An interesting thing about Oleander's Basic Braining, is that it's not even a true representation of his mind, it's a construct he built in his mind for the purpose of training Psi Cadets, completely shut off from the rest of his mind. Now, we never get to see what his mind is actually like beyond that construct, but we do get a good idea with the Meat Circus due to it being an amalgamation of Oleander & Razputin's minds This is actually why there are no Censors there, because Oleander is specifically trying to keep his Censors out of this construct so they don't interfere with the campers' training
That makes a lot of sense. It seems like Sasha is also capable of making his Censors appear in his mind when he wants them to. Maybe trained minds just have better control over their Censors. I remember Forsythe in Psychonauts 2 even directed a Censor to kick Raz out of the High Rollers Lounge
@@GhostSurging Yeah, though it's clearly not perfect as things like the rabbits, the meat flowers & the meat-related figments, as well as that second memory vault have managed to slip into the construct
It's dark, yeah, but imagine being Raz in all of this. This is a child who gets firsthand experience, hear, and see the darkest recesses, guilt ridden, depressing imagery, and traumas of the mind when he isn't supposed to in the first place. I know he says it'll sink in when he grows up, but dang, that's a strong-willed kid.
Honestly you should do Psychonauts 2. Considering how good your takes here are, I would love to hear what you can say about the sequel. Might get it a few more fans that way.
I just would like to say thank you for making this video. I was REALLY into Psychonauts when it first came out and played the shit out of it as a kid, but I never found out about the social media like website that the campers used, oh how I would have LOVED to read through all that when I was playing the game. and I thought I knew everything about the game but never once stumbled upon the secret room with the "demons". loved the way you set up the video great work man.
55:31 Its not just easy to miss, its straight up impossible to see (within normal gameplay) as you only receive the confusion grenade after you enter the asylum, which means you can no longer talk to boyd.
Psychonauts was such an absolute gem of a game, you can tell everyone working on it put their heart and soul into it. It's also one of the best examples of something being dark but not edgy. They could have easily filled it with excessive gore or cursing but they actually went with the subtlety route, which makes everything more effective.
lmao I once told ppl about the time my dad ate my pet rabbit (we lived on a farm it maybe was never a pet and I just assumed so bc it was cute) and some dude was like "Are you a Psychonauts villain" and now I get it XD;;
It’s maddening that this game flopped very hard when it released despite the overwhelming praise and acclaim it received. So much so, Tim Schaffer and some Investors had to create A WHOLE CROWDFUNDING PLATFORM just to get people to fund the development of Psychonauts 2! I still own the copy of Tips & Tricks with the walkthrough (spoiler-free) and I love re-reading it every so often to compare and contrast the mental picture I had of it just reading that walkthrough versus the incredibly imaginative actual game! The Milkman Conspiracy is still one of the best levels I’ve ever seen in a video game and just explaining it doesn’t do it justice. Thanks for this video!
funfact the nightmares (demons) were going to have a much bigger role originally, where they would have broken out and would have kidnaped and harmed the children of whispering oaks, this was scraped for the story we love and know
I somewhat dislike the "kaijufication" effect in Psychonauts since i could never figure out where that could work as a psychic power then this vid reminded me of 1 thing, the cheer squad, one of them "Spirit" as a psychic ability, which then makes me think, maybe that's what that is "Spirit" as a psychonaut ability, is just the power of boosting another person's psyche. Just that 1 last push needed to subdue trauma and mental exhaustion, that could be what the Kaiju fights really are just Raz getting a LITERAL Ego boost, and that becoming imperative to defeat the big trauma bosses
Dogens problems with exploding animals run in the family, compton in psychonauts 2 accidentally detonated an entire pound of captured dogs when attempting to free them, Sam doesn’t seem to have the same issue which may be because of her more “assertive” attitude to animals
This level of quality is CRIMINALLY undersubscribed and underpromoted. Please make a video on the sequel, and keep on making this series because I'm addicted
Funny thing about the Milla's Children and Nightmare room I once encountered a glitch on the Xbox version of the game where ALL of the memory slides I unlocked up to that point had some of their slides replaced with some of Milla's Children slides whenever I was in her mental world. I thought it was a feature at first but I've never seen it happen again in any other version. Crazy Stuff
The oleander backstory is actually very similair to a dutch christmas song where a little kid gets sad and angry because his pet rabbit is missing and in the end it turns out that the father killed it for the christmas diner. Also a joke at the end of the song implies that the kid killed his father as revenge.
dozing off sometime in the "meet the campers" section and waking up to Milla's secret room was certainly a whole experience. Your vocal delivery is very relaxing... Milla's demons, apparently, are not.
On the topic of the psychic interference, that's being broadcast by Oleander over the speakers as he sits in front of the radio in a trance. Every time you hear him muttering, that's the interference. I'd also love to see a video on Psychonauts 2, I've just found and subbed to you for this one.
I got about a third of the way through the video and felt inspired to play through the game again. Gonna let the rest of the runtime run and come back to this when I finish my playthrough. Thank you for your hard work
I did my own essay on video game psychology, and one observation I made on Psychonauts was the level progression into darker territory. The first three levels are the teachers with "stable" mental worlds, then two worlds that were influenced by outside forces (Loboto and Oleander), and finally the three patient worlds that are ravished by mental illness. Only now after watching your video, do I notice that of course Oleander is at both ends of that progression.
29:48 So when I first played this game it was on an Apple laptop and the game had some old glitches.. one of which was the Nightmares glitching out and skipping/looping around. It was SUPER unsettling and while I knew it was a glitch the fact that it happened then of all times was incredibly disturbing
I would have to guess the reason why the aluminum foil hat doesn't actually work because Dogen Bull Psychic powers are probably on a frequency that passes right through it. It's the reason why aluminum is used for electronic devices that have wifi because the Wi-fi frequency can pass right through it.
About those faces seen in the clouds at Thorny Towers, we know that wasn't just a random thing that the devs put in to add to the atmosphere, that was put there on purpose. I'd be curious to hear what your theories on it might be. My theory however is that Raz is seeing those as a result of his psychic powers interacting with the minds of the people at the Asylum, like one of the Asylum residents is hallucinating those faces in the clouds and Raz is telepathically picking up on it. And I think that hallucination is coming from Loboto cause in Psychonauts 2, you can see those exact same faces in the background of the Asylum area in Loboto's Labyrinth
I’m so down for a video on psychonauts 2, I always thought it was more sanitized and flashy rather than gritty and peculiar like the first, (not that that’s a bad thing though, both games are absolutely fantastic)
I was quite young when I first played this and remember being really scared of Linda and had a nightmare with her in it. Of course now I'm fine and wish the best for her.
I wasn't sure if it was pepper since it appears as a green sparkly color. That made me think it was some kind of special substance. If it is just pepper though, that's really funny
@@GhostSurging Psychonauts 2 also features some brain sneezing, and one of the characters refers to it as "super sneezing powder" at one point, so it's not pepper according to the series' "Deep Lore". ...Not that it really was that deep to begin with. It's basically pepper and that's why it's funny.
I am willing to defend The Meat Circus feeling like an awful level because it's meant to put you in the same mental place as Razputin. Unending stress, repugnant visuals, painful obstacles you're force to revisit over and over with each failure and always feeling like you're on the edge of having a mental breakdown as you struggle to make it out of here alive. It's meant to be horrible and even *unfun* from the main character's perspective. Whether it does too good of a job at that, I will leave up to opinion.
It took me watching this video to realize it. There isn’t a single time Raz goes into the mind of another child. Part of me wonders if it’s because they’re not mentally developed enough to have entire worlds in there. Raz himself only has his old family cart in a black void. Even the meat circus is just the result of his mind merging with an adult’s.
This got me curious so I booted up the game to try using the Psycho Portal on the other campers. If you try, this big text box shows up on screen. It says: "In accordance with Section 3, Paragraph 1 of the 'Young Minds Protection Act' any device created for the purpose of invasive psychic procedure must have built-in safeguards which make its use upon anyone under the age of eighteen (18) impossible." Then the camper you tried to use it on will look at Raz and shake their head. It's another cool and obscure detail!
@ that’s a really nice touch. Most of the Psychonauts can seem pretty callous towards the safety of children, given pretty much everything that happens in the first game, but it’s nice that in the lore, those kinds of protections are there to avoid exploitation by adult psychics. Even if there was no safeguard against giant lungfishes, psychic wildlife, and feral dentists. But hey, you can’t always prepare for everything.
Man i love these videos but if I can make a suggestion? I know YT doesn't like mentions of self harm or unaliving but it's super jarring and kinda confusing when the audio just goes completely silent when you mention those topics. I've seen other channels reverse their audio for those subjects as well as others who just make it gargled speech. Personally, on my content I just talk about it when it comes up because I think being able to talk freely about a serious subject like that is far more important than potential monetization... That's just me tho. Great video as always dude! This is becoming one of my favorite series to listen to
You're right, I'll try better to openly discuss these topics in future videos. I just wasn't sure how to go about discussing these topics, so I just mimicked what I saw other channels doing. I typically saw people muting the audio entirely, but gargling the audio or reversing are pretty good ideas. Thank you for the suggestion!
if u want to use words like hanging and suicide, either say them or dont. dont use this half hearted attempt of censorhsip by leaving gaps. if youre in it for the money thats fine. but at least give it the tiniest bit of effort. this has to be the laziest and least caring way of doing it...
An interesting thing about Oleander's Basic Braining, is that it's not even a true representation of his mind, it's a construct he built in his mind for the purpose of training Psi Cadets, completely shut off from the rest of his mind. Now, we never get to see what his mind is actually like beyond that construct, but we do get a good idea with the Meat Circus due to it being an amalgamation of Oleander & Razputin's minds
This is actually why there are no Censors there, because Oleander is specifically trying to keep his Censors out of this construct so they don't interfere with the campers' training
That makes a lot of sense. It seems like Sasha is also capable of making his Censors appear in his mind when he wants them to. Maybe trained minds just have better control over their Censors. I remember Forsythe in Psychonauts 2 even directed a Censor to kick Raz out of the High Rollers Lounge
@@GhostSurging Yeah, though it's clearly not perfect as things like the rabbits, the meat flowers & the meat-related figments, as well as that second memory vault have managed to slip into the construct
@@GhostSurging Taking control of censors is easy, you just stand firm and yell "You are my own creation, I command you to stop".
It's dark, yeah, but imagine being Raz in all of this. This is a child who gets firsthand experience, hear, and see the darkest recesses, guilt ridden, depressing imagery, and traumas of the mind when he isn't supposed to in the first place. I know he says it'll sink in when he grows up, but dang, that's a strong-willed kid.
Raz is better than me. I would have popped those smelling salts the second I saw Elton explode in Basic Braining
Honestly you should do Psychonauts 2. Considering how good your takes here are, I would love to hear what you can say about the sequel.
Might get it a few more fans that way.
Agrees
I just would like to say thank you for making this video.
I was REALLY into Psychonauts when it first came out and played the shit out of it as a kid, but I never found out about the social media like website that the campers used, oh how I would have LOVED to read through all that when I was playing the game. and I thought I knew everything about the game but never once stumbled upon the secret room with the "demons".
loved the way you set up the video great work man.
55:31 Its not just easy to miss, its straight up impossible to see (within normal gameplay) as you only receive the confusion grenade after you enter the asylum, which means you can no longer talk to boyd.
Psychonauts was such an absolute gem of a game, you can tell everyone working on it put their heart and soul into it. It's also one of the best examples of something being dark but not edgy. They could have easily filled it with excessive gore or cursing but they actually went with the subtlety route, which makes everything more effective.
lmao I once told ppl about the time my dad ate my pet rabbit (we lived on a farm it maybe was never a pet and I just assumed so bc it was cute) and some dude was like "Are you a Psychonauts villain" and now I get it XD;;
Damn, sorry to hear it, but maybe just keep your distance from any psychic kids or evil dentists, just to be safe.
@@logicaloverdrive8197 Eh, the worst part is that he beer-braised Mr. Fudgey. I wish my 'pet' had at least tasted good. XD;;
It’s maddening that this game flopped very hard when it released despite the overwhelming praise and acclaim it received. So much so, Tim Schaffer and some Investors had to create A WHOLE CROWDFUNDING PLATFORM just to get people to fund the development of Psychonauts 2!
I still own the copy of Tips & Tricks with the walkthrough (spoiler-free) and I love re-reading it every so often to compare and contrast the mental picture I had of it just reading that walkthrough versus the incredibly imaginative actual game! The Milkman Conspiracy is still one of the best levels I’ve ever seen in a video game and just explaining it doesn’t do it justice.
Thanks for this video!
funfact the nightmares (demons) were going to have a much bigger role originally, where they would have broken out and would have kidnaped and harmed the children of whispering oaks, this was scraped for the story we love and know
sounds interesting though, wouldn't mind playing that.
I somewhat dislike the "kaijufication" effect in Psychonauts
since i could never figure out where that could work as a psychic power
then this vid reminded me of 1 thing, the cheer squad, one of them "Spirit" as a psychic ability, which then makes me think, maybe that's what that is
"Spirit" as a psychonaut ability, is just the power of boosting another person's psyche. Just that 1 last push needed to subdue trauma and mental exhaustion, that could be what the Kaiju fights really are
just Raz getting a LITERAL Ego boost, and that becoming imperative to defeat the big trauma bosses
Dogens problems with exploding animals run in the family, compton in psychonauts 2 accidentally detonated an entire pound of captured dogs when attempting to free them, Sam doesn’t seem to have the same issue which may be because of her more “assertive” attitude to animals
This level of quality is CRIMINALLY undersubscribed and underpromoted. Please make a video on the sequel, and keep on making this series because I'm addicted
It took me till now to get the pun behind "The Log"
The campster site is such a cool and in depth look into all the characters, its crazy how much they put into it
Funny thing about the Milla's Children and Nightmare room I once encountered a glitch on the Xbox version of the game where ALL of the memory slides I unlocked up to that point had some of their slides replaced with some of Milla's Children slides whenever I was in her mental world. I thought it was a feature at first but I've never seen it happen again in any other version. Crazy Stuff
The oleander backstory is actually very similair to a dutch christmas song where a little kid gets sad and angry because his pet rabbit is missing and in the end it turns out that the father killed it for the christmas diner. Also a joke at the end of the song implies that the kid killed his father as revenge.
I LOVE your choice of games to talk about, Sly Cooper, Jak and Daxter AND now Psychonauts. All these games are among my favorite game series' ever.
please make a video for psychonauts 2 as well 🙏
love the rampage mention also- keep up the good work man !
dozing off sometime in the "meet the campers" section and waking up to Milla's secret room was certainly a whole experience. Your vocal delivery is very relaxing... Milla's demons, apparently, are not.
On the topic of the psychic interference, that's being broadcast by Oleander over the speakers as he sits in front of the radio in a trance. Every time you hear him muttering, that's the interference.
I'd also love to see a video on Psychonauts 2, I've just found and subbed to you for this one.
I'm a simple man. I see anything PSychonauts related, I like! Thanks for another vid for the collection. I'd love to see you go through Psychonauts 2~
I got about a third of the way through the video and felt inspired to play through the game again. Gonna let the rest of the runtime run and come back to this when I finish my playthrough. Thank you for your hard work
I did my own essay on video game psychology, and one observation I made on Psychonauts was the level progression into darker territory. The first three levels are the teachers with "stable" mental worlds, then two worlds that were influenced by outside forces (Loboto and Oleander), and finally the three patient worlds that are ravished by mental illness.
Only now after watching your video, do I notice that of course Oleander is at both ends of that progression.
PLEASE keep making this content, there's so much to dive into and you make it incredibly digestible for listening at work.
Doing the sequel would be amazing. There is so much subtle horror in things like Bob's Bottles andthe Ford Crueller minds
29:48 So when I first played this game it was on an Apple laptop and the game had some old glitches.. one of which was the Nightmares glitching out and skipping/looping around. It was SUPER unsettling and while I knew it was a glitch the fact that it happened then of all times was incredibly disturbing
Great video! Glad to be seeing some love for Psychonauts after the second game came out.
Oh! And a cover of the second game would be incredible.
I would have to guess the reason why the aluminum foil hat doesn't actually work because Dogen Bull Psychic powers are probably on a frequency that passes right through it. It's the reason why aluminum is used for electronic devices that have wifi because the Wi-fi frequency can pass right through it.
This video is wonderfully put together my guy I love it very entertaining
About those faces seen in the clouds at Thorny Towers, we know that wasn't just a random thing that the devs put in to add to the atmosphere, that was put there on purpose. I'd be curious to hear what your theories on it might be. My theory however is that Raz is seeing those as a result of his psychic powers interacting with the minds of the people at the Asylum, like one of the Asylum residents is hallucinating those faces in the clouds and Raz is telepathically picking up on it. And I think that hallucination is coming from Loboto cause in Psychonauts 2, you can see those exact same faces in the background of the Asylum area in Loboto's Labyrinth
Thank you for this. I love this game and hearing you discus it was a joy. I hope to see your take on Psychonauts 2 once its ready.
I’m so down for a video on psychonauts 2, I always thought it was more sanitized and flashy rather than gritty and peculiar like the first, (not that that’s a bad thing though, both games are absolutely fantastic)
Yes. please do psychonauts 2. Though I would say psychonauts 2 is more out there and more in your face about the characters.
Love psychonauts! Also nice OFF profile pic dude, i hope you talk about the game since the recent announcement caused a resurgence in OFF fans.
psychonauts ! let's gooo ! this game left a nice little warped mark on the mind; love it & still replay it once in awhile
Great vid.
Oh I adore Psychonauts, I even learned some things about it from this video. Like the cut voice lines!!! I'll admit I started to cry, how could I not
Don’t forget about the VR game that has Lobato back story
I'll be sure to cover it in a future Psychonauts 2 video!
Cool
Wow, I knew most of the stuff you were talking about, but how come I never heard about this website.
The meat circus made me almost quit this game but I am glad finished it I really enjoyed the story
I was quite young when I first played this and remember being really scared of Linda and had a nightmare with her in it. Of course now I'm fine and wish the best for her.
Thank You for reminding me of how amazing this game is.
Crazy to see this video just being uploaded cus I literally just beat Psychonauts for the first time yesterday!
Hell yeah! I hope you enjoyed your time with it. It's an absolute gem of a game
This was a nice video. I hope you cover the sequel at some point.
I'm pretty sure that Loboto is using pepper to make the kids sneeze their brains out. His prosthetic is literally a pepper shaker
I wasn't sure if it was pepper since it appears as a green sparkly color. That made me think it was some kind of special substance. If it is just pepper though, that's really funny
@@GhostSurging Psychonauts 2 also features some brain sneezing, and one of the characters refers to it as "super sneezing powder" at one point, so it's not pepper according to the series' "Deep Lore".
...Not that it really was that deep to begin with. It's basically pepper and that's why it's funny.
i love videos like this.
i hope to see more.
Good video on a great game 👍
God this was a classic, looking forward to check this vide out
I am willing to defend The Meat Circus feeling like an awful level because it's meant to put you in the same mental place as Razputin.
Unending stress, repugnant visuals, painful obstacles you're force to revisit over and over with each failure and always feeling like you're on the edge of having a mental breakdown as you struggle to make it out of here alive.
It's meant to be horrible and even *unfun* from the main character's perspective.
Whether it does too good of a job at that, I will leave up to opinion.
So since the brain experiment is a mix of Oleander and Raz's brain who does the mental baggage sound more like? or is it both combined?
This got me curious so I booted up the game to check and most of the bags sound like Raz crying. However, the purse sounds a bit more like Dogen
5:02 Cursed by a psychic to all die water, you say? That psychic wouldn't happen to have been Sylvia Brown by any chance now would it?😅
I mean a hat in time is another kids game with scary stuff
It is likely semi untelated, but there is also an official mod for the steam version of it that gives you the hat raz wears.
can we look into how dark that one nintendo game is? it’s the one with squids that commit genocide
Such a shame that the sequal coulnt love up to the same standard. So many elements just got diminished or regurgitated in a less compelling way.
It took me watching this video to realize it. There isn’t a single time Raz goes into the mind of another child. Part of me wonders if it’s because they’re not mentally developed enough to have entire worlds in there.
Raz himself only has his old family cart in a black void. Even the meat circus is just the result of his mind merging with an adult’s.
This got me curious so I booted up the game to try using the Psycho Portal on the other campers. If you try, this big text box shows up on screen. It says:
"In accordance with Section 3, Paragraph 1 of the 'Young Minds Protection Act' any device created for the purpose of invasive psychic procedure must have built-in safeguards which make its use upon anyone under the age of eighteen (18) impossible."
Then the camper you tried to use it on will look at Raz and shake their head. It's another cool and obscure detail!
@ that’s a really nice touch. Most of the Psychonauts can seem pretty callous towards the safety of children, given pretty much everything that happens in the first game, but it’s nice that in the lore, those kinds of protections are there to avoid exploitation by adult psychics.
Even if there was no safeguard against giant lungfishes, psychic wildlife, and feral dentists.
But hey, you can’t always prepare for everything.
Man i love these videos but if I can make a suggestion? I know YT doesn't like mentions of self harm or unaliving but it's super jarring and kinda confusing when the audio just goes completely silent when you mention those topics. I've seen other channels reverse their audio for those subjects as well as others who just make it gargled speech. Personally, on my content I just talk about it when it comes up because I think being able to talk freely about a serious subject like that is far more important than potential monetization... That's just me tho. Great video as always dude! This is becoming one of my favorite series to listen to
You're right, I'll try better to openly discuss these topics in future videos. I just wasn't sure how to go about discussing these topics, so I just mimicked what I saw other channels doing. I typically saw people muting the audio entirely, but gargling the audio or reversing are pretty good ideas. Thank you for the suggestion!
18:03 oh no
Off coming to the switch I’m so excited to play it
Well you gotta do the squeal, but do you plan to doing the Vr game?
MAKE THAT SECOND VIDEO
Gonna sub in hopes you do psyconauts 2
I've finished it. Good video. Did not know the game was this fucked. Please do the sequel.
Grim fandango music
Please make a video for the Second Game too!!! 😁
I'll subscribe 🥺
It's only been 12 minutes.....
comment for jokes only adult will get in children's media and algorithm engagement
Can you play Valiant hearts It’s one of my favorite games it’s pretty short as well. They recently Made a sequel. To
it's not horror game?
if u want to use words like hanging and suicide, either say them or dont. dont use this half hearted attempt of censorhsip by leaving gaps.
if youre in it for the money thats fine. but at least give it the tiniest bit of effort. this has to be the laziest and least caring way of doing it...