March Update- A Psychonauts 2 video post-mortem

Hello hello hello

So, given this video went so over deadline and that I spent SO long promising it, I figured you guys were owed something substantial for the support and patience you offered as I kept going ‘no really guys, I’m making things’ while banging my head against a keyboard. It has been especially rewarding to get this done in a way different to the other videos, and I tried to keep track of how I was approaching this- so, here’s a little rundown of what I went through to get this video to happen. Enjoy!

—————

The Process

When I made ‘the simple complexity of Psychonauts’ I was *convinced* I’d be playing the game that same year. I think the recently released trailer and other elements made me think we were close to something happening, but of course, that wasn’t the case, and I had the thought of doing it eventually looming over me, knowing I had made another long term promise I needed to keep as soon as the game was done.

Fast forward two and a bit years and boom, release.

Psychonauts 2 came out the day after my sight reached acceptable enough levels post-surgery to see everything I was doing, so I was understandably very excited to get to grips with it. I can’t tell you the feeling of satisfaction I had playing it for the first time, that moment of realising this was it and it was doing everything I hoped it would with a huge smile on my face - but as the game went on, the feeling changed, for better and worse, and when it finished I realised I was nowhere near ready to say exactly how I felt.

This time around, I realised writing the video was going to be an evolving process. I needed to get all my thoughts out and play through the game a few more times, as well as have a lot of internal debates, to truly figure out where it left me, and I have to be honest, that process never really ended until the day before the video went live. There were a lot of long walks with friends, some discussion with family, and seeing what other fans thought, as I tried to reconcile my expectations and my understanding of the game with what it was really saying, and the more I did that, the more I knew the game was having a strong effect on me- I needed to make a video.

I was also getting extremely frustrated with the analyses and reviews coming out on the game. Most of the videos were very positive but seemed to either completely miss what the game was doing specifically or denigrate the original in ways I felt weren’t helpful. A lot of written reviews by fans online were in contrast quite harshly critical and I also wasn’t sure they had figured out all the ways the game tied together, that even if I agreed with their shortcomings, they didn’t accurately assess why that choice would have been made over others. I’m very much someone who doesn’t want things to be misjudged- if something is not achieved but had intentions to achieve that thing, I think it should be talked about, and many times my research and my replays seemed to indicate most of what I felt was lacking was, on some level, considered.

In the end, I think the video benefitted from the time to fully reflect on both my and the world’s response. Had I not, I think I would have said things I didn’t fully mean, and in that effort to not be misunderstood, it drove me to take a few angles I hadn’t tried before.

Puzzles

You’ll have noticed the different names of the sections in the video- because Psychonauts is such a multi-sensory series I knew even before the video that I would have to tackle a lot of its topics in different ways, using all sorts of tactics to bring the most out of its points. This is why all the sections of the video are sorta named after class courses- to better illustrate the skills put to use by the team.

 Early in the process I figured out the key difference between how I wanted to talk about 1 and 2, as a jigsaw and a Rubik’s cube, but originally I was going to get friends to help me make them digitally- kind of a Mark Brown thing. Problem was that they were all extremely busy and I didn’t have a set deadline, and when I asked if they could do it for January and realised I wasn’t going to hit that date, I panicked. But then I realised- these things exist in the real world. Make them.

So, out came the pens and pencils. I was lucky my guess that there would be template jigsaws I could draw on was real, I bought a bunch of those and a plain Rubik’s. I thought it’d be better to draw on them to make it more obvious they were physically hand made things to match the games vibe rather than print outs, and I err, don’t have a printer yet anyway, oops. It all happened late in the game, but I think it worked out in the end.

I was very proud of the idea of the puzzle forming an outline of Raz’s head, but the plan with the Rubik’s was, once all the sides were together, to have every face suddenly be Maligula’s. Sadly that didn’t work out, it would have been a nightmare without a scanner to re-daw 6 matching faces as well as ruin a cube I’ve stupidly become a bit attached to now. I’m also glad nobody pulled me up on Otto’s inclusion- I know we don’t enter his mind, but he’s still as mentioned in the video a part of the puzzle and it was too fun to have the 6 depicted as a connected cube.

I think I’m slowly figuring out my own voice in shaping these videos, right down to making the thumbnail a drawing of my own. This has, like the FF video, proved a great way to experiment and evolve how I do what I do, and hopefully I can keep growing that as we go.

Research

More than many of the other videos Psychonauts had me scrambling to what felt like the four corners of the earth to find out more. I think this speaks for how brilliant the series is, because it’s never just one concept or idea you can go deep on, this is a game talking psychology, history, art, everything, and I wanted to seriously invest in all the influences that made this game as rich as it was. Been waiting YEARS to bust out the Stinky Cheese man in a video. YEARS.

Even going into how the game was made was a hell of an interesting experience to better critique their choices and ensure I was giving them a fair shake. It’s not often devs document their process as they go, over a period of years no less, and luckily there was a tonne of content from DF that gave me much to build a picture on, stuff that makes you realise what was always there and what wasn’t (Gristol’s level, it seems, was developed VERY early on.)I don’t know if anyone understood when I showed Coach ole talking about them cutting his funding and showing that map- an early piece of concept art where there was a secret bunker where he was building a giant mech to fight Maligula. That coupled with the drawing of the gang, including him in a riveters outfit, kinda shows you their original plans to give him a role on the same level as Sacha and Milla, and it was a clever way to get that point into the game as a joke.

Psychology was the one I wanted to pin down the most for obvious reasons, it’s the biggest point. Schafer did an interview where he answered like 50 quick questions and in one he very casually threw out ‘I based the first mostly on Freud and the second mostly on Jung.’ That was all I had to go on- I mean we already had the concept of archetypes spelt out directly in the game but I needed to try and work things backwards and see how it applied to the rest of the game. Luckily as shown in the video, I had a friend on hand into this stuff who provided me with the best (and funniest) possible descriptions, and was able to work my research out from there. These are not easy concepts to read wikipedia on and get, and the more I delved the more I realised it wasn’t just a case of every brain representing a different psychosis. A lot of people had incorrectly attributed Cassie to multiple personality disorder, when she actually has the same sense of inner conflict as everyone else in the game, she just has a better grasp of how to compartmentalise her archetypes as separate personas, as with everything else she knows from her extensive knowledge of the world, and I wouldn’t have fully grasped that had I not read up further.

The one I didn’t need any research for was the subject of addiction. I didn’t elaborate in the video and maybe this is an overshare but I have lived with addiction, specifically drinking, within my family all my life. As Bob’s level started I was very skeptical - I’ve seen people discuss the subject or depict it and miss the point completely, or just not get the feeling right. Of course, it was entirely effective In the end, which is why I chose not to go deeper into the topic. Some things, I feel, speak for themselves.

Rewrites

More than any other video this one was subject to huge rewrites.

When you start these things you tend to have an idea of how the video might feel as a shape, how it might move and flow from point to point, and with this one I actually found that very quickly, but like my feeling with the game, I didn’t think I always hit the mark. I spent so much time trying to get the words perfect, touching on every point I wanted to cover, which I spent a lot of time on hoping I wouldn’t have to voice it a million times- but the minute it was on its feet, I suddenly could see all the ways I was either skimping out on important details or even worse not communicating my points in full. It was like I was watching the video on YouTube for the first time and going ‘man, this guy sucks!’

Take the section on Raz’s fear of water. I’d simply left it originally as ‘Hey, I didn’t really feel this’ with a couple of the points you still see in the video - but when I edited the clips together I was like ‘hey, wait a minute, people are gonna say this looks fine.’ There were a few shots I’d forgotten until I edited them and I’m like, man, am I just completely wrong on this? But talking it over with others and on replays, I still felt the same way. This was how I slowly realised what was missing for me and knew the point needed altering to better get this across. I didn’t want to be so simply dismissive, I needed to accurately get to why, even for the good it was doing, it wasn’t affecting me, and in a conversation with a buddy I landed on the idea of Raz taking out Maligula with his own hand of Gaoloccio. We joked about it being like, a series of hands, him all covered in water having taken on the power completely for this one moment.

As I recall, they said Raz should’ve gone ‘and that is the purpose of the goggles’. King.

Some sections got chopped up and moved into other places, some got turned inside out, but every time you do that you need to make sure those whole sections, and indeed the whole video, still flow naturally. Right up until the last moment I was making sure that was the case, and that can be tough when you’re a one man band working on a long project. I couldn’t show everyone I knew my full video every time I needed feedback on how it was going - I just needed to keep going over it and judge for myself if it was working or not.

History

I’ll come out and say to you guys, this was the part I was worried about the most.

So, for some background, I majored in Russian history for my A Levels, after a year of studying it for my GCSE’s beforehand. It didn’t make me an expert, but I was fascinated by it, covering the end of the Romanovs to the fall of the USSR. I even went to school with the daughter of a major player in Russian politics who equally found the history fascinating, and given what happened to him, I was made aware early on how volatile this history was.

I was amazed, then, when a game I love decided to capture a history I found so exciting in such a wonderful, artful way. In some ways I think Gristol’s mind is the best because he’s the only complete wild card of the brain levels in the game. It’s a huge gimmick in the mind of an incredibly deluded person which lends itself brilliantly to artistic interpretation. As you gathered of course knowing the real history gave me pause for thought when certain things didn’t play out, You all now know how I overall feel about this take and I could go on for ages about it, and almost did here, but I’m not gonna, it’s literally a mountain of a discussion.

This was a unique situation for me to tackle because I wanted to be true to what I felt without making people feel the game’s depiction was bad or unwarranted, because I liked it as much as I felt uneasy about its choices. How do you get across an entire period of history and its full nuance while keeping it entirely relevant to the discussion at hand, and without dismissing the truth the game absolutely nails? I rewrote this section almost 50 times. I sat in front of the screen for days trying to think how best to word my answer, trying to make sure I covered everything and accommodated every argument. I was actually violently ill the day before as I tried to think of a way to word it, though err, I’m convinced that was down to bad food as well as stress. But I realised none of that would help. So, I firmed myself up. I kept going back to find different, credible historians to assure me of any gaps, and made myself sure of my stance.

But what’s interesting is very few people have taken it badly at all. Some have disagreed it was an issue or even said that I didn’t go far enough- both I can live with- but nobody has (yet) said that it was unreasonable to think what I did. In fact, if I’m honest, I think it proved a great opportunity to offer a history lesson that will maybe make people appreciate their risk to use it even more. I think you can view the history and the game as two separate entities and draw different conclusions, but my worry was that people weren’t talking about the history *at all*, from the way people were talking it was something they didn’t even know- and that, more than anything, was what I wanted to bring to the conversation.

Oh, and one more thing.

When war broke out between Russia and the Ukraine, I of course would come back to the video much later realising there was a hell of a coincidental overlap, and a worry that people might misconstrue my points in the heat of the events happening. I had, however, done my research. I’ve always known that the deaths of the family were covered up by what became Stalin’s regime in order to keep its cause alive- and I know Yeltsin re-introduced the truth of their murders in order to put this behind Russia, and establish democracy. Putin came in and attempted to validate ALL leaders- Stalin, Lenin, the Tsars- with an eye to establishing a completely mismatched set of ideologies as if to validate a single dynasty of power, Russia, that would ensure, eventually, his total autocracy.

I had already written this allusion into the video, and I figured this was, if anything, a point Double Fine also wanted to be heard.

Effect

There were two responses I really wanted from this video.

If you liked Psychonauts 2, I wanted you to walk away going ‘wow, this game is even better than I thought.’ If you didn’t, I wanted you to walk away going ‘okay, I’m not entirely alone on how I feel, but I get it now.’ I saw both of those within a few hours of posting the video and I was totally relieved as a result, I’d achieved what I set out to do, and all the responses that followed fell somewhere on this spectrum.

I will understand that some people won’t care for me taking what is a genuinely strong work of art and even inviting the idea of being critical, but I don’t see this as a way to dismiss the game or the people who made it, because, well, if you think I’m not frightened of burning the bridge between myself and others by even slightly suggesting they could have done things differently then you really don’t know me at all. The only thing I know to do is to be true to myself and stand firm on speaking my mind, even when it’s probably wrong, because maybe that will be useful to someone or to myself, as long as I make sure I feel the point is really worth sharing. As mentioned in the video, the only way to reaffirm our reality is to speak our truths and see what bridges it may build, how we can turn something that doesn’t feel right into something ideal as a part of the collective, because to me, there is nothing more beautiful than the reassurance that our reality is shared, and not merely a delusion of our own making.

For me, I now have total peace between myself and the game, and it’s a game I will be playing again in the future, and while I always worry someone might upturn that with ‘B MASK EXPOSED’ in a response video or whatever, I chose to make these thoughts public, and I have to just sit back and live with that consequence.

I guess only one thing’s truly clear.

I bloody love Psychonauts.

—————

So there you have it, a very different set of points for a very different video.

I know I always say this but the support is appreciated, and I really value those who have had to put up with my hiatuses. I really am always working on these and sometimes it just takes way longer than I want, but the good news is that I have a tonne of projects in the pipeline that are much easier to put together. I’ll keep you all posted as to when those are arriving. As mentioned previously the confirmed videos are-

-A video about my past on YouTube

-A discussion of one person’s musical projects

-A surprise video essay

-A video on Jak as written last year

Until next video, gang,

-B