September 21, 2022|

Filed under: Editorial

Center Stage: Hollis’ Hot Streak and the Lady Luctopus Casino (Psychonauts 2)

In “Center Stage,” Wolfman Jew discusses environments and level design across the games industry. They may be single levels, larger sandboxes, or broader settings. They may be as small as a room and as large as a world. Some may not even be good. But they are all interesting.

Hollis’ Classroom starts off like any Psychonauts world. Ten-year-old psychic Razputin Aquato dives into the mind of a woman, Hollis Forsythe. Her subconscious has taken two forms, first a classroom in a geodesic dome and then a hospital, that he explores. The world is bizarre and twisted, but also detailed; Raz’ll jump into a hallway that squishes itself into being an ambulance’s back seat, clamber over giant X-rays of himself, and jump from one errant thought to another. It’s a perfect setting for a 3D platformer, a genre of lands more magical than our own.

Image: Double Fine Productions. Raz blasting from the dome rool into the ambulance hallway from the safety of a mental bubble. The mix of art styles and colors is typical of Psychonauts 2.

As Raz continues through easy combat and optional collectibles, he pieces together the truth. The orderly, no-nonsense attitude Hollis exhibits in the real world is the result of pain in her past. She suffered poor treatment at the hands of a coworker, justifiably lashed out at him, but what she did had repercussions so bad that it completely changed her worldview. It’s a good story, which is important since in Psychonauts 2, each world’s setting is the story.

It’s also a typical story for this atypical series. 2005’s Psychonauts also fashioned worlds from minds, traumas, and psyches. It leveraged game and platformer mechanics to craft an experience like no other at the time (even modern mindscapes like Persona 5 struggle to match its vision). While Raz’s summer camp for psychic kids was a perfectly charming hub, the appeal lay in how he’d delve into extremely cool mental worlds. Psychological unwellnesses could take the form of kaiju movies, stageplays, and sliced-up suburbs. They were why the game became a cult classic—and the main point of criticism towards its story. You were jumping into people’s minds and “fixing“ them, which is a limited and kind of problematic take on mental health.

It wasn’t the main complaint, though; while the story, characters, and setting were all top-tier, the basic gameplay was not. Raz was stiff to move, and the level design made simple jumps perilous. “Game feel” was barely there. There was also some poorly aged edgelord humor—perhaps a consequence of having a lead played by Richard Horowitz, Invader Zim himself—but the biggest issue is that it was janky. The imagination helped it go down, and it got a lot out of being a rare 3D platformer in the mid-Aughts, but it had issues.

Source: Fandom. Psychonauts 1‘s final level twists two traumatized psyches into a dizzying Meat Circus. It’s cool, but playing it is absolute torture.

Psychonauts 2 has these issues on its mind, but its role as a response and successor goes beyond self-correction. It fits a classic mold of video game sequel, where it’s going big as much as forward. It also had the unenviable role of a Kickstarter funded, sixteen year sequel to a cult classic, so these changes have to be for newbies and oldies alike. But while it has a lot of great ideas, it also waits just a bit to show its hand. It lets the first world, a trippy, dentistry-themed spy trap, act as a tutorial so it can set up its response in earnest. The response takes the form of several setpieces that start with the second world: Hollis’ Classroom itself.

See, Hollis isn’t just a doctor or a teacher; she’s Raz’s teacher—and the Lesser Head of the Psychonauts, the organization of psychic spies he’s joined. It’s Hollis’ “Classroom” because it’s a mental study hall for her slate of interns to safely experience “basic braining.” But Raz doesn’t want safety; he already spent a game proving he can be a secret agent (and devotees of the first game wouldn’t want him stuck in a rut). Plus, there’s a crazy conspiracy afoot! A cult is trying to bring a genocidal supervillain back from the dead, someone in the agency is a mole, and there’s a mission underway to infiltrate a casino. A casino! This is primo spy stuff, the kind Raz and the player deserve to experience firsthand.

Source: Double Fine. The intended Hollis’ Classroom.

So, just like in any Psychonauts 1 level, Raz changes his subject’s mind. Thanks to some peer pressure by his fellow interns, the vast majority of the Classroom is spent off-script, as he breaks out and searches for a way to alter Hollis’ thoughts. Using his new Mental Connection power (a sort of Hookshot that lets him cling to floating, disconnected thoughts, some of which can be joined to create a coherent idea), he gets Hollis to reject her cautious mindset in favor of one that’s less risk-averse. And all it takes is for him to simply connect “risk” with “money” in the morgue where Hollis’ worst times happened.

Source: Double Fine. The idea is that you zip to each thought, then zip to another one to connect them (and supersede an older connection). Figuring out which two go together opens the next area.

Short, pleasant, and linear, Hollis’ Classroom spends its time dealing in different kinds of spaces. You start by leaping from thought to thought in a sphere with a bottomless pit, but most of your time is spent exploring the face of the hospital and jumping through odd tunnels. It’s easy, as a classroom should be, but the physically and stylistically different spaces keep the exploration from feeling bland. The new enemy it introduces helps; the Bad Idea throws bombs you can throw back using Raz’s all-purpose telekenesis (or just ignore if you’d prefer to use melee or long-distance shots).

But really, the biggest boon isn’t the environment but the basic movement, which is fantastic. Raz’s jump has a good, hefty weight, and the speed and bounce of the Mental Connection power makes jumping around really satisfying. While the first game had virtually no tactile sensation, this one goes out of its way to provide. It makes it more fun to seek out the game’s large number of optional collectibles (this is a 3D platformer, after all), but it also just makes basic movement compelling whether Raz is jogging, fighting, or riding his extra-fast levitation ball. In this way, it follows and compliments the first world, Loboto’s Labyrinth, though it lacks that world’s gravity and logic-defying rooms.

Source: Double Fine. Now THAT is a Bad Idea.

And it works! Hollis is suddenly way more cool, trusting, and ready to bring a gang of pre-teens on a dangerous spy mission. And it’s here that Hollis’ Classroom is revealed to be not just one level but only the first in a four act arc (and why, despite its importance, it didn’t get on the already stretched title to this article). This attempt to give Raz perspective becomes the story of him doing what he did before, getting himself and others hurt for it, and making things right. It’s also exceptionally cool.

The rest of this sequence is a sting at the Lady Luctopus Casino. The Psychonauts’ mail director has been “de-brained,” he had a key to the penthouse in the casino’s hotel, and the casino just so happens to be where another operative went missing. Raz’s mentors from the first game are on-site and expecting support. The base is a swanky hotel room, one of the only places free from the casino’s anti-psychic cameras (because for all of how it deals with psychological and intergenerational trauma, Psychonauts is exceptionally silly).

Source: Double Fine. That you can’t get to explore all of this crazy place is almost a crime.

But we have a problem. Seems Raz’s attempt to nudge his boss didn’t just cause her to ignore the copious reasons for not bringing ten-year-olds on spy missions; it reignited a tampered-down gambling addiction. Hollis straight-up abandons the ongoing mission (and her agents, one of whom is about to die in an air shaft) to try to gamble enough money to pull the underfunded Psychonauts out of the red. What used to be your catch-all solution—jump into someone’s brain and fix things!—has only made things worse. So it’s time for Raz to set right what he did wrong, sneak up to her by climbing down the casino’s side, and jump back into her mind for the third world, Hollis’ Hot Streak.

Source: Double Fine.

It’s barely any time from his last visit, but Raz is shocked to discover that Hollis’ Classroom has been twisted into something demented, chaotic, and respendent in neon. The geodesic room that housed the classroom is broken. The hallway-ambulance is covered in martini glasses and giant pills. The 2D X-ray section that took you into the hospital shows playing cards. And the hospital is a surgical casino that meshes medical practices with gambling in exceedingly crazy ways. The most “normal” you get is a cubic mini-hub in the morgue. Each side is a mortuary cabinet that goes to a different sub-section, the one that goes into the boss fight is guarded by Hollis, and she only lets you in if you bring her tokens from three parlors: Pharmacy, Maternity, and Cardiology. Together, they’re worth the three “gazillion” dollars you need to access the high rollers suite.

Source: Giphy. The morgue.

Of course, it’s not that simple. The whole joint is rigged. The pharmacy has slot machines and a big ole’ pachinko cabinet, but “pillinko” is even more fixed than regular pachislot; the heart you’re supposed to reach is literally off the board. The Maternity Ward is dominated by a mammoth roulette wheel—whichever prospective parent guesses right gets to take home a baby!—that always lands on double-zero. And in Cardiology, people bet on card suits in a race, but poor Heart can never get out of last place with their broken leg.

The solution is what got you in trouble in the first place: the new Mental Connections move. Each ward’s puzzle involves getting the NPCs to physically express Hollis’ individual thoughts, stitching those together, and opening portals to platforming sections once you find the two thoughts that give her a healthier perspective. The move is satisfying to use, it gives a big boost to the platforming, and it’s neat having a mechanic like it be instrumental to the puzzles. It’s even fun to give the wrong answer, since Hollis will come up with a wonderfully terrible idea out of any two combined thoughts (“Death” and “Winning” gets her to shout “good luck collecting your debts after I’m dead, losers!”).

Source: PureXbox. In the Pharmacy Ward, helping Hollis’ mind fixes the giant pachinko machine.

This structure of side areas, puzzles, and tokens is cool, but it’s also in keeping with Psychonauts’ pedigree. It’s the flagship of Double Fine Productions (Psychonauts 1 was their first game, Psychonauts 2 their most successful), a studio founded by adventure game alumni. And adventure game logic dictates the structure of these games. Most worlds divide themselves into smaller segments, build paths based on collecting keys for doors, and demand sizable backtracking. Bob’s Bottles is a Wind Waker-y section that sends you on platforming voyages. PSI King’s Sensorium, probably the best level by consensus, tasks you with reforming a band one member and sub-area at a time. It’s a stock structure, but it works—after all, sub-areas and collecting crap fit a 3D platformer just as well as an adventure game.

This was the standard in Psychonauts 1 as well, but it’s stronger here. The biggest reason is that the game is just better; its mechanics and movement far outpace its predecessor (and since the platforming affects everything from the combat to the puzzles, it gives those a boost, too). But it also gets a lot out of that sixteen year gap. It looks gorgeous, with excellent lighting perfect for a surreal adventure and retro gaming house. The greater technology also allows each world to do more trippy things. Hollis’ Hot Streak makes great use of that trope of a portal that links two totally disconnected areas, as well as plenty of other visual and mechanical tricks.

The final battle against the Lady Luctopus, the avatar of Hollis’ addiction, is fun, too—probably the best boss fight of the series. It combines two powers in a satisfying loop; you use Mental Connections to zip around to the weak point, like the dual Clawshots of Twilight Princess, after you telekinetically toss bombs to knock out her tentacles and rescue your kidnapped classmates. The gambling theme even comes up mechanically, since the stage’s giant chip stacks collapse midway through (thus providing shelter over an arena-wide electrical attack).

Source: Fanbyte. The game is really good at tossing out wild and frenetic ideas, like a giant, bomb-spewing octopus gambler.

After Raz cashes in the Lady Luctopus’ chips, he gets a well-deserved talking to from Hollis about how Psychonauts don’t “fix” people or mental illnesses, just provide support. It’s a response to criticisms of the first game (from journalists and, most likely, the developers themselves), but it’s also good character work. It sets up the main throughline of the plot, where Raz has to clean up the overreach of his predecessors by helping them through their own trauma. Many of the worlds in Psychonauts 1 came from the minds of bystanders in a caricatured mental asylum, while these come from people you actually know. These changes are improvements and natural story evolutions; they’re just seeded in a way that obscures how much they’re doing.

But for now, it leads to a nice denouement of Raz, now with the codename “Eggbeater,” getting to be the one to sneak to the penthouse. You avoid security lights in an easy stealth segment, grind across railings, and get aid from the interns in the mission’s final act. The aid comes up in exceptionally cool overlays of the characters while you’re in full control of Raz, a feature that blew my mind when I saw it. Plenty of modern games have cut-ins like this, like the close ups of a fighter’s eyes in a Smash Bros. Final Smash, but this is a quick cutscene playing out during gameplay.

Source: YouTube. See? It’s totally cool!

The style hews close to Sixties spy movies, whose posters liked to position smaller images in groups (the header image Voyager made follows this as a direct homage to The Prisoner and From Russia with Love). That fits, as the casino mission is Raz’s debut as a real secret agent. It goes about it in an offbeat way, but Psychonauts is very much a retro spy story, with its own clandestine agency and exciting locales. Each operative homages different spy tropes; their adventures were recorded in the vintage comics that inspired our hero. The casino is Raz’s first significant time in the field, give or take the obscure (and unimportant) VR side game Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin. And it’s a necessary step for him and the series.

The casino motif, long a standard of pulpy spy and “men’s adventure” fiction, adds to this. It’s exciting and fun seeing all the ways Hollis’ Hot Streak meshes the medical and gambling themes together. Cardiology has an old timey operating theater reimagined as stands for the races. Every employee is an anthropomorphized piece of medical equipment, like a talking needle or pill bottle, and they and their patients are hilariously terrible. Outside of the mental world, the actual casino has this vintage chic. And the music! The jazzy, big band songs that play throughout the casino heist are just perfect. Most comedy and retro games have this balancing act between pastiche and sincerity, and this does well by both sides.

Source: Double Fine. Hollis’ Hot Streak is a great contributor in the field of “gambling”-themed platformer levels.

Psychonauts 2 came into being with a lot of goals. It had to be a sequel to a game whose ending begged for a sequel (a mainline one, not a VR side project that existed mostly for the mainline one). It had to engage with its premise in a more serious way, and maybe shed some of its tendencies. It had to make its hero grow. It had to move on from the summer camp and actually be the spy adventure it was always going to be. Most of all, it needed to simply be a stronger game than its brilliant but painfully mixed predecessor.

Every world in Psychonauts 2 engages with all of these concerns in different ways. They do much better with the base gameplay. They have a more thoughtful, if equally empathetic, take on the human psyche. Certainly the mental worlds are more demented thanks to the technological jump. But Hollis’ mind, and the casino adventure around which it revolves, is the thesis about where the game is going. You have the self-criticism, the better puzzles, the great platforming, and the secret agent style all in one. Each bit of metatext works in tandem, where you have better movement options from abilities based on concepts that tie into character growth. It’s dealing a perfect hand while keeping you from being too aware of its play. After all, that kind of deftness is important for a counselor, a spy, or a developer.