A Relatively Quick Summary of Psychonauts

[WolfofWords]

Psychonauts is the story of Razputin, a young boy who was born with psychic powers but was forbidden by his father from using them. He grew up idolizing the Psychonauts, a team of elite agents with psychic powers. He decides to sneak away from home to attend a psychic summer camp run by the Psychonauts to achieve his dream of joining the team. When he appears, they decide that he can participate in activities at least until they can call his parents. He is introduced to the other weird kids at camp most of which do not initially want anything to do with the weird new kid.



You officially start the game by heading from the cabins to Coach Oleander's treehouse for Basic Braining. He introduces the main theme of the game by pulling you into his mind. When you regain consciousness, you are in an obstacle course that the Coach has prepared in his mindscape. The course is themed after a war zone in keeping with the Coach's seeming obsession with the military. He berates you through the entire level as if he were a drill sergeant, insulting you to get you to work harder. As you navigate the course, you get comic relief from your fellow campers and you start a rivalry with bully Bobby Zilch and meet the inquisitive Lili Zanotto. While most of the others struggle, you are able to navigate the course. You also learn the psychic power of throwing a telekinetic punch. When you are the first to reach the end of the course, you get the first inkling that something might not be as it seems. A corner of Coach's mind reveals that he has a secret. You see a glimpse of an odd blueprint.



After that, you get to explore the campgrounds for a bit and interact with your fellow campers. You get handed a list of items scattered around the camp for a scavenger hunt. This hunt will take most of the game to complete since you need certain powers and upgrades to find some items. You meet a strange man who is the camp's janitor, chef, ranger, and waterfront manager. You are told that Psychonaut Sasha Nein wants to see you. It seems that you impressed him while navigating Coach's mind and he wants to put you through some advanced training/experiments.



You travel to Sasha's lab and he officially introduces himself and shows you his Brain Tumbler machine. The machine allows you to enter your own mind. You enter a landscape that reminds Raz of the traveling circus he grew up in. However, when you enter a circus wagon, you end up in a much stranger place that does not look like your mind. Curious, Sasha asks you to explore more. You encounter Censors, little creatures that try to eliminate rogue thoughts. When the Censors become too much for Raz, Sasha pulls him out and tells him that he needs to find Ford Cruller to be issued permission to be trained in marksmanship.



At this point, you are pointed to the camp's ancient fast travel system which leads you to Ford Cruller, former Director of the Psychonauts. He is the guy who you have seen serving in all of the odd jobs around the camp. His psyche has been shattered in battle and he is confined to his lab with various personalities slipping out to watch over the camp. Ford takes a shine to Raz and teaches him more about the Psychonauts and grants you permission to learn a long-distance telekinetic attack.



You travel back to Sasha who pulls you into his mind. His mind is very ordered and provides a course to practice your new long-distance attack. Sasha carefully lets Censors loose in his head to give Raz some shooting practice. Unfortunately, Raz gets impatient and floods the place with censors which leads Sasha to briefly lose his fastidious control. This eventually leads to the escape of the Mega-Censor, a giant beefy censor who rampages across Sasha's mind. Sasha steps in to help out but is ambushed which leaves Raz to fight the Mega Censor alone. Once he does, he is then clear to use his new marksmanship badge outside of Sasha's mind. Sasha sends you back into what you are sure is not your own mind now where you battle to a mysterious tower. To get to the top of the tower, you will need additional training.



You head to meet Agent Milla Vodello who brings you into her mind for training in the use of the Levitation power. Her mind is a mix of a pinball machine and a never-ending party as the free-spirit as a contrast to Sasha's more uptight personality. This is the mind where you learn pretty much the rest of your movement tech in the game as you learn how to float on currents and move at high speed on a ball of energy. At this point, your fellow campers start to encourage you. Except for Bobby Zilch who makes a return appearance to race Raz. With the Levitation badge, Raz can reach the top of the tower.



At the top of the tower, Raz finds himself inside of the blueprint that you glimpsed in the Coach's mind earlier in the game. It was a blueprint for a tank and you witness a fellow camper get his brain sucked out and placed into the tank which makes it a robot with psychic powers. After beating the tank, you realize that a man named Loboto has teamed with the Coach to create these tanks to take over the world. You head to rendezvous with Lili who has been conducting her own investigation only to watch her get kidnapped by a giant Lungfish.

[WolfofWords]

Raz rushes to save Lily by descending into the depths of Lake Oblongata in a bathysphere, throwing caution to the wind. He finds a strange bubble of air under the surface which allows him to combat the giant Lungfish in its own habitat. The Lungfish tries to kill Raz over and over but he manages to outsmart the beast. With the Lungfish temporarily knocked unconscious, Raz is able to enter its mind.



When you come to, you find that you are suddenly gigantic. In a role reversal, you are now a kaiju in Lungfishopolis, towering over tiny versions of the Lungfish. The citizens flee in terror from you and the military tries to attack you. However, you are contacted by a rebel force inside of the creature's mind. These forces work with you to fight through the city. You arrive at a tall tower which turns out to be a mind control device. It is guarded by a personification of the device in the form of Coach Oleander as a kaiju. After destroying the Coach kaiju and the device, the Lungfish is free. Introducing itself as Linda, it offers to ferry you across the lake.



You arrive at an island in the middle of the lake and at the gates of the Thorney Towers Home for the Disturbed, an abandoned asylum. The place may have been abandoned by the original owners, but the Coach and his assistant Dr. Loboto are in control now. One of the first things that you notice is that the place is littered with jars that contain the brains of your fellow campers. At this point, you can rescue the brains and bring them back to Ford to be reinserted in their bodies, earning your fellow campers grudging respect. Back at the island, you find the gate locked but an odd man named Boyd is standing in front of the gate acting as a security guard. You enter his mind.



You find yourself in a house with Boyd who is in full-blown conspiracy theorist mode. When you exit the house, you immediately figure out that there is a huge conspiracy at play. The suburban neighborhood looks sunny and nice but it is soon clear that everything is manufactured. Everything and everyone is watching you. You encounter strange spindly men in trenchcoats and fedoras. They are obviously trying to act like normal people but failing at anything resembling ordinary behavior. You also encounter little girl scouts who seem a little too defensive when you question them. You navigate a strange mystery and eventually battle the Scout Leader and awaken Boyd's dormant alter ego, the one Coach groomed for violence.



Back in the real world, Boyd is broken free of Coach's influence and is back to his destructive ways. He unlocks the gate for you, allowing you to slip inside while he starts to try to burn the place down. You discover that some of the patients are still around and one of them is guarding an elevator that will lead you up into the tower where Coach and Loboto have Lili. Luckily, this ex-patient is nearsighted so all you have to do is assemble a vague Loboto costume from items that the patients have. The first patient whose mind you enter is Gloria, a faded ex-actress who clings to her memories of show business and suffering from bipolar disorder.



Raz finds himself in a huge theater with a cast of misfit actors on stage and a long-suffering stage manager just off stage. The audience is empty except for Gloria's inner critic, a big bully who constantly insults whatever efforts are going on stage. Raz befriends Gloria's inner performer, the part of her that delights in acting. There is also a Phantom in the theater who ruins any performance that Gloria's inner actress takes part in. You get the actors on stage to reenact scenes from Gloria's childhood to help to understand her and to gain access to the catwalks where the Phantom creeps. When you finally confront the PHantom, you realize that it is the critic. You battle the critic and defeat him, causing him to shrink and allow Gloria to stop being so hard on herself, freeing her from her doubt and pain. She still has bipolar disorder, of course, but it is a little easier to shoulder now.



You next enter the mind of Fred, a hapless guy who is locked in an internal battle with his ancestor Napoleon Bonaparte who seems to represent Fred's lack of confidence. When you arrive in Fred's mind, you find Fred and Napoleon fighting over a board game. You are able to shrink down and enter the game in order to help Fred win. You help recruit soldiers and a carpenter to act as his army. Along the way, you convince Fred to believe in himself and give him a little push to confront his ancestor (a split personality) and gain a measure of freedom and peace.



You next enter the mind of Edgar, a hulking painter who is blocked by trauma from his past. His mind looks like a Spanish villa done up like a blacklight poster. The place seems to be one long street and a giant bull is continuously running through the level, threatening to clobber you. You must navigate alleys and sewers to find ways around the bull. You can also utilize art itself to form useful objects, doors, and ladders to continue the level. You have to fight four luchadors to obtain access to the final boss. In the middle of a bullfighter's ring, you pierce the bull with spears. It is only then that you find out that the bull is Edgar himself and represents his own anger that he can't move past. You find out that his girlfriend left him for another guy in high school and it destroyed him, turning him from a jock to an artist. When you defeat the personification of the guy who stole Edgar's girlfriend, it shows Edgar how pathetic his ex and this guy were and how silly it was to fixate on all of it. He forgives them and forgives himself.



Free to continue into the tower, you travel to stop Coach Oleander and Loboto's plan and rescue Lili. Once there, you are able to rescue Lili along with Sasha and Milla, impressing your Psychonaut heroes. Coach Oleander is not done and puts his own mind into an even bigger tank which Raz has to fight. Raz has a tough fight against the tank and defeats it, exposing Coach's brain. Both Raz's and Coach's brains end up in the same tank and Raz is sent into a mixture of his own and Coach's nightmares.



You awaken in The Meat Circus, a mix of the Coach's childhood being bullied by his butcher father and Raz's childhood growing up in a traveling circus. It seems they both had overbearing fathers. The two blend together to create a huge vertical level with a sinister edge which Raz much climb. Along the way, you encounter Coach as a child and repeatedly protect him against threats to allow him to be happy, something his father never allowed him to be. Finally, you confront Coach's father but he teams up with a memory of Raz's overbearing father to create a dangerous behemoth that takes all of your skill and power to defeat. At the last moment, Raz's actual father mentally projects himself into the mix and helps Raz save the day. It turns out he was only tough on Raz because he was worried and protective but he is proud of his heroic son.



With the day saved, Raz is made into a full-fledged Psychonaut, fulfilling his dream. A future romance with Lili seems all but certain and his relationship with his father is on the mend. As things wrap up, they get word that Lili's father has been kidnapped and Raz, Lili, Sasha, and Milla spring into action to save the day once again.

[WolfofWords]

The sequel is just as quirky and sassy.