The “Milkman Conspiracy” and “Black Velvetopia”. These two levels are standing out the most when talking about Psychonauts. The Milkman level has some excellent deadpan humor, a crazy layout and delivers on the premise of the game. Velvetopia is gorgeous beyond belief. I would love to love both those levels. But I don’t think they should exist in this game.
Oh, there goes 90% of my readers. For those of you who stayed let me clarify some things. It’s not that I dislike those levels. I just think that they don’t belong in the story that the game is trying to say.
Think about it. We spend the first half of the game in the camp. We get to know the other kids, our teachers and their stories. We develop some relations with most of them. A crush on Lily, a rivalry with Bobby. There is also plenty of foreshadowing from very early on about the end of the game. We hear something about a lake monster kidnaping children. We see that Coach Oleander identifies with Raz over their daddy issues and being marginalized by society.
So when problems start, we are invested. Someone is stealing the brains of our fellow campers! Someone kidnapped our crush, right after she told us to make out! It is the moment the adventure really starts. We go after the lake monster, defeat it, learn that Lili is in the Asylum and then...
Well we have to spend an hour into the mind of someone we never seen before to get him to open the gates of the Asylum. Yes it’s funny. Yes it’s weird. Yes we needed more time inside some weird brains to deliver on the premise of the game. But it doesn’t fit. It slows the game down.
And after that we have three more levels, with people we have never met, don’t really care about and their stories add nothing to the story we were in. By the time I finished with the last of the inmates, I had forgotten all about my urgency to find Lili, because I have spent the last 3 hours thinking about finding a gourmet dinner for Napoleon’s knight or how to proceed in Velvetopia.
“But,” I hear some argue, “those are the best levels of the game! All the magic of the game would be lost! We would lose all the humor of having government agents mourning in deadpan their supposedly dead husbands. How dare you Dimitri? How dare you.”
Well let me get you a copy of your arguments from a parallel universe, when I tried to tell them to include the “Black Velvetopia” to their version of the Psychonauts. “But Dogen’s and Boby’s brains were the most interesting brains in the game! Look at all the great humor at Bobby Zilch's brain! Look at how crazy interesting and weird Dogen-the-guy-who-accidentally-blew-the-heads-of-four-people brain was! Why would we want to replace that with some random guy's brain?”
You see, the talent of Tim Schafer is to turn anything he touches into comedy gold. We love the “Milkman conspiracy” because it is what we got, but we don’t account for what we have lost. Do you honestly believe that if they wrote some other two levels, they wouldn’t be just as good?
What to replace them with? Well, we have spend so much time around some very interesting characters. Why throw them away for the finale? Use them! I would pick Dogen, Bobby and Lili. Why? Because I love those characters. Those are the ones that *I* want to explore. But any other camper could do.
The developers could invent any reason to have us go into their mind. Like having them wired into a locked door, that they maintain closed with the power of their inner issues. Or something like that, only funnier.(1)
What we achieve with that is that we have a familiarity with those people. We feel connected with them. We care. We want to save them before we proceed, instead of helping them to acquire some items, to fool a guard, like we are in the worst kind of adventure game.
Don’t think I don’t like the game. I love it. It is one of those games that I love playing over and over again. I am planning to write a post someday with everything Psychonauts did masterfully. The only reason I am writing this is because it is not perfect and I wish it was. There are more issues of course, some of them about the gameplay, some more about the story and I may visit those in the future. But the problem with the Asylum patients is the one that irks me the most.
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