Psychonauts
Psychonauts is a platform game developed by Double Fine Productions, published by Majesco, and released on April 19, 2005, for the Microsoft Xbox, the Sony PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Windows. It was the first game from Double Fine Productions, a company founded in July 2000 by Tim Schafer, well known for his previous work on graphical adventure games at LucasArts.
Plot outline
In Psychonauts, the player controls Raz (short for Razputin), a mysterious new arrival at a training camp for Psychonauts — elite special agents who use their psychic powers to combat psycho-terrorism and retrieve information from inside people's minds. After honing his own mental abilities, Raz discovers that someone is abducting cadets from the camp with the purpose of stealing their brains. He must discover who is behind this sinister plot and stand against this evil.
Setting
The story is set in Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp, where students are trained to become Psychonauts. The history of the area is detailed on an annotated tree stump near the camp parking lot. The area was hit centuries ago by a meteor made of psitanium (an element which can grant psychic powers or strengthen existing powers), creating a huge crater. As Indians discovered the metal, they fashioned arrowheads from it. When other settlers began inhabiting the region, the psychoactive properties of the meteor slowly drove them insane. An asylum was built to house the afflicted, but within fifteen years the asylum had more residents than did the town. The government relocated the remaining inhabitants and flooded the crater to prevent further settlement, creating what is now Lake Oblongata. The asylum still stands but has fallen into disrepair. Five years ago, the government established the Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp near Lake Oblongata, since the high concentrations of psitanium can help psychically gifted youths to harness their powers and become Psychonauts. Excavated psitanium arrowheads are used as currency within the camp, both amongst campers and in the lodge's general store.
The local wildlife has been profoundly affected by the psitanium as well. Bears are able to attack from afar using telekinetic claws, and cougars are endowed with pyrokinesis.
Storyline
During Coach Morceau Oleander's initiation speech to the incoming Psychonaut trainees, Razputin is discovered eavesdropping in a tree. Oleander and fellow agents Sasha Nein and Milla Vodello attempt to probe his mind to determine who he is and where he comes from, but "Raz" has amazingly strong mental defenses for an untrained youth. This strength earns him grudging admiration from the camp staff, but regulations require that Raz leave the camp as soon as his family can arrive to claim him, despite his protests and pleas. Raz is allowed to stay with the other campers until then but is barred from training and classes. Fellow Psychonaut-in-training Lili Zanotto seems instantly smitten with Raz, although she disavows any attraction.
The next morning, however, Oleander allows Raz to take place in Basic Braining, the introductory course which has a military training-theme. Mid-way through the course, he is pushed over a small cliff by the camp bully, but saved by Lili. He learns she was actually saving a weird meat-like plant at the foot of the cliff, saying that it has been in her dreams lately. At the end of the level, he finds a stage, presumably where the awards are presented, but no one has arrived yet, not even the Coach. However, there is an open door in the room, which piques Raz's curiosity. It is a white bricked hallway with something being hidden behind red drapes at the end. Before Raz can see what's behind the drapes he is psychically pulled away by Oleander, who says he didn't expect him to get to the end at all, let alone so early.
Back in reality, Bobby (the bully from earlier) and his toady Benny get into another confrontation, which is promptly interrupted by Agent Nein. Nein expresses interest in Raz's mental talents, and discreetly encourages Raz to find his hidden laboratory, where he wishes to conduct experiments to explore Raz's abilities. The Brain Tumbler, a large machine Raz describes as "hair dryer looking" allows Raz to explore his own mind. It first delivers him to an area Sasha calls "The Collective Unconscious". Raz mistakes this for his own mind, and Sasha explains that it is in fact a hub, used to access many minds. Currently, there's only one door, that leads into his own mind. Inside he finds a weird bunny-like creature, which Sasha believes may represent a primal fear or memory. He advises Raz to follow it, and see where it leads. Raz continues, but eventually discovers a mysterious, threatening entity that spits a heavy diving helmet at him.
Sasha lets Raz enter his mind to show that it's a organized cube. He shows Raz a censor which deletes data that doesn't belong including psychonauts and teaches him the Psyblast. Sasha produces a pipe and a dial (which goes through 1-6 and has a skull at the end) which produces censors. In the end, Raz get tired of how slow it's going, so he turns it to the skull and accidently breaks it. This causes problems and Raz has to close all of the pipes producing censors. In the end, though this causes a backup which produces a Mega censor. By using the psyblast Raz defeats it and Sasha gives him the badge as long as he never mentions what happened.
Back in reality, Raz soon encounters Dogen and learns to his horror that Dogen actually has been de-brained, converting him to a mindless zombie interested only in television and hacky sack (and no one seems to believe Raz about this, as everyone seems to think that "He's just like that"). Rumors swirl about a legendary monstrous fish that lives in the lake but emerges at night to steal children's brains. The idea of investigating this lead is somewhat daunting to Raz, since his family bears a gypsy curse to die in water; in fact, if Raz wades into water more than knee-deep, a ghostly hand (A.K.A. the "Hand of Galochio") tries to drag him under the surface.
He is helped on his quest by agent Ford Cruller, the former head of the Psychonauts. Cruller is a legend in the PSI community, but previous psychic attacks have left him unstable. As a result, Ford is only "himself" when in his underground headquarters close to a large psitanium deposit. Aspects of his personality have split off and hold various jobs around the camp (ranger, janitor, cook/storekeeper, boating supervisor), but they are unaware of each other. Cruller agrees to help however possible; whenever Raz needs advice, he can telepathically summon the old agent using a strip of bacon (Ford's favorite food). Additionally, Cruller keeps machines in his headquarters to convert mental cobwebs into PSI cards and to connect these PSI cards into markers which raise Raz in rank. When Raz attains any multiple-of-ten rank (10, 20, 30, et cetera), Ford awards him a new ability or an upgrade to a previous ability.
As Razputin tries to discover more about what is happening, more children are turned to zombies. When Sasha Nein and Milla Vodello are suddenly called away on ill-defined "official Psychonaut business," Raz realizes the fate of the camp (and the campers) is in his hands. Further investigating his own mind with the Brain Tumbler, Raz begins to suspect that someone else's thoughts are infiltrating his mind. He finally manages to enter the nightmarish tower he saw earlier and finds that Lili has also been kidnapped by the deranged dentist, whose name is Dr. Caligosto Loboto. The abducted campers sneeze their brains out after being exposed to Loboto's sneezing powder; Loboto plans to use the powerful brains to control deadly tanks. To Raz's amazement, however, Loboto is only a pawn in the scheme, and Coach Oleander is the real mastermind behind it.
Determined to rescue Lili, Razputin enters the lake in a bathysphere and confronts the monster, a huge mutated lungfish. After a frantic chase and a brief battle, Raz manages to overpower the lungfish and enters the creature's mind. He appears in the lungfish's mind as a horrible monster ("Goggalor", in the tradition of Japanese monster movies) towering over a tiny city populated by peace-loving lungfish. Eventually Raz finds that the lungfish has been forced by Loboto and Oleander to kidnap the campers against its will. Razputin helps free the lungfish, named Linda, from enslavement and in gratitude, she transports him to the island where the Thorny Towers asylum stands.
Once on the island, Raz must enter several minds in order to reach Loboto in the recesses of the asylum. The first is that of Boyd, the less-than-stable security guard protecting the front gate. Boyd's mind is a twisted conspiracy-theory-ridden version of suburbia populated by the G-Men, monotoned figures resembling Men in Black, and Rainbow Squirts, sinister youth troops reminiscent of Girl Scouts. Raz awakens a darker persona of Boyd called "The Milkman," implanted by Coach Oleander. Overtaken by the Milkman, Boyd prepares himself to complete his final command from Oleander: to throw a molotov cocktail at the asylum, destroying all evidence of the plot. However, something is preventing him from doing it just yet. Inside the asylum, Raz meets Dr. Loboto's severely near-sighted assistant Crispin Whytehead, who guards the elevator leading further into the asylum. Razputin must find the elements of a crude disguise to fool Crispin into thinking that he is Dr. Loboto: a white coat, a claw, and some sort of facial likeness.
Wandering the asylum grounds, Raz encounters Gloria von Gouten, a once-famous actress who has gone insane. Inside her mind, Razputin helps her defeat her inner critic, and in thanks Gloria allows him to take one of her old awards that vaguely resembles Loboto's three-pronged claw. The former head orderly, a direct descendant of Napoleon named Fred Bonaparte, is confined to a straitjacket due to his feelings of inadequacy over "not living up to the family name". Raz enters Fred's mind, which resembles a large-scale strategy boardgame, and helps him regain his confidence; Fred sheds the straitjacket, which Raz uses in place of Loboto's lab coat. A depressed artist named Edgar Teglee obsessively paints black velvet pictures of bullfights, due to being scorned by a woman long ago. Raz helps Edgar triumph over the bull within his mind, and as his first non-bull-themed piece of art he paints a portrait of Loboto for Raz. These three objects allow Raz to trick Crispin and gain access to the elevator, which takes him to the higher levels of the ruined asylum.
As he ventures further into the asylum, Raz finds several of the kids' brains in jars scattered about and collects them for later "recranialization". A shadowy figure seems to be always a few steps ahead of him, issuing squeaky warnings to leave but fleeing from contact. When Raz reaches the top of the tower, he discovers that the figure is that of Sheegor, Dr. Loboto's reluctant assistant. Sheegor wishes no harm to anyone, but Loboto is holding her beloved turtle "Mr. Pokeylope" hostage to ensure her cooperation. Not only has Lili been captured, but Sasha and Milla are prisoners as well. Raz rescues the turtle for Sheegor and mounts a rescue plan, during which Loboto falls from the tower. Oleander arrives but is subdued after a psychic group battle that Ford joins, wearing a chunk of psitanium. As the former prisoners and former inmates all leave the asylum, Boyd finally launches the flaming projectile, which ignites a gas pipe; the asylum explodes and burns to the ground. The Psychonauts are about to leave the island when a tank emerges from the rubble and knocks them all out (save Razputin) with a blast. Oleander managed to transfer his mind into the tank as a last-ditch effort to avoid defeat, and Raz engages the villain-powered vehicle in a final fight. Raz wins, but the tank emits a cloud of "super sneezing powder" that makes him sneeze his brain out. His body wanders away, leaving Raz with no alternative but to move his own brain via telekinesis into the same vat as Oleander's. The remainder of the game takes place in a mental landscape that combines the traumatic memories and nightmares of both Oleander and Razputin.
Razputin's upbringing in the circus joins with Oleander's nightmarish visions of his own father, a butcher, to form a "Meat Circus" where slabs of flesh are arranged in a big top populated by horrible, mutilated creatures. In this environment, Oleander has reverted to his childlike persona of "little Oly", whom Raz must protect as he wanders obliviously in pursuit of his pet rabbit. Eventually, Raz is confronted by enormous, vicious versions of his own father as well as Oleander's butcher father and must navigate a hellish obstacle course of circus-themed gymnastics equipment to avoid ever-rising water levels while defending himself from attacks from the duo. Raz manages to defeat the monstrous butcher, who falls into a huge meat grinder.
Unexpectedly, Razputin's real father appears; he explains that he is also a psychic and that Raz has misinterpreted his concern as dislike. He blasts the evil version of himself, knocking it into the same meat grinder. As Raz and his father prepare to detangle the two mental worlds, the sinister visions of the fathers reappear as a grotesquely joined version. Raz's father channels all of his mental energy into Raz, giving him the power to defeat this last boss.
Summer is at an end, and the children are about to go back home. Coach Oleander apologizes for his crimes and says that he is finally cured of his psychological trauma. Ford Cruller asks Raz to become a Psychonaut, and he accepts. As Raz is about to go home with his father, the news arrives that the "grand head" of the Psychonauts, Truman Zanotto (Lili's father) has been kidnapped. Sasha asks Raz, as the "anti-kidnapping expert", to join the team on their quest to save him. Raz joins Sasha, Milla, Coach Oleander, and Lili on the Psychonauts jet, which speeds away.
Gameplay
Psychonauts combines traditional console platformer elements with the kind of strong storytelling, humor and dialogue found in adventure games. The game features ten levels, each of which let the player enter a different person's mind. Each of these levels therefore has its own unique visual design and set of challenges, related to the demons, nightmares and secret memories of the mind that Raz is exploring. Three other levels are set within the real world, making a total of thirteen levels, interspersed with several boss fights. As the player progresses through the game, Raz acquires new psychic powers, including telekinesis, invisibility, pyrokinesis, clairvoyance, and confusion. These are directly involved in the puzzle-solving aspects of the game, which tailor to the player's own playing strengths. The game's refreshing, seemingly kid-friendly style evolves into levels that seem more suited to teens and often laced with black comedy.
PSI Powers
- PSI Blast: Granted when Raz completes Sasha Nein's shooting gallery, earning the "Marksmanship" merit badge. This is a beam of psychic force that is shot from Raz's forehead. This power has limited ammunition, which may be replenished by gathering "balls of aggression" that resemble angry orange exclamation marks. A lock-on feature allows the player to target specific enemies or objects. As Raz increases in rank, he can fire more frequent blasts which become more powerful and can ricochet among chains of targets.
- Pyrokinesis: This is the first power Ford Cruller awards to Raz after he gathers enough PSI markers and figments to "rank up" to level 10. Holding the assigned button will cause the temperature of a targeted hostile or object to rise until it bursts into flames. As higher ranks are achieved, the strength of the fire and its area of effect increases.
- Telekinesis: Allows Raz to psychically pick up a creature or object and toss it along a projected path. Ford grants the telekinesis merit badge after Raz attains level 20. Some objects can be "thrown" at enemies to inflict significant damage.
- Levitation: Milla Vodello gives Raz the Levitation merit badge after he maneuvers through her dance-party training course. Once this ability has been earned, the ball of psychic energy Raz normally uses to double jump can be used for other purposes. Raz can run on top of it and move much more quickly, bounce on it to jump higher, or dangle beneath it after a jump and glide. Unlike several other powers, this has no time or ammunition limit. The levitation abilities increase in power as Raz gains additional ranks; for instance, spikes appear on the ball when Raz runs on top of it, allowing him to cause significant damage to enemies by colliding with them.
- Invisibility: This merit badge is earned at rank 30. Raz can hide his presence from others' minds with this ability, allowing him to avoid combat with enemies. Due to the intense concentration required, Raz can only remain invisible for a limited amount of time, after which he must allow time to elapse to "recharge". As higher ranks are attained, the period of invisibility increases.
- PSI-Shield: After gaining this ability, Raz can create a bubble-like psychic force field that can not only protect him from some attacks, it can even reflect other attacks. As with invisibility, this power can also be active for limited amounts of time before recharging is necessary. With higher ranks, the shield can also damage enemies on contact.
- Clairvoyance: This power, gained at the beginning of Boyd's "Milkman Conspiracy" mental world, allows Raz to see the world from someone else's viewpoint. Its primary practical use is within Boyd's mental world, and using clairvoyance in other locations is largely a source of comedy in seeing other characters' opinions of Raz. Unlike many other abilities, this has no time limit, uses no ammunition, and never increases in power.
- Confusion: This is the last ability Raz acquires, found within Edgar Teglee's "Black Velvetopia". It allows him to hurl a mental grenade that, upon detonation, causes all hostiles in the blast radius to lose interest in Raz and attack themselves or other hostiles. The supply of confusion grenades is finite and can be refilled by gathering green balls of energy that look like question marks.
The later rank-earned upgrades include gradual regeneration of mental health and unlimited energy for all powers.
Development history
Tim Schafer's team was partly made up of several people he worked with on Grim Fandango at LucasArts. Amongst the art design crew was background artist Peter Chan and cartoonist Scott Campbell. Voice actor Richard Steven Horvitz, best known for his portrayal of Zim in the cult favorite animated series Invader Zim, provides the voice of Raz, the game's protagonist.
Originally, Psychonauts was to be published by Microsoft for release exclusively on their Xbox console, but in March 2004, Microsoft pulled out of this deal. It emerged in August 2004 that Double Fine had negotiated a new publishing deal with Majesco to release the game on Windows as well as the Xbox. Tim Schafer was quoted as saying "Together we are going to make what could conservatively be called the greatest game of all time ever, and I think that's awesome."[1] In October 2004, it was revealed that Psychonauts would be released on yet another platform, the PlayStation 2, ported by Budcat Creations. The final US release date for the game on Xbox and Windows was April 19 2005, with the PlayStation 2 port following on June 21, 2005.
Despite the game's overwhelming critical success, its sales have been somewhat lackluster. The disappointing figures for both Psychonauts and Advent Rising contributed to the variety of financial troubles plaguing Majesco; in July 2005, the publisher revised its fiscal year projections from a net profit of $18 million to a net loss of $18 million. In light of this announcement, Majesco's stock price tumbled drastically and its CEO, Carl Yankowski, announced his immediate resignation. It has been questioned by some fans why the game was not released on the Nintendo GameCube considering that the outwardly family-friendly aesthetic of the game would seem to be a good fit for that console's market demographic. Although the ending does invite a sequel, it's hard to say if there will be another, due to dismal sales.
As of June 2006, the Xbox version of Psychonauts cannot be played on the Xbox 360 via its limited backwards compatibility feature. Tim Schafer encouraged fans to e-mail the Xbox 360 backwards compatibility team to request that this be made possible.
Characters
- Main article: Characters in Psychonauts.
Psychonauts features a large cast of characters, led by the game's protagonist, Razputin. These include camp Coach Oleander, Psychonaut agents Sasha Nein and Milla Vodello, Raz's mentor and idol Ford Cruller, and Raz's love interest, Lili Zanotto.
Awards
- GameSpot Best and Worst of 2005: Best Voice Acting, Best Graphics Artistic, Funniest Game, Best Game No One Played, Best Platformer
- IGN 2005 Awards: Best Platformer, Best Game No One Played
- Razputin was placed #2 on the Game Informer "Top 10 Heroes of 2005" list.
- EuroGamer: Overall Game of the Year 2005
- PSM: Buy or Die award in issue #100, #5 on Top 10 Games of 2005 list, Best Voice Acting
- Electronic Gaming Monthly 2005 Awards: Best Game No One Played
- 6th annual Game Developers Choice Awards: Best Writing, with Tim Schafer and Erik Wolpaw accepting
- PC Powerplay: First full 10/10 score after the magazine's switch from the 100-point scoring system to its current 10-point scoring system
- PC Gamer magazine 2005 Awards: Best Game You Didn't Play, Editor's Choice Award
- E3 2002 Game Critics Awards: Best Original Game
Trivia
- Examining the stumps used as part of a system for travelling around the campsite gives a reference to a joke used in The Secret of Monkey Island, a game Tim Schafer also worked on.
- Erik Wolpaw, a member of the original Old Man Murray team, worked as a writer on Psychonauts contributing story and dialog.
- The term "psychonaut" can refer to a user of psychoactive drugs.
- Originally, the main character was an ostrich suffering from mental imbalance and multiple personalities. Tim Schafer killed the idea because he strongly believes in games being "wish fulfillments," guessing that not many people fantasize about being an insane ostrich.
- Tim Schafer first conceived the idea for Psychonauts while working on Full Throttle, which originally was to have an interactive peyote trip sequence. The idea was deemed unsuitable for a family-friendly game, but it led to Schafer someday wanting to do a game featuring psychological trips or interactive dream sequences.
- While once suffering from writer's block, Tim Schafer came up with the idea to develop many of Psychonauts' supporting characters by giving them fictional online identities on the Friendster social network service and posting messages in-character.
- Spoiler: Oleander, the game's main antagonist, is the name of an herbal poison that causes the heart to beat irregularly and sporadically, making for an extremely painful and slow death.
- Several characters' last names mean "no", "none" or "nothing", including Bobby Zilch and Sasha Nein.
External links
- Official Psychonauts website
- Official Double Fine Productions website
- Razputin's Domain website
- Majesco's August 4th 2004 press release
- Psychonauts at MobyGames
- Psychonauts profile at The International House of Mojo
- Majesco's financial problems at GameSpot
- Psychonauts Explorer - A resource viewer/dumper for Psychonauts
- Psychonauts Saved Game Editor - A saved game editor for the PC version.
- Spoil Everything: Psychonauts characters and plot