Psychonauts/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: Tim Schafer says he's ready to make a sequel. All he needs is a publisher.
  • Anticlimax Boss: Loboto. You don't fight him at all. Instead, Raz uses telekenesis to drop Sam/Mr Pokeylope's brain into the tank, which blasts Loboto off the top of Thorney Towers, presumably to his doom.
  • Big Lipped Alligator Moment: The Nightmare fights.
    • There's also the reel The World Shall Taste My Eggs: A chicken hatches, rides on a fish and creates a theme park where he kills other fishes/humans.
    • Actually, this is not a BLAM, it's a case of Fridge Brilliance. It goes something like this: First you have to realize that's not a chicken, it's a brain (It even looks like a brain sideways). So, a brain hatches from an egg (a child realizes he/she is psychic), goes for a walk in the sun (goes to Whispering Rocks), finds a lake (Lake Oblongata, obviously), rides on a fish (gets kidnapped by Lynda of Oblongata), goes to a carnival (the insane asylum), plays in the teacups (gets put in a tank), and kills people with lasers (this part should be obvious). So it's really Oleander's plan in a very encoded form, which makes sense because you are actually in his mind and he is a strong enough psychic to encode it like that. It's still one hell of a Mind Screw, though.
      • However, exactly like the trope description, after viewing it Raz asks: "What the hell was that?"
  • Cargo Ship: Admiral Cruller and his canoe.
  • Catharsis Factor: Ah, Lungfishopolis, how we love thee...
  • Crack Pairing: Linda/Mr. Pokeylope. If you get 100% completion, it's canon.)
  • Draco in Leather Pants:
    • Loboto, bizarrely.
    • Whitehead. It's the accent, it seems. He's rather physically ugly.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Fangirls loooove Sasha Nein. There is more fanart of him than any other character in the game.
    • Alternatively, D'Artagan (sic)--a character cut from the final game, who nonetheless appears in lots of fanart, occasionally shipped with the hero Raz.
    • If you look you can find a following for just about every student in the camp.
    • Of the other adults, Ford Cruller especially gets a lot of the fans' love. His Cloudcuckoolander attitude and tragic backstory make him adorable.
      • Being a old man who's obsessed with bacon makes him hilarious. He's got something for everyone.
    • And Milla Vodello, naturally.
    • Fred has quite the fan following too.
    • Edgar is practically something of a mascot for a number of the game's fanartists, though not necessarily as a subject - in general, the asylum inmates are rather well-loved in the fandom.
    • Loboto's role in the game's plot is bigger than in the game itself, but still, he's... pretty damn unforgettable.
    • Boyd Cooper's level is one of the most popular ones in the game, and with his simultaneously disturbed/disturbing and amusing character, he does look to be the most liked out of the Thorney Towers residents.
  • Fanon: Loboto being Bobby's father, due to the similarities in their appearance and personality.
  • Fridge Brilliance: The bull that pushes you back and forces you redo parts of the level reflects the obsessive-compulsive nature of Edgar's mind.
    • Book depository in Milkman Conspiracy with a sniper sitting in it? Will sound familiar to all Conspiracy Theorists.
      • Except the sniper in the book depository is the official explanation.
      • The sniper is a girl scout. And if you've played the level, you know that the girl scouts are the only ones that are really dangerous. So EVEN MORE fridge brilliance.
    • If you watch the memory reels in lungisholopis, you'll see how Linda originally looked, that means that in her mind, you haven't actually increased in size at all, the citizens are just normal-sized, unmutated lungfish, veers right back into Fridge Logic when you start wonder why, if this is the case, his personal gravity is still wonky.
  • Genius Bonus: The Waterloo World level's background music is composed of the lesser known portions of the 1812 Overture.
  • Goddamn Rats: The exploding rats in the asylum are quite possibly the most annoying creatures in the game.
  • High Octane Nightmare Fuel: The flaming Nightmare room in Milla's mind.
  • Memetic Mutation: Pretty much every line, but the gems given to us by The Milkman Conspiracy deserve special mention.
  • Most Annoying Sound: No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. ... Curse you, Sasha's Shooting Gallery.
  • Porting Disaster: The PS 2 port features numerous sound glitches and framerate issues and is probably going to crash at least once per playthrough, especially in the minds of the Lungfish or Gloria. I hear the PAL version is even worse.
  • The Producer Thinks of Everything: During Sasha Nein's training, he tells you to defeat 1000 censors in order to receive the Marksmanship Badge. To generate these Censors, there is a lever with output levels to monitor in what frequency they appear with a gauge indicating from "1" to "SKULL". The game only progresses if you, being Raz, gets impatient and turns the switch to the "Skull" setting. If you go about killing 100 Censors without turning the switch up, the Censors stop spawning until you increase the level which eventually leads to you summoning the boss of the level.
    • Throughout the game, Raz receives a multitude of items that can be held in hand prompting the use button to show it off to people. Usually, when used on the correct person it evokes the plot-based reaction. EVERY single person in the game has a unique reaction to EVERY item you receive. Complete with voice acting!
      • Just to emphasize this further: When you just play through the game normally, you'll have Mr. Pokeylope in your inventory for about 10 seconds. Yet, every single person way back in the camp has a unique reaction to that item.
      • Just like with the items, every person has a reaction to targetable PSI abilities like PSI Blasts and Pyrokinesis!
  • Scrappy Level: Meat Circus, infamous for its difficulty, and one of the most prime examples of the Scrappy Level ever. It combines Timed Missions, Escort Missions, a Timed Jumping puzzle where the boss is trying to knock you off with attacks from offscreen, and virtually the same boss fight three times. Good luck.
    • The last fight totally makes up for the rest of the stage, though.
    • Five years after the game's release on Steam, a patch was made available that made the Meat Circus easier.
    • Also, the upper levels of the asylum. They're dark, have some tricky jumps, and are home to some really annoying enemies.
    • And The Race section of Milla's mind, although that level's only conditionally Scrappy. Running the race is fun, but going through to collect all the figments is awful; it takes over twenty minutes to go over all the routes thoroughly, most of the figments blend into the track around them, and when you finally reach the end and realize that you're still missing a few you won't be blamed for wanting to throw your controller at the screen.
    • There will come a moment where you'll eventually have to begin grinding for the expensive cobweb duster, either by killing enemies for about an hour, or by doing the immensely annoying Dowsing Rod minigame where you have to nearly break your keyboard in half as you tap like crazy to rip out another arrowhead from the ground.
  • Tastes Like Diabetes: Clem and Crystal, bizarrely subverted with their suicidal tendencies.
  • That One Level: Two words: MEAT. CIRCUS. See the Scrappy Level entry.
  • Toy Ship: Raz and Lili, Elton and Milka, Nils and J.T. with Elka... Raz himself said it best, really.

 Raz: Is making out all anyone ever thinks about around here?

  • Ugly Cute: About half the characters in this game are sort of adorable, Shegor in particular.
    • Linda is pretty cute once she's not being mind controlled. What a magical lady...
  • Viewer Gender Confusion: Quentin:
  • Vindicated By History
  • What Do You Mean It's for Kids?: Peoples' fears and nightmares in this game can be downright unnerving. It features a lot of people with childhood trauma, animals burnt alive, spirits of children who died in fire, a pre-teen girl shooting a rifle and, when cornered, throwing herself out of a window and then blowing herself up to kill her enemies and... well... Meat Circus.
  • The Woobie: Take your pick, folks:
    • Sasha Nein: Lost his mother when he was just a baby; his only encounter with her comes from his telepathic readings of his father's mind, which were... erm, colored in the way you might expect a man's thoughts about his wife to be. Also, borderline emotionless. Does he just need a little wub to heal?
      • Either that or lots of Brain Bleach
      • Sasha's father can qualify too--lost a wife he dearly loved and drove his only child away, probably without ever realizing how. The heartbroken look on the poor man's face through the whole reel just makes you want to hug him.
    • Milla Vodello: Used to take care of children... until they all died horribly in a fire. Still has little bits of that nightmare locked up in her mind. While she seems to be all better now, many fans seem to think she's still haunted and deeply troubled by her past. Even if she's coped, it's still pretty darn tragic...
    • Ford Cruller is a particularly tragic example: all the different roles he plays in the camp, from cook to forest ranger to janitor, are multiple personalities caused by psychic damage inflicted on him by an evil psychic. The fact that Ford is the most adorable, nice, caring adult in the entire game makes it downright heartbreaking.
    • Dogen Boole: Small, runty, picked on by the other kids at camp, terrified of everything, barely able to control his own psychic powers, the first to lose his brain to Dr. Loboto, and even those who are generally his friends (Raz and Lili) still take occasional pot shots at his expense. While some are annoyed by him, others find him somewhat sad.
    • Gloria: While the rest of the inmates have somewhat goofy histories, Gloria's is genuinely sad: she spent much of her childhood at a Boarding School of Horrors, dreaming of the day her parents would arrive and take her home. While she shot to stardom, she abruptly crashed when she found out that her mother had committed suicide. Sure, she acts funny, but she is clearly deeply troubled.
      • Even more upsetting when you consider the events of the "Tragedy" plays are likely meant to represent her actual life; her mother committed suicide because she never got a letter back from Gloria while she was in the Boarding School... because the letters she was sending never got sent by her agent.
    • Sheegor: Dr. Loboto's beleaguered assistant, she lives in fear of him and what he might do to her pet turtle, Mr. Pokeylope. He abuses her constantly, and she has a childlike mind. When you use Clairvoyance on her, she sees Raz as Jesus an angel, come to save her from the torment she goes through.
    • Raz: A temporary case maybe. When he starts to talk to Ford about how he thinks his Dad hated him and tried to distract him from his powers and/or kill him with endless training, this troper couldn't help but want to give him a giant hug. This is temporary though, because by the end of the game we find out it was all a misunderstanding/misinterpretation. He's still cursed though.
    • Every kid seems to be a woobie to some degree, judging from Raz's speech and how they react to it.
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