Psychonauts and the Levels That Are Also Characters

Platformers usually give you a theme: a forest, a lava cave, an ice world. Psychonauts gave you a person. Each of its main levels is the inside of someone’s head, and the layout, the enemies and the rules of movement grow out of that person’s fears, memories and quirks. It is one of the most inventive structural ideas in a genre that mostly recycles its scenery.

The game was the first release from Double Fine Productions, the studio founded by Tim Schafer after his time at LucasArts, and it appeared in 2005 for the PC, the Xbox and the PlayStation 2. You play Raz, a boy who has run away from a circus to attend a summer camp for psychic trainees. The camp is a cover for something darker, and to uncover it Raz uses his abilities to enter the minds of the people around him, a group that includes his instructors, his fellow campers and a lunatic or two.

What follows is a string of set pieces in which the rules change completely. In one, a dance-party disco full of eccentric geometric dancers reflects a character’s lost sense of self. In another, a suburban neighbourhood turns out to be a stage set patrolled by agents in identical suits. In another, a city of giant fish-like creatures is treated as a monster movie. A velvet-painted world of bulging eyes and bright colour expresses a different obsession. Opinion: the best of these are still unmatched in the medium, because each one uses the platforming as a form of characterisation rather than decoration.

The writing is the other reason for its lasting appeal. It has the dry, warm, absurd humour associated with Schafer’s earlier work, and its cast includes memorable minor characters who are given real emotional lives. That the game can be funny and then unexpectedly sad within the same level is a large part of why it is loved.

It has real flaws. Some of the late levels, and one final stretch in particular, are widely cited as too hard, and a few control quirks and an awkward difficulty curve dented the experience for some players. Sales, by most accounts, were disappointing on release, despite strong reviews, and the publisher changed during development after Microsoft stepped away, with Majesco releasing the game. The commercial failure is one of the standard cautionary tales about acclaim not translating to revenue.

Yet the game did not vanish. Its reputation grew steadily through word of mouth, and re-releases, including a Steam version in 2011, brought it to new audiences. A crowdfunding campaign in 2015 helped fund a sequel, and Psychonauts 2 arrived in 2021 after Double Fine had joined Microsoft.

The moral is a happy one. A game that fails in the shops can still become a cult classic and then a franchise, provided people keep talking about it. In Psychonauts, every level asks what a person’s mind might look like from the inside, and few games have answered the question with such invention.