takes the form of a “mental world,” a thematically distinct construct we play through inside the head of one of the characters. But the “real world” of the campground, too, is full of secrets and mysteries of its own.

I never went to one of your old-fashioned cabins-by-a-lake sort of summer camps like this as a kid, but all the elements are familiar enough. The crushes and bullies, besties and loners, all are represented. Only at this camp they use levitation and invisibility and pyrokinesis. Psychonauts looks recognizable and uncanny at the same time, like something from Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas in its odd creepiness, or Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom in its pat intricacy.

As you might expect, there are some twists, but the basic premise is simple. Despite his psychic gifts and determination to become a psychonaut, Raz has a dilemma: he’s run away from home to come to Camp Whispering Rock. To the psychonauts’ chagrin, he can’t stay. His family will be on their way to collect him in a few days. In the meantime, Raz intends to learn as much as he can and develop his abilities to the fullest. Presumably one thing will lead to another, though, and he’ll save the world and get the girl while he’s at it.

The conceit of clearing up “mental cobwebs” and resolving “emotional baggage” is unobtrusively linked into the basic platforming urges to jump on things and collect stuff. Transparent outlines of “figments” and glowing purple arrowheads function as experience points and currency, respectively. As we progress through each mental world, Raz also finds film reels and slideshows illustrating aspects of the mind he’s traversing. Are they memories? Wishes? Some seem more private than the owner intends to reveal. All sorts of thoughts and feelings start to show up in strange forms. Why is there cartoony meat growing like plants and fungi? Who or what is kidnapping kids psychically, and why do all the bears seem to attack with astral projections rather than teeth and claws?

Rorschach Test: Basic Impressions

It took me about an hour to get into Psychonauts. The controls and graphics are about as clunky as you’d expect them to look and feel after a decade or more. Load times are slow, but that’s probably just my computer. The music is by and large unremarkable– a bit boring in places, funky and fitting in others– but the voice acting is consistently entertaining. The writing is vivid, powerfully contributing to that surprising depth of character and story for a 3-D platformer. I still have my quibbles with some of the game’s appeal to clichés, even if it is going to prove to be in service of subverting them later.

A glance at the discourse around the game will show plenty of people — with more right to speak on such things than me– have thoughts about the game’s use of psychological issues for punning humor and cute level design. But I’m hooked at this point. So what if there is an Indian burial ground hidden under the peaceable cabins and the waters of the lake?

… On land seized by colonizers who named their squalid homestead “Shaky Claim”?

…Oh, and a giant psychic-powered meteorite buried somewhere below that?

It’s an apt metaphor for our politics writ large, not just discussions of psychology and trauma.

So make yourself comfortable and relax. Trust in the process. I recommend that you play (or re-play) Psychonauts if you have the time for a therapeutic summer break.