Programming Note: I missed an edition and I have no plans to make up the difference. I’ve got stuff going on, sue me!
Though I don't think I've invoked it beyond an image or a footnote, Inception looms large over this project. With its 'Keanu Reeves saying woah' level of depth and it being considered peak Christopher Nolan1, arguably the reigning king of blockbusters (depending on your Avatar opinions), it left quite an impression on culture. Which is why it's so funny to start sniffing around this concept and discover that it's not quite as original as the general public might have thought. Sure, Paprika is the obvious comparison, but it looks like there are some other bites missing from this apple.
I'd argue one such bite is Psychonauts. It's a quirky platformer adventure game from 2005 about a world of psychic agents who literally invade people's brains. It's a game I played way back in the day, though probably already a couple years after it came out, and I recall finding delightful.
Psychonauts's is the kind of thing that inevitably gets boiled down to a mishmash of clashing influences, which are all totally fair but a bit reductive. It's a kind of gee whiz 1950s/1960s comics thing, with a visual sensibility that is chasing Henry Selick and Tim Burton in a major way. It takes place at a summer camp that's also a training program for psychic spies where you are a runaway from your circus family. It bandies in (I believe) consciously groanworthy dad-ish humor. It's a lot of things, but it also is very much its own thing.
Coming back to it, I find the story is weirdly difficult to convey. It doesn't feel like there's much of it but there actually definitely is and it's not complicated or confusing but it's also not coherent. There are a series of events which just kind of happens without too much connective tissue. You escape from your family, you're in camp, you get special training and abilities. One of your teachers uses a giant fish monster to kidnap children. Who then have their brains extracted by a mysterious weird dentist guy. Which is the teacher’s evil plot for reasons. You uncover and foil all this by infiltrating a nearby abandoned asylum. And it culminates in you fighting an amalgamation of your daddy issues and the villian’s daddy issues, alongside your actual dad. Yeah. It doesn’t quite not work, you just kind of go along with it.
The game plays as a mash up of two popular genres of its hay day, 3D platformer collectathons and puzzley adventure games. The former is all jumping and exploring and collecting an excessive variety of both important and unimportant knick knacks. The latter is all trying to figure out the one thing you need to do next to make the game keep happening. When it works, I'd argue it feels great. It's mostly a joy to move around the world as Razputin, especially once you have your levitation powers, and the puzzles are generally intuitive enough to not frustrate.
That's when it works though. I think the years have aged this game mighty poorly. Several platforming elements don't work well, particularly the swinging monkeybars which are finicky and slow in a game that usually offers a real sense of movement and speed. Most frustrating, though, is the ability progression. You have eight psychic powers to use which you unlock one by one through camp patches. Which are unlocked using some ratio of:
Levels (via obtaining figments within minds)
Psy cards (found in the real world and convertable from various other items)
Psy cores (found, unlocked using arrowheads (another currency weirdly found in and out of minds), and probably convertable from other items too
To be clear, I have no idea if the above is accurate. I just collect stuff when I see it and eventually the game tells me I have enough stuff to unlock a new power. But sometimes (twice in this playthrough) you'll hit a wall in the game, try very hard to solve it, eventually ask the strange old man who can literally pop out of your head for advice, and he'll say you probably need a new power.
(Edit: After typing all the above about the annoyance of unlocks, I then got the final unlock in a totally different way. I’ve no idea whether I was just remembering it wrong or this was a special case, but I think it speaks to the clumsiness of that aspect of the game. And regardless of how I unlocked it, the annoyance of not knowing I needed to unlock it still stands.)
There's two issues here, the first just being the decision to give you powers like this in the first place. All these powers are very contextual, it's not like having them all breaks the game and makes it too easy. Why not just slowly drip feed them to you with lil tutorials in the first two hours?2 And if you're going to put in an arbitrary wall where you need a new unlocked power, have some indication pop up that tells you that you do so the wall isn't arbitrary AND invisible. The second issue is this byzantine collection system which involves a store, two different conversion machines, and, by my rough count, 7 different collectible items. I don't mind running slightly out of my way to collect stuff, but I really resent feeling like I have to all the time. And I really really resent the leg work of going to machines and stores and making one type of meaningless collectible turn into another. There's precisely one collectible in the game that I happily go out of my for, which are the Memory Vaults. They give you a little slide show backstory on the person's mind you're in. It has narrative value and is completely disconnected from the collectible currency nonsense, so it actually feels worthwhile.
That's about the extent of my serious complaints with the game. Beyond its premise, its great strength is its commitment to and the specificity of its personality. It's a major game that's basically a quirky kid friendly comedy, which was a rarity of its time when point and click adventures were disappearing and games were beginning to be dominated by grim shooters of various brown and grey hues, prior to the explosion of indie gaming as a thing. It's still a little strange now, but the shine has come off the apple a bit as quirky and random humor3 has become so very tired, and I've since seen a lot of things which influenced this and that this influenced. Still though, it's cute, and even if the comedy isn't funny it's still consistently fun, which sounds like faint praise but is often a bar that is not cleared with bad comedies.
The levels, which are the distillation of the premise here, are what I'd really like to dig into. In one you play as a giant kaiju version of yourself who stomps through a miniature city of fish people who run from and fight your godzilla ass, until you fight the 'good' kaiju guy whose turned the city against humans (you are the brain of a giant fish monster who abducts children). You run around twisty Escher-esque suburbia populated with mysterious agents, getting to the bottom of a paranoid conspiracy about a milkman. You play a boardgame where you scale down to piece size and then scale down even further to play on individual tiles, trying to help an apathetic psych patient beat his ancestral memory of Napoleon.
Even when aspects of these levels don't work (and most of them bump a little at some point), you can't help but feel like what you're doing is cool. The idea of going into a mind and untangling a colorful conceptualized world with action and puzzles to literally solve someone's neuroses is cool4. I can move pieces around on a board and talk to some imaginary people for a bit and think, 'yep, now this guy in a straightjacket won't think he's Napoleon anymore' is a lot of fun. The fact that all of the world's are consistently creative and interesting, usually both visually and conceptually, is fantastic5. It's a real testament to games as a medium, where the level structure and pacing lends itself really well to this material. It suits it in a way that's hard to imagine any other medium suiting it.
This is just such a rich premise that people can't help coming back to it across mediums, but it's hard to imagine anything matching it for meeting it with such imagination and joy. Today it's rougher edges feel rougher and it sometimes feels like it's trying to get in its own way a bit, but it's a cult classic for a reason and it still feels singular and like a stepforward for the medium. Though it's slightly less singular now, seeing as they made a sequel in 2022. But that's a discussion for another day (not next week, just to be totally clear).
Coming up next time, I will explain all my mixed up feelings about… Inside Out!
Funny to consider that Nolan has now matched, if not exceeded, Inception in Nolan-ness with Tenet and maybe even Oppenheimer.
The answer is because they wanted to make collecting things part of the game and without this approach collecting things is pointless. To which I say, if you make collecting things fun and optional, people might do it and enjoy it. If you make it tedious and mandatory, people will hate it.
You summon the old man who lives inside your brain by waving a bit of bacon by your ear. It was 2005.
I am not going to attempt to address whether/how the games' treatment of mental health might be reductive or problematic. For one thing, I'm in no position to weigh in on that. For another, I think almost anybody who plays this would acknowledge this game has no real interest in or connection to real human minds. The concept of literally solving people's mental problems from inside their head is just a jumping off point for exploring personality and character (and justifying fun gameplay, of course). I think you’d have to be going out of your way to possibly imagine the game is trying to engage with human psychology in anything like a serious way.
Some of the worlds are actually slightly more boring and linear, but these are more tutorial levels without brain problems to solve.