Fractured Identity in Psychonauts 2
This was originally written for Ashley Bardhan’s in-person reading on darkness in gaming, go follow her! She is a sweetie and also one of the best video game writers out.
Far from me to deserve to subject you all to another essay about trauma, but Psychonauts 2 is the rare work that deserves to be revisited in this context. There are plenty of great games about trauma–the Silent Hills, Celeste, Spec Ops: the Line, but Psychonauts’ brilliance is that it removes any sort of allegory or hint from the equation. Its unequivocal shamelessness in tackling the topic is the rare showing AND telling that works from a storytelling perspective.
If you’re unfamiliar, the plot of the first isn’t really important. Raz (AKA Invader Zim and Billy from Billy & Mandy) saved the world by jumping into a bunch of people’s brains and now he’s doing it again here. Only this time it’s a far more insular, pointed tale about the ravages the characters’ brains go through; from alcoholism and gambling addictions, to extreme anxiety and multiple personality disorder. The wackiness of the first game has been replaced by a title far more considerate and caring of mental health. If that sounds kind of afterschool special, it isn’t, cause Psychonauts 2 is also funny as shit and packed with unique gameplay ideas and motifs.
The characters’ mental darkness specifically relates to the postmortem of a giant battle in which the most Psychonauts of 20 years prior were driven into various states of disarray. It’s a race for a protagonist to fix them, as their minds have become disheveled, dioramas to be traversed by Raz as he battles the psychological manifestations of their pathologies. The game takes liberties visualizing maladies as enemies, the mind seeing Raz as an invasive parasite and mounting defenses against him. The brain sees the cleansing force and immediately denies it, mirroring our own self-destructive tendencies.
The levels themselves constitute the most important commentary. Every nook and cranny is packed with memorial instances, pain and hurt flooding the environments throughout. You see it in the specific instances where they contort the level, flipping your understand on its head, playing with the physics to rubberstamp that yes, you cannot control any part of this geometry, you must conform to the laws of nature in the brain, the problems of those you infiltrated are your problems now. It is up to Raz to resolve these messes; to right the wrongs that have been inflicted on these elderly psychics.
So much of Psychonauts 2 is based on relitigating the past. Of synthesizing how people digest their relationships, maintained in self-interest yet trying to stay morally righteous. Playing it, I thought about the time weed broke my brain, forcing me to go to the campus hospital in a panicked stupor, receiving nothing in the way of useful care. What would my brain world look like? Sordid horror? Unstable breaking platforms constituting my fragile mind? Psychonauts is a game dedicated to building such unknowable concepts into a corporeal form, fracturing self-hate and turning it into fulfillment. Despite the tests Raz goes through, his is a mission of immutable hope, and that can always pierce the darkness.