GameClub - Psychonauts Wrap-up (Patreon)

Thanks for taking part in the first GameClub, on Psychonauts. It was so great to read all your thoughtful responses to the game. 

I think Julian really summed up the game for me, saying it's like a classic adventure game, but uncomfortably squeezed into the mould of a collectathon platformer.

"The parts that could have easily translated to an adventure game (the writing, the visual design, the scenario, the logic, the GOD DAMNED WRITING) are really really excellent," says Julian. But the platforming, combat, camera, and collectibles (a topic of in-depth discussion!) were average at best. 

This shouldn't really be surprising. Psychonauts was the first game by a studio made up of ex-LucasArts developers, and it's obvious that the developers' expertise was in adventure game stuff. Plus, Tim Schafer has said that the idea for Psychonauts came during the development of Full Throttle.

(Also, it's worth remembering that no one really knew how to make adventure games work in 3D and on a console / controller, in the mid 2000s. Games like Dreamfall, Indiana Jones, and Broken Sword 3 were all heavily compromised with crappy mini-games, bad cameras, simplified puzzles, and ugly visuals). 

Should the game have been made as a straight-up point and click, though? (Putting aside the economic issues). Daniel Haas isn't so sure. 

"Most of the "a-ha" of truly engaging with the representation of psychosis comes through literally wandering through the worlds and the ways they force you to behave. It's obviously done with a comedic tone, but my point is that you would not get this same engagement just by seeing these levels as you do by living them."

But I'll tell you what's interesting - Psychonauts: Rhombus of Ruin, which just came out on PlayStation VR. It's not a platformer (The Milkman Level in VR would make you heave!), and is instead a weirdo first person puzzle thing. This gameplay fits the humour and style of the game really well, proving, I think, that Psychonauts didn't need to be a platformer, exactly, to work. 

Puzzles

Anyway, back to the first Psychonauts. While the game starts out as a straight-up platformer, it eventually introduces way more puzzles, and feels more like an adventure game. You get an inventory of items, and the different psy powers work almost like the verb grid in Monkey Island. 

The sudden shift in genre was jarring for some. Josh Foreman writes:

I had the most problems with the Milkman level as it seemed to suddenly shift from 90% Platform/10% puzzle to 20% Platform/80% Puzzle. And I hate that kind of game. Almost with a passion. But the art and characters kept me going.

SpeckObst notes that Double Fine has a history for weird shifts in genre. "Kinda reminded me of Brutal Legend and how that game changed from an action brawler to a strategy game." 

It doesn't exactly help that the puzzles in Psychonauts were... okay, at best. Mark Leiman says:

Often they are held back by Lucas Arts-levels of frustration (when a certain object or power must be used, but isn't explicitly stated that it CAN be used to interact: i.e. the Napoleon Bonaparte level and Telekinesis). Often those old point-and-click games that Tim Schafer loves and grew up with were often obtuse or the answers to the riddles were puns or jokes, and Double Fine games sometimes can suffer from the same issues.

They're also just kinda simple. The milkman level was more like a simple Zelda dungeon with locks and keys than anything. I know these guys can do amazing puzzles (see: Day of the Tentacle), but I guess the move to a platformer compromised their complexity and quality. 

Structure and Pacing

Alen Kanlic made this great comment, when praising the game's overall structure.

Each level is it's own self contained story with a beginning-middle-end that serves the overarching narrative. Not only do the different levels have the freedom to be unique with their setting and game plays, they allow for Psychonauts to play like an entire season of a Nickelodeon show rather than your traditional video game. 

Instead of picking these unique levels from a menu, though, you get a hub world. As in, the summer camp, not the place with the doors. And this hub was, I think, responsible for both positive and negative comments from you. 

In terms of positive, the hub obviously added to the summer camp feeling, and as Matt Kimmich says, let you just chill with the characters. 

For me, DoubleFine games to some extent are hang-out games - I love hanging out in these worlds, with these characters, so the rest is almost secondary. In a way, a more involved game would almost detract from that, unless the gameplay could somehow reinforce the hang-out aspect.

But, as Michael Brennock says, it's easy to miss all this stuff (I know I did).

Though the plot urges you to keep moving forward (Raz only has a few days to become a Psychonaut, Oleander has gone rouge and plans to take over the world), There are tons of secrets to find around camp that you might miss on your first playthrough if you do, such as all those interludes with the other campers.

Now, I don't think Double Fine should have forced this stuff on you - but more encouragement - or at least some way of telling players that this stuff is out there to discover! - would have been great. It's too easy to barrel straight past it (me again!)

There is one thing, though. Halfway through the game, you're forced to grind for currency in the campsite to buy a cobweb duster, which is necessary to finish the milkman level. Cameron Tauxe felt like it threw a spanner into the works, bringing the game's forward momentum to a grinding halt.

I had the same experience. If it was designed to encourage me back into the camp, it didn't really work: I got the arrowheads as fast as humanly possible and then left.

I'm not sure what the perfect solution for all this would be. I'd hesitate to say "put more steps / puzzles in the hub world, between the proper levels" because I don't like that in Zelda (where there's loads of busywork between dungeons).

For me, though, I simply didn't realise all this extra content was there. So perhaps all it really needed was better signposting.

Before I move on from structure, Vlad Kovalenko makes a good point that the game's difficulty curve is all over the place. There are three tutorial levels, a weird Lungfish thing, and then a bunch of gimmick levels. "No real challenge, no test of your learned abilities. Until Meat Circus, that is, but no one likes Meat Circus".

Level Design as Character Study

I'm surprised that more people didn't touch on this aspect. This was the most interesting and impressive part of the game for me, and will be the topic of a future episode of Game Maker's Toolkit.

As such, I don't want to go too deep into it here. But suffice to say, the way the game explores different psychological disorders, as well as general emotional issues like repression - all through the design of the levels is really smart.

Take Boyd's level. He's a paranoid schizophrenic. As such, his mind is twisted and distorted. There are surveillance cameras and government agents everywhere. And the main mechanic / puzzle of the level is about worrying how other people are looking at you.

Every level is like this, to an extent.  Cameron Tauxe says this of Edgar Teglee's stage. 

As a coping mechanism he re-imagined the whole ordeal as a romantic tale of the damsel being taken away by a champion bullfighter. When you enter his mind, it's all black velvet and wrestling/bull-fighting. But when you climb down into the sewers, it looks like a warped and twisted high school locker-room. I think it's ingenious how the level design takes the otherwise abstract idea of "Edgar buried his high school life underneath this fantasy" and makes it literal by showing the high school literally buried in the sewers of the Spanish city.

I agree with Vlad Kovalenko, though, who says "Vaults are great, but it seems like you must find them to fully understand the backstory of the character whose mind you're in." 

You can play Milla's level, for example, and have no idea that the crazy disco party is hiding anything. Find a vault (and a secret chest), though, and you know more.

I do like that you have to work to fill in the blanks - but it's often better when you have to do the mental work of trying to understand all the symbology (is that the right word?) of the level, rather than simply hunting down a secret room / vault. 

Like I say, more on that in a full episode.

Oh, and it's worth noting that "the portrayal of mental illness is noooooottt super", as Julian puts it. The mental patients are "total cartoons that take advantage of existing tropes, enforcing a warped public perspective of mental illness."

Though I found that there were actually few jokes at the expensive of the ill, boyd is the one who gets the most shit slung at him.  People with DID don't have another person hijacking their body,  people with schizophrenia are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators, don't have other identities living in their head, and don't go crazy because they get fired. Gloria had a very sympathetic story but Bi-Polar is so much more complicated than "happy and sad"

I'll be sure to mention that in the video, as it struck me too. 

Okay! Hopefully I've covered everything and haven't totally mischaracterised your thoughts!

Keep your comments coming, of course. We'll do another GameClub soon (I'm pretty busy in March, so let's wait a bit). Let me know if you liked doing it, how we can improve in future, and what sort of games you'd like to play together in future.