Third Playthrough–1 Hour

“Psychonauts is not worth my effort…Psychonauts is not worth my time…Psychonauts is not fun.”

In other words…

The way that different mediums deal with the threshold of an audience’s level of interest is, in itself, an interesting thing. Mostly, they have to deal with how a person’s going to experience those few initial moments of a product, and then make sure that they stay put in order to experience the whole thing instead of turning around and giving up. It’s why all the best moments in movies usually wind up in their trailers, since once your curiosity’s been beguiled enough to pay for a ticket, their job is pretty much done. It’s why the first five minutes of a television show are all so open ended, since they’ve got to meet their goal of making sure your attention span won’t fizzle out before the commercial break. Heck, it’s even why the first chapter of a novel aims to hook you more than the rest, seeing as you’ll mostly be deciding whether or not to buy it based on the handful of pages you’re able to read while browsing in the bookstore.

The point is, with all those mediums you’re able to effectively test the product before you hand over your money– you try before you buy. Games used to have that on their side, at least in the era of arcades and shareware proliferation. Paying a quarter for a round of Street Fighter II or snagging the first level or two of Doom from a friend might’ve been what helped you decide to go pay full price for the SNES port or the full PC experience. The closest thing we’ve got right now is the rental market, which despite being a spending decision of its own winds up being fairly proportionate in terms of the distribution between the full price of the game, the price for the weekend and the amount of territory you’re likely to cover in those two or three days. Because of that, ever since the advent of Blockbuster or so, bigger games have tended to structure themselves with as much upfront to convince the player that it’d be a wise decision to buy it in a store (or at least keep renting until you’ve beaten it, which is probably what the rental places would be hoping, themselves).

Usually, it means that the first three levels or so would be designed as both easy enough for rookies to grow accustomed to the difficulties, yet also challenging enough for veterans to feel its obstacles weren’t merely pushovers. Stories would be written with enough big bangs and inciting incidents to get the story rolling right out of the gate, while also composing themselves full of enough twists, turns and questions to make sure that players wouldn’t feel they could see exactly where the narrative was going ahead of time. Most importantly, the game’s mechanics were grounded enough to make sure that players were introduced to as much of their skillset as soon as possible, teaching them how to use their moves, weapons and items in the early stages so they’d feel as though bigger and better opportunities to exploit those abilities would arrive in later ones.

The best games I’ve played have all had this in mind. Each of the first stages in any given Mega Man is easy enough to pursue in whatever order you prefer, but the bosses waiting each one’s end are all challenging enough to demand the proper order for Rock-Paper-Scissor strategy to unleash the game’s true potential. Ever since A Link to the Past, almost every Legend of Zelda title has been structured so that the first three dungeons can be cleared in about two days of dedicated playing, only to introduce the player to more challenging adventures afterwards. Possibly the most clever usage of this structure that I’ve encountered was in Metal Gear Solid 2, thanks to its switch of playable characters– rent the game, and you probably thought the whole game was about Snake, but only after buying it would you realize the focus was on Raiden, instead.

It’s nothing new, of course. The early levels of games are for largely designed to be as inclusive as possible, so new players don’t get turned off– we’ve always known that. But it’s about more than just mere difficulty. You’ve got to make sure that the first three hours, the first three missions, the first three playthroughs are as fun as possible in order to convince the player that the rest of the game will be fun, as well. However, after making it up to the first three hours, missions and playthroughs of the subject of my most recent Dispatches, my dear pleasant dreamers, I’m afraid that I can only say this about a game which has apparently garnered a far more vocal contingency of support than I’d initially estimated:

Psychonauts is not worth my effort, neither to play or write about. Psychonauts is not worth my time. Psychonauts isn’t even worth my money. Why, do you ask? Because, quite simply, Psychonauts is not fun. At least not for me, anyway.

Now I know, of course, that you’re not really supposed to do this. In a perfect world I ought to have much more patience for a work which has been loudly proclaimed as misunderstood, and I appreciate that. I’ve got favorite films, books and games of my own for which I’ll endlessly forgive a thousand flagrant faults in order to tout the highest peaks of their most deserving qualities. I don’t care how wooden the dialogue and acting are in the Star Wars prequels– I love them anyway. I don’t care how aimless and pretentious the piling conveniences and coincidences of plot contrivances in ongoing serials like 24 and Lost can be when the midsections of their seasons sag– I love them anyway. I don’t even care how repetitive and monotonous the novels of a writer like Don DeLillo can be, harping on the same observations over and over again in the same didactic minimalism– I love them anyway.

It’s no different in my preferred games. I’ll excuse all the bloated, self-indulgent exposition from Kojima in return for the kernels of invention he strings along the way. I’ll sit by and by through the slowest paces and emptiest stretches in one of Ueda’s landscapes for the flashing panic that occurs when vivid, animated life arises to rear its ugly head. Heck, I’ll even put up with Jaffe’s bullshit for the bold streaks of naked exhilaration his tapestries afford.

Therefore, I can understand how there are plenty of people out there (you know who you are) who want to look past the clumsy, mollycoddling platforming and the absent, negligent procedural direction at the heart of Shafer’s errant rogue of a latter day action-adventure title, hoping to convince the rest of us of its promised value by pointing out its wit, candor and imagination, but you know what? I ain’t buyin’ it. No siree Bob. A game with cool characters, writing and art design cannot and will not succeed on its own as a piece of compelling interactive narrative (which is not the same thing as interactive fiction– which, by the way, really ought to be called “Interactive Prose,” seeing how the former term pretty much covers every act of gaming that doesn’t follow suit with the likes of Madden ’08, et cetera) without first and foremost establishing its credentials on the basis of casual engagement, putting its audience squarely in a place where the rules are understood, the goals are clear and the terrain in the way demands more effort than mere concentration. True, perhaps there’s more engaging stuff waiting for the more diligent amongst you pleasant dreamers, but by the time my will ran out on my own, I didn’t once feel enclosed within the magic circle, or anywhere near any piece of paranormally suggestive geometry. Apart from its aesthetic qualities, this game really had no deeper gameplay virtues to attract me into any more than these three, belabored playthroughs, so the argument that its characters and storyline makes up for all its mechanical flaws cannot convince me to give it another try, no matter how entertaining those surface values may be.

But while we’re on the subject matter, you know what? I don’t even like the fucking surface values– so there! I don’t find these characters engaging– they’re just annoying! I don’t find the writing funny– it’s just stupid! I don’t find the artwork to be original– it’s just fucking ugly! Worse than that, it all too often gets in the way of the flow of the game by slowing down frame rates and obscuring the actual objects of onscreen concentration with its cluttered cavalcade of kaleidoscopic camera angles. On the subject of dialogue, it might’ve make for interesting fare when offered in comic strips of the mid-90’s, where you were most likely to find this same kind of watered-down, self-consciously “quirky” and “ironic” observational adventurism in significantly smaller dosages, but here it just comes off as naive, strained and prodding to the point of migraine inducing. It doesn’t help that the voice-work seems to be done by actors going out of their way to be over-the-top irritating, which brings us to the point of the characters themselves, who alternately register with the same amount of gleeful, spiteful rancor as a three-year old inflicted with a glucose addiction and other times as animated and livening as a herseful of mannequins. Being able to punch an NPC and hear whatever witty one-liners they have to say isn’t enough to make a character stand on their own in a game– after all, shouldn’t some of them, even this early on, do something other than talk if you hit them? Shouldn’t they be hitting back?

It boggles my mind that it came to this. Really. Because, you’d think that designers, even those who are new to console gaming like Schafer (I’m not even going to bother to check which way is how you’re supposed to spell his name) would have pretty much figured out how to craft some solid platforming by now. I’m not saying anyone can do it, but that anyone in his position really has no excuse to fall as far from the mark as he has. After all, everyone’s played Super Mario 64 by now, and we’re all smart enough to know how it works and how one can put together another version of it without screwing up the basics of what it gets right. What set Miyamoto’s 3D adventure apart from its 2D predecessors is in the importance of exploration, rather than collection. In the side-scrolling NES and SNES games, pretty much every interactive asset was there for you to see, and with the exception of really well-hidden secrets buried deep within the titles series’ essential linear cores, there wasn’t that much for anyone to go out of their way looking for, hoping to unlock a skeletons key for all-purpose problems.

Not so in SM64–there, making progress dictated finding stars, and finding stars dictated searching through every nook and cranny a world afforded, weaving in and out of all the game’s dangers naturally in order to locate resources and journey further to find more environments, and more locations to search through. You spend all your time exploring, as opposed to the side-scrolling games where you spent all your time collecting as many items as possible. Think about how SM64 drastically limited the amount of items to be out on the look for– coins were all there, certainly, but in a far shorter supply than in previous titles. The most important of them were the red coins, an inheritance from Yoshi’s Island, which were put here chiefly as another means of finding a star. Because of that, the game actually more closely resembled a Zelda game in its sense of motivation than a Mario game– one is about being in an expansive world, while the other was almost solely about linear progression.

The theme of exploration works in expansive territory, and collection in linear worlds, and when the two are kept separate and clearly defined, everything’s fine. The problem with Psychonauts is that it doesn’t keep those two entities separate and clearly defined– the whole thing’s messed up as a muddy mixture that clouds everything up. Now, Schafer was clear headed enough to realize two of the things Miyamoto didn’t quite see in Super Mario 64–first, that inhabiting a three dimensional world becomes most invigorating once broken free from the physical restrictions of ordinary physical space (and 2D platformers) in order to roam in larger lands less bound by gravity and more by imagination. That is to say, in 3D the world can be round as a globe instead of flat as a map, and it’s something he recognized in level design like the Sasha Nein cube world. The other, possibly more important realization was to create a more encompassing bridge between the Mario and Zelda sensibilities– Psychonauts uses the jumpy mechanics of Super Mario 64 within a structure which owes a great deal to Zelda‘s series of overworlds, dungeons and chainquests. It’s a keen observation, and one which could’ve proved genuinely insightful if it had been closer to the foreground as the game’s focus, rather than something which feels altogether peripheral to its aesthetic values. Instead, the game winds up being standing irrevocably cluttered, not only because of this contrasting conflict between the surface and the gameplay, but also thanks to something altogether mechanical:

Collection.

Psychonauts is a blend of Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda, both of which stress exploration as the primary means of progress. While taking steps forward in so many ways, Shaffer actually managed to fall so many paces back by injecting so many meaningless articles to collect in the game. Figments, arrowheads, swirly card things I can’t even remember the name of anymore– so much stuff is necessary to collect in droves that unless you’re willing to go get it all, you’re not going to move forward at all. The means of getting these articles isn’t even challenging enough to stand on its own as a kind of exploration, but instead just winds up as meandering, peddling busywork. It’s something that worked for 2D games, but it’s really pretty much lost its effectiveness in the 3D generations, at least in a game as otherwise progressive as this.

Back on the NES, that method of collection is what made Mario one of the most tool-like of all video game characters, a net for catching so many golden butterflies. Today, on systems like the Gamecube and the Wii, he’s evolved into something else, more abstract and obscure, yet mixed with such a whimsical fluidity that comparisons to mere corporeal instruments don’t quite capture the elusiveness with which his plumber’s gait can dance across the newly dew-tipped mushroom-tops. The difference is that newfound aim, that sense of purpose and direction which drives the player in far more meaningful ways than the ticking of a clock, the quickening of a familiar tune or the ever-present point-of-no-return on the left-hand side of the screen. With stars, suns and planetoids to find amongst the misty detritus of a candy-colored landscape, Mario becomes not merely the object of our point-of-view, but an extension of our vision itself, and every time he leaps in bounds across the blinking hills it’s though we make eye-contact with those pixelated pupils ourselves. Playing with Mario today is playing with the bouncing ball across the screen of a Karaoke machine, beckoning us to sing along to the tune of a familiar song. Mario before was mute and pantomime, whereas Mario today is full of voice. That sense of exploration is what makes his hills alive with the sound of music, finally free to rebound upon themselves in echoes rich with pointless, carefree acrobatic patterns. It’s why Super Mario Sunshine, for all its halting faults, still feels like a breath of fresh air compared to the compressed, claustrophobic breaths of Psychonauts, because where the former is free of all previous responsibilities, tending only the barest of formalities to service the best and brightest of its function, the latter stands as almost nothing but obligations.

A few months back, I talked about the toll-booth quality of games. That’s part of what kills Psychonauts, especially since so many other games before it have already figured out the art of avoiding traffic congestion.

The rest is pure procedural frustration. In Sasha Nein’s level, I learned to shoot at things so I could return to Raz’s mind and shoot a great big monster that stood in the way before. It’s a familiar gambit, as old as Metroid and its weapon-keys and boss-locks. When I returned to the monster in Raz’s mind, however, I absent-mindedly punched it instead of opting to shoot, and it was defeated anyway. Never mind the fact that a supposedly important figure of the game’s internal architecture was beaten with merely one blow– I’m still trying to remember if I merely imagined the fact that I beat a boss without the ability I’d previously worked so hard to get. If I did, it’s sloppy design. If I didn’t, then this game is obviously having a much broader effect on my attention than I thought. I’ll admit that this game has been having a pretty bad effect on my level of effort in gaming throughout– thanks to it I’m getting soft and lazier than even my own everyday depression and sloth can be brought to blame for. This playthrough, rambling through the third teacher’s mind, the swinging 60’s woman, I could barely muster up the interest to learn the new ability of levitation I was supposedly being taught. All throughout, I couldn’t believe how Schafer was making such stuff I’d played before in games with such ease feel newly terse, unfriendly and next-to-impossible. For anyone to manage screwing up gaming cliches like the fireball, the float or the double-jump is just plain discouraging.

Ultimately, that’s the biggest feeling I’m walking away from this game with. The small amount of time I’ve spent with this title has given me serious doubts to the future of gaming. I’m only glad to be able to say that the general gaming population largely ignored it, and therefore it isn’t likely to have that much of an impact on game design’s destiny, even as a cult classic. If you want a gauge to see how badly this game has effected my appreciation of the medium, just look at the date of this post’s publication and look back to the date of my last piece– it wasn’t so long ago that Charles was asking me to cut down on my volume of contribution here, anxious to make sure I tried to keep my writing weekly at the most to make sure I didn’t drown out any other voices here. Now, it’s barely been less than a month since the last time I’d summoned the will to return to you, my pleasant dreamers. Between these playthroughs I’ve had to rehabilitate my gaming acumen by crunching my way through an MSX emulation of the original Metal Gear duet on my laptop, endless rounds of Dungeon Maker on my friendly neighborhood PSP and long, masturbatory bouts of schizophrenic Wii Sports tennis, playing both sides against the other like so many Palpatines, Big Bosses and Bobby Fischerses. I can’t say that Psychonauts has entirely shaken my faith in games per se, but that it’s almost certainly destroyed my belief that you can write about any given game on a playthrough-by-playthrough basis and make the experience as solid for the reader as it was for the player. After all, it depends upon the quality of the game itself– I can write Dispatches for God of War, Link’s Awakening or even Snatcher, because despite their shortcomings they’re all genuinely good games (including Snatcher, which technically doesn’t even count as an actual game, with all due respect).

Writing Disptaches for Psychonauts, however, is next to impossible. It’s not just the fact that I have no motivation whatsoever to keep on playing, much less writing, but that if I were to keep on writing, it’d stink. You only get out of playthrough-by-playthrough documentation what you put into it, and in this case, those both happen to be bullshit.

Rest assured, however, that I’m not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater, no matter how much this particular game is beginning to resemble the Lindbergh brat to me at the moment. You won’t soon find my copy of Psychonauts floating about the bargain bin at your local video game store any time soon (I bought it used already, so I’d probably only get five bucks for it, anyway) which means that on some glorious, bright day I’ll plop it back into my PS2 and finally discover, with equal parts joy and regret, all the wonder and beauty of the game you fanboys have been whining about– I won’t say it’ll never happen. Tomorrow I may say that 2 plus 2 equals 5 as well as 4, and that Oceania is at war with Eurasia, not Eastasia, and always has been. I may proclaim my love for Big Brother instead of Big Boss, and rise up in the Two-Minutes Hate against an Emmanuel Goldstein more and more looks suspiciously like a certain duckbilled amphibian with a voice like a cartoon Forest Gump that hails from that planet where they shot the lake scenes from Casino Royale. I might even vote Republican in the next election– anything’s possible.

But I will say this: no matter how much I turn out to play or enjoy Psychonauts in the future, I won’t write about it again. As surely as there will always be an England, it will be a game as dead to me upon this mighty keyboard of mine as Ulysses S. Grant is within his tomb which overlooks the happy waters of the Hudson. Certain games, no matter how promising, can’t sustain that much conversation. Shafer’s misbegotten fiasco represents a discovery of something important, but an accidental one at best. It’s the Slinky, Silly Putty or Columbus discovering America on the way to a photo-op at the Taj Mahal. Psychonauts stumbled upon the Rubik’s Cube design, brought Escher’s wild, mathematic glee into crystalized gameplay, but didn’t know what the heck to do with it. It’s a clarion call to bigger and better things, a flag planted on the soil of a pagan nation ripe for colonial exploitation and defilement, a bargain for the price of a handful of Mardis Gras necklaces. Like GTA and everything Sim, it boasts the trumpet note of explorers, hoping for pilgrims to come and tame the wilderness they’ve put down in their newly updated maps. Until someone comes to plumb these pipe-dreams and explore the final frontier of this galactic undiscovered country, perhaps this game is best left as a place where no man has gone before.

Someone once asked me why I take games so seriously, and not just sit down and have fun. Well, I do have fun with my games– it’s just that I have to be careful how I write about them. Being professional, I only want a bias to come out when it’s going to help a title make it bigger, where it belongs. Right now, I find myself consumed with such bitter frustration for this game I’m rather flabergasted that I’ve allowed myself to write for so long about a game I’ve enjoyed so very little, if indeed at all.

In the end, if you need to know any more about how I feel about Psychonauts, go ask Oren what he thinks of MGS, and simply cut and paste the titles. Everyone has something they don’t like. Psychonauts is mine.

For now, I’m going to need to recoil from this latest excursion and find a better game to spend my time with. I won’t mail you no letters, no, before I’ve gotten my hands on a more solid title, something I can really sit down with and dedicate myself to with all the pomp and circumstance a god of old might’ve demanded in the ears of all the oracles. Until then, pleasant dreamers, look out at midnight for all the agents…