His thoughts bounce haphazardly from fragments of various conspiracies. In the real world, Boyd rambles incoherently about a nefarious plot involving someone he calls the Milkman. Outside the gates of the creepy hospital you meet Boyd Cooper, and it’s there that the tragedy of the Milkman Conspiracy delivers one of the most unforgettable levels in video game history. Though you meet each character out in the real world, it isn’t until you’ve scoured their subconscious that you truly get to know them.Īnd this is handled most expertly once you make your way across the lake from Whispering Rock and over to the abandoned insane asylum. Instead of just collecting the arbitrary tchotchkes strewn about most platformers, in Psychonauts you stumble across figments of their imagination, literal emotional baggage, and roving piggy banks that store film reels of the occupant’s repressed memories. There’s something about the way each stage reflects its owner that gives weight to the game’s exploration. Likewise, his Brazillian partner Milla Vodello’s world is a never-ending fashionista’s dance party that locks away all of the emotional scarring deep inside a hidden prison. Slick Agent Sasha Nein’s world is all packed neatly into a minimalist cube floating in outer space that occasionally pops open and reveals his childhood trauma.

That’s because each stage exists as the subconscious of one of the characters in the world, complete with all of their fears, regrets, and repressions. The game uses the campgrounds as a familiar hub world to explore, but the individual levels themselves are anything but familiar. They’re a group of international psychic spies who come across as a mix of the X-Men, MI6, and a group therapy session. The first game from Double Fine Productions, Psychonauts is a 3D platformer where you play as young Raz, a runaway acrobat who sneaks off to Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp in hopes of joining the Psychonauts. However, 2005’s Psychonauts is a glaring exception to that rule, synergizing every aspect of its setting, characters, abilities, and collectables to feed into one singular theme.

But rarely do the aesthetics of a world actually mean something to a game’s theme, story, and characters.

But most of the time, these settings serve as aesthetic variety that allows for different platforming challenges - an erupting volcano limits the number of safe areas, trees make for excellent swinging challenges, and a sheet of ice transforms the act of controlling our character into the goal itself. It’s a safe bet that most of us have made our way through countless lava, forest, and ice biomes in games. Platformers have provided themed levels since the days when Mario shot down a pipe and found himself in the bottomless caverns of World 1-2.

Psychonauts milkman level