I don’t think I really have anything positive to say about the story that hasn’t been said by people who played this game right when it came out so before I go ham picking apart how much the second half of it bums me out I do want to say that I more or less like it and I think a lot of the positive reviews I’ve been reading here on backloggd are good, and that I agree with them! Me slapping this bad boy with a two point five and spending the next thousand words criticizing the bits that I couldn’t shake is not me saying that the writing in the game as a whole is bad, or that I didn’t enjoy it for the most part. Just wanna make it clear up front. I Like Psychonauts 2. I just haven’t really seen anybody talk about what I’m about to talk about which is wild to me because it has been a huge blinking light casting a terrible shadow over the back half of this experience for me, beginning as a small niggle and only growing larger and uglier the deeper we go.

So. Psychonauts 2 positions itself as a game about self-acceptance. Our ability to be cool to ourselves as much as we are other people, to cope with our traumas, to handle adversity in a healthy way. In a much more explicit way than in the first game, Raz every mind Raz enters involves him actively seeking to aid but not cure people. He gives them the push they need, or squeezes their hand in assurance when they’re wavering. This is a sweet premise to work from, and it works, mostly, in a vacuum. This is the real way the psychonauts are supposed to use their powers, we’re told, and the first lesson Raz has to learn is that responsibility and empathy. This is the first hitch, though; the psychonauts aren’t therapists, they’re mercenary spies, and ambiguously pseudo-nationalist ones at that? These two things, the “ask for permission before you enter a mind and only help people out” ethos and the “governments hire us to do spy work to protect people” work they actually do are simply incompatible. I would have accepted an argument that this is a game, if not for kids, then set in a childish universe, but Psychonauts 2 goes out of its way to forbid me from framing it that way, what with its central plot revolving around genocide, putting front and center imagery of violent suppression of peaceful protests even as it’s too PG to directly voice a character’s struggles with alcohol in dialogue.

Genocide really is the word I would prefer not to be typing right now and the Deluge of Grulovia is the event from which all of my little frictions with the game’s story blossom into full on disappointments. For as much as the actual battle with Maligula is key to the game as the event that shaped the lives of most of the people Raz interacts with, changed the course of his family history, and with the lengths the game goes to portray that specific event from many different points of view, it’s shocking to me how intensely uninterested it is in the context surrounding it.

Lucrecia is painted as a sympathetic character who was manipulated by people she trusted because of forces she couldn’t control within herself, but that’s not really true? It’s stated in the game that Maligula didn’t become her dominant personality until after the first time she committed mass murder, and it’s implied that it wasn’t the mass murder that did it, only the fact that she also killed her sister in the event. And sure, the first deluge event was an accident, but Lucrecia was still voluntarily and completely under her own volition aiding a fascist dictator in the violent suppression of people who were openly stated at multiple times throughout the game to be protesting the regime peacefully. When a fragment of Ford’s memory blames the Grulovian people for “pushing her too far” by…asking to not be oppressed, I think that there’s room to take that as a bitter piece of his psyche indulging in some dark thoughts, but honestly given the way the rest of the game portrays Lucrecia and the first generation of psychonauts it’s hard to say! Outside of the actual physical confrontation that had with Maligula that broke so bad, there’s just too little to contextualize how anybody else in the game felt about her, and what little we do see in Ford’s memories seems to portray it more along the lines of “we’re all worried about you!! You’re not acting like yourself!!” rather than treating her like the state sanctioned fascist she was?

And this is the thing right like, Ford should be the villain of this game, and it does seem like it’s gonna go this way with the initial reveal of what he did to Lucrecia and to Raz’s dad, but he never really answers for it. Raz forgets he’s mad at him after like two scenes. We see Raz’s dad experience the grief and trauma of remembering the truth but that’s the last time we see Raz’s family in the game – there’s no reckoning or reconciliation, no coming to terms at all. It’s a combination of two factors, one of which is a common problem in Tim Schafer games and the other a certainly unintentional but more insidious one. The first is that the end of this game is rushed as hell, and there’s no room for any real thematic resolution after the big climax. Any resolution, really. Lilly’s subplot, her dad’s, Raz’s family, Ford in particular, none of them get any time. There’s no denouement.

The other is the bigger thematic issue at play across this whole game. I’m loathe to use these words because they make me sound like a chud asshole but they’re shorthand that I think people will understand so I’ll just try to explain myself to the best of my ability. Psychonauts 2 feels like a Cozy game to me. Like a Wholesome game. I’ve seen a lot of people mention that it feels like some of the teeth are gone from specifically the comedy in this game and I would agree with that but I don’t mind it, the goofs are cute in this game and it got real actual laughs out of me a few times. But this sensibility has tendrilled out into the rest of the writing in a very uncritical way, to the detriment of this game having anything impactful to say about almost anything it wants to.

There’s a desire in Psychonauts 2 to be kind and respectful of people with mental illness and people who are struggling in general. This is good. But the aforementioned Wholesome Mentality shorthand is what gets you to the point where you’re accidentally saying that people who have been addicted to alcohol and people who resign themselves to self-pity and people who make selfishly unilateral harmful decisions for other people’s lives fully aware of the consequences that will ripple out across generations and people who commit genocide are equally worthy of forgiveness and reevaluation. It’s how you get a game that emphasizes the importance of asking for consent to enter a mind and then has you almost exclusively entering the minds of people who don’t have the faculties to provide actual consent, or worse, has Raz openly tricking people or asking people he knows can’t answer him, with every intention of doing it either way, and finally eschewing the consent thing altogether once we’ve decided that the guy we want to go into is a bad guy. In all of these cases there are justifications, and often good and reasonable ones, but there is also a lack of self-reflection. Why do we have these rules if we can so easily explain them away? How can we not consider our own relationship to power and institutional authority when we make these decisions and our excuses for them?

Psychonauts 2’s biggest failing isn’t that these things happen in the game, it’s not even that the game is so uninterested in interrogating the way it handles or presents them. It’s that it doesn’t seem to understand that there’s anything contradictory here at all.