Zodi Plays: Psychonauts (This One Time, At ESPer Camp...)

Let's Plays Completed Let's Plays
#21

How’s about some Psychonauts to start off your day?

Zodi Plays: Psychonauts [13] The Milk

Video Length: 23:55

Starting us off today, we quickly get the second to last scavenger hunt item back in the campground; an old miner’s skull that we need the Shield power to obtain. I’m not a big fan of this since it’s pretty unintuitive, but given the other scavenger hunt items have required using our powers this one needing one makes a degree of sense as well. You just gotta figure it out.

Now for the real meat and potatoes of the episode. Heading up to the asylum, it seems our route into the place is actually blocked by the night watchman. Though judging from his scribbles and his ranting, he should be on the other side of this gate. Without many options at our disposal, we throw out Sasha’s psychic portal to invade his mind. At first everything feels relatively normal, and then we find the Clairvoyance merit badge in his fridge, which helps him see the world like he does. It seems the Milkman is missig, maybe dead, and Boyd won’t help us out until we find the Milkman. So, we step out into the rest of his mind.

Outside the mental confines of his home we find a level with some of the best representations of what it would actually be like to be within someone else’s mental world. Welcome, to the Milkman Conspiracy. A simple sleepy suburb, but eyes are hidden everywhere, watching us. The figments are mostly just regular, ordinary people and things, but enough of them hide cameras or are actually sinister if you look closely that it’s actually off putting. There are black cars in every driveway, and secret agents clearly pretending to be other people milling about being suspicious. It is in my opinion this stage, where the game actually truly begins. The first three were tutorials, made by psychonauts to help you out. Fish town is fish town. Here we have our first look into someone’s actual psyche. Unfortunately, mechanically, it’s not super great. It’s the most Adventeure Game-y of them all, having us run around solving relatively simple puzzles to obtain items that will let us pass by the agents, all to make our way to the graveyard so we can find the book that tells us where the Milkman is.

Helping us with this is the Clairvoyance power, which is my favorite power in the game. With it, we can see 2D representations of what the target of our Clairvoyance thinks of Raz. These are often some of the funnier jokes this game has, like the weird brain slugs that transport things around seeing Raz as a package. The effect is amplified in the Milkman Conspiracy since just holding say, a pair of hedge trimmers makes us look like a completely different person. It’s fun, relatively flavorful, and shows just how unfortunately warped Boyd’s mind is. So long as you have the most basic of appearance signals, you are a gardener, or a plumber, or a road crew worker.

All that aside, it’s not time I talked about the thing that makes me so negative about this part of the game. My past time playing this game, the first time I played this game, I had to use the keyboard and mouse controls. This was the first real mark against the game, since the keyboard controls are abjectly terrible. But things where, for the most part, fine. I got the cobweb duster, got the dowsing rod, got a ton of arrowheads and spent them all, it was all good and cool. Then I got to Boyd’s level. Starting with the Milkman Conspiracy, every level has at least one mental cobweb that is explicitly in your way and MUST be collected to pass. Unfortunately, the game has a rather severe glitch where, at random, without any indication and without any obvious triggers (which is to say, it can happen at random) the Cobweb Duster can just vanish from your inventory forever. You have to go buy it back from the camp store. Now, given my arrowhead count currently this isn’t that big a deal. Back when I first played I had basically run the store dry buying as much as I could, buying a ton of cores and such, and I had run out of Deep Arrowheads to find. Which meant I needed to grind up the arrowheads in the camp, one at a time, to get all 800 I needed to buy the Cobweb Duster again so I could actually continue on with the level.

Adding insult to injury, this game features ye olde classic cheat codes. One of which is to get max arrowheads. Unfortunately, the PC version had those removed for no reason. Now, as of last year or so, Psychonauts was updated to have achievements and to reduce the difficulty of one of the levels later down the line…but they didn’t fix the cobweb duster glitch or put cheat codes back in as a failsafe against this glitch. Which can still happen, by the way, and guess what? There is a point of new return in this game. And if you pass it and your cobweb duster vanishes, you’re basically out of luck. Hope you had a prior save! So yeah, this incident incredibly soured my opinion of the game, and given the Milkman Conspiracy is kinda tedious to play and a little too long (and other things we’ll get into next time and in the videos to come) this last segment killed my enthusiasm for the game almost entirely.

All that aside this run has made me like the game a lot more. Hope you all enjoyed this silly, ranty video. See you guys next time for more milk.

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#22

Having used the cheat codes in the Steam version for my own LP (bonus videos only, of course), I can assure you that they’re still there. They may require a controller, or a particular keyboard setup, but they’re there.

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#23

Huh, didn’t know that. I could of swore back when I first played this, before it got updated with achievements and stuff, it lacked the codes.

#24

It’s entirely possible that they were patched in somewhere along the way, but they worked when I tried them. It was admittedly very difficult to get the inputs right.

#25

It’s time to deliver the milk.

Zodi Plays: Psychonauts [14] Cookies

Video Length: 26:57

Starting off this episode, we solve the hedge maze finally. This one is…annoying. It’s very simple of course, you just find a crow feather (which we already have in the real world) and use Clairvoyance on it near those crows in the maze and…that opens up the gate to the flowers we need to become a grieving widow. It’s probably the most Adventure Game-y scenario we have to deal with in this game, because it really doesn’t make any sense. But it’s okay, because now we can sneak into the graveyard! Within the graveyard we find that the Milkman’s body isn’t here, and instead we find a book. The book ultimately contains nothing, but it’s FROM the book depository, so now we know where to go. And by that I mean we’re going to the post office. This bit is of course finicky as it’s hard to get the Clairvoyance to hit the target. It’s not that bad though. Once we’re inside, we find a spooky dark room that hides the Plunger, which we need to get to the book depository. Nothing can stop us now!

Except for a Nightmare, of course. The remnant of an abandoned plot line, for some reason Boyd still has Nightmare fights in his brain. And boy, what fights they are. I’m trying to be more positive but they’re really just not good at all. Their only real attack that I’ve encountered is their grab, which is unavoidable if you’re actually trying to deal damage to them in a timely fashion. Otherwise they just move around the battlefield in faux menace. Once you’ve hit them enough they break open, spewing out inner rage which you can grab with your TK and throw into it to finish it off. But what if you don’t have enough rank to HAVE TK? I don’t know! As far as I know you either get enough to have TK or you’re stuck fighting the boss forever.

With the Nightmare out of the way we can now head to the book depot. It’s not that hard to get there, though the sniper segment can be tricky if you’re not careful. Also tricky, getting the game to register that you’re hitting Clairvoyance so you can use the helicopter helmet we find the way the game WANTS us too. This bit was actually super annoying, as I hope you can tell from how I’m mashing the button after a point. But we finally get it, and it reveals the location of the Milkman! So now all we need to do is go there and get into the building. After we get into another Nightmare fight woo boy.

Now that we’re actually AT the main rainbow squirt building, we have to get inside. And…this is a very difficult part, which took me FOREVER. In order to get into there, the game WANTS you to shoot the child with your PSI Blast. But this is actually impossible given the set up of the area and how fast she zooms away if you get spotted. The other way you get in is by being invisible and sneaking past her, but she can see you if you’re invisible (as has been shown earlier in this video or last one, I think) so she will just run back and close the door! Now, it occurred to me while editing that you could PROBABLY drop down from the roof to get inside, but it really doesn’t feel like there’s enough time to do that. But, finally, we do it…and we are rewarded with a really bad bossfight. The way her two attacks work, it’s very difficult to actually get in a hit. She throws her Gods Eye shuriken thing at the exact intervals that the cookie bomb explodes, meaning that to avoid one implicitly means getting hit by the other, like 80% of the time. The way you hurt her is by punching her, which is often just not viable, or using TK to throw the cookie bombs at her, which is also basically not viable half of the time. After we beat her up enough, she makes the entire arena go into the dark, meaning the only way we can progress is by using the Gods Eye she dropped to Clairvoyance into her head. But as I’ve shown you, the game is unreliable about actually making that WORK. Even when you do get it to work, you’re now doing this exact same boss pattern with all these stupidly timed attacks, but from her perspective so it’s harder. This is a REALLY hard boss, which makes no sense given this levels anti-focus on combat. This is a puzzle level, it shouldn’t have a boss fight in the traditional sense.

But whatever. We beat the Den Mother, releasing the Milkman! Boyd proceeds to uh…blow up everything. The rainbow squirts hiding his aggressive tendencies and programming, the agents trying to find them to squash that programming, the censors that are here to help out. Everything. Everything will be bathed in the off white colour of door to door milk. We’re the hero! With all that said and done, we finish collecting all of Boyd’s brain stuff. Hope you all enjoyed, I’ll see you guys next time for…another stage that is sorta infamous.

So, how does one go about psychoanalyzing Boyd? Well, it’s clear he’s got paranoid delusions, brought on by a mix of him losing multiple jobs and his own personal problems (some of the figments show a worker getting drunk and are located in pretty clear hiding spots, making it obvious that Boyd has not been fired for NO reason, at least). The poor guy finally snaps and makes molotov cocktails out of some milk and blows up the mall he was working at, and is sent to the insane asylum…where he’s programmed by Oleander to serve as his watchmen. And as we saw once we killed the Den Mother and triggered his programming, his other function is to destroy the Asylum and everyone in it to hide what Oleander is doing. Devious.

I actually quite like how the game presents Boyd’s various conspiracy theories. Mentally, it turns out those agents are just factors of his own mind and while they ARE making him think things are all connected and out to get him, they’re working with the censors of his mind to remove the programming. Even though his thoughts are full of crazed, wild imaginings, even his brain can tell what is and isn’t a foreign entity in his mind. It’s cool because we never actually fight or see censors until that scene, since we’re such a small problem in the grand scheme of things. Too bad that it seems Oleander planned for this, and the trigger of Boyd’s Milkman persona is the programming being attacked mentally. This is how you do this by the way, you don’t just stick buildings and a Jet Jaguar reference into an island chain and populate it with fish people and say it’s mental programming, you have to actually do it with nuance since at the mental level that’s all you have.

The nightmares even make sense to be here, though I feel (and still feel honestly) that they’re massive wastes of time and make Milla’s nightmares feel less unique due to just being copies of it. Boyd’s nightmares being flame based makes sense given his trauma, but if you’re gonna shove in two stupid nightmare fights make him more thematic and don’t just rip off one of the only things I really REALLY like about this game. So yeah, that’s Boyd’s mind, a paranoid psyche that is literally fighting itself in a twisted suburbia. I really like it.

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#26

I actually like the difference between the two mental landscapes. The key thing i’m seeing here is that the Lungfish’s mind and body were grossly expanded by the experiments, and that sense of artificially is everywhere. Having seen the other mindscapes, its fairly apparent that this really wasn’t the lungfish’s original mindscape and instead the one constructed mostly by Oleander.

That said i can see why both levels could be extremely frustrating, with the cobweb duster glitch pushing it to rage quitting levels. Thanks for showing these levels off.

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#27

Anytime. I’ll be honest, the back half of this game is actually really good from a thematic point of view! The mechanics are…somewhat lacking, but workable.

#28

Again, I feel I have to defend a few aspects of the game that you’ve given the short shrift. First, the puzzle in the maze is that when you walk through the small gate in one direction, the large gate opens, and when you walk back through (as is natural to do), they both close. You can’t see the big gate while walking through the small one unless you use Clairvoyance to get a bird’s eye view, which helps you put the puzzle together. In this case, you jumped back over the gate, so the puzzle was solved.

Next, the first Nightmare fight only happens once you’ve collected the plunger, which requires the Cobweb Duster, which you can’t get until you reach rank 20, the same rank at which Telekinesis unlocks. In the worst case, if you purposefully avoided getting the power from Cruller before entering Boyd’s mind, you can use the Bacon to go pick it up and return.

As for the Clairvoyance issues: You can only use Clairvoyance on the helmet on the top floor of the book depository, since that triggers the phone call. That may be a bit counterintuitive, but it is what the game was pointing you to, and it’s where you get the helmet to start with. I think your issues with Clairvoyance not working otherwise were you hitting the wrong button. The icon for Clairvoyance generally didn’t wiggle like you were hitting the button when you said you were trying it. It wouldn’t be the first time that you confused your buttons.

Finally, the Rainbow Squirt at the door can’t see you if you’re invisible. It seemed like you were just running out of power before she opened the door. Hiding around the corner and activating it just before you make the dash for the door seems to be the best way to conserve power, if you don’t have the upgrade.

To cut down a bit on the contradiction, you’re correct about the bosses - neither fight is done very well, and having to fight two identical Nightmares is ridiculous. On the bright side, having enough ammunition makes either fight much easier. The Den Mother in particular seems to be one of those parts of the game where they didn’t balance the difficulty very well. It’s way too hard to hit her with the cookie boxes, and I don’t think you’re intended to have to punch her either. The Shield power is much more useful against the Nightmare, and I’m surprised you didn’t use it more.

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#29

Yeah, the bit about the PSI Cadet rank and the hedge maze puzzle have been mentioned in The Other Thread I have, but thanks for the info. I completely forgot about the store blocking you off from buying things until you’re at a certain rank. I feel this is ALSO bad, as an aside, and they should of made bosses that don’t require you to grind the game’s collectables to progress, but this is a problem with many games so I won’t hold it against Psychonauts.

While I was up with the helmet, I was hitting Y instead of Clairvoyance, and to that I’ll say I did just forget. It wasn’t until I went down stairs to see what the agents think helicopter Raz are that I started hitting Clairvoyance.

#30

Today is a surprisingly important episode of Psychonauts.

Zodi Plays: Psychonauts [15] All The World’s A Stage

Video Length: 24:15

In this episode, we finally finish off the scavenger hunt, getting another achievement and a couple PSI Cadet ranks in the process. We also finally learn Cruller’s secret, and learn what the purpose of finding those brains is (beyond just helping our technical friends). After that we make our way to the next stage! It’s Gloria von Gouten, a semi famous actress who’s star has pretty clearly burnt out considering her current location. And her mental world is, on reflection, probably one of the best in terms of symbolism. But we’ll get into that later, though rest assured a lot of it will become clear as we play.

The conceit of Gloria’s Stage is that we’ve got to stop The Phantom within her mind so her inner muse can shine forth. But with a nasty inner critic and a production obsessed with the traumatic and dramatic moments of her life, it’ll be tough to work our way through it. We need to find plays that’ll play out on set for us, and we need to navigate between sets and moods to influence what, where, and how everything plays out. Each set is a different memory, with the mood changing which memory the stage is being used for. It’s really well put together…on paper at least. In practice this is KIND OF annoying, especially since the bad mood has a ton of really annoying enemies. Since this stage is just one singular stage that changes sets, all the figments are mostly hidden here which is both a blessing and a curse. But honestly, after making SMART use of Pyrokinesis and being able to play this area with a controller instead of a keyboard, this stage has come off way better than it did my first time playing it. That’s kind of weird, honestly, since I went into this dreading it because I used to hate this level.

But yeah, that’ll be it for today. There isn’t a LOT to talk about Gloria’s Stage, but there also is if you catch my drift. I’m just gonna wait to mention most of it. All I can really specify is, get help if things are going badly for you. It’s important. Sorry if this came out of nowhere but I feel it’s important!

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#31

Okay, lets do us a Psychonauts.

Zodi Plays: Psychonauts [16] That’s Showbiz

Video Length: 30:17

Last time, we started Gloria’s Stage. Today, we continue, making use of the mood matrix and the plays to get further into Gloria’s psyche. There really isn’t much for me to say HERE, because I kinda stumble my way into the solution to all the puzzles almost immediately, minimizing the difficulty of getting through this stage by quite a lot. We also manage to see basically every memory scene we need to see, making it PRETTY clear what happened to cause Gloria to fall apart. Eventually, we get a hold of the play for the escape from Hagatha Home, which lets us get the balloon to come down for us, lifting us up to the rafters.

In the rafters, we find the Phantom! Chasing him down the catwalks, finding figments, baggage, and the last memory vault along the way, we encounter more than a few really bad platforming glitches, but overall have a decent time. We flash the Phantom in the face with some light, scaring him off, but all that really does is set us up for a rather annoying boss fight that feels entirely tacked on vs the Critic, who is surprise surprise the Phantom. The fight is super annoying, his attacks having far too much homing and the air vent you need to ride up to the rafters being too thin is NOT helping matters. Luckily, he’s not TOO hard, just annoying and tedious like most boss fights in this game. But yeah, after crushing her inner critic we have…more or less helped Gloria, I suppose? She gives us her Emmy award, and we leave it off there for today. Hope you enjoyed!

So, Gloria’s Stage is probably the best in terms of sheer symbolism. Gloria’s life was the stage in it’s entirety, and as such it occupies her mind without end. The figments of her mind are all various stage stuff, with the best use of figments of course being the audience. The stage itself replays traumatic (and happy) memories in repeat, over and over again, obsessed with those moments that refined her. Sadly, the whole bipolar mood switching thing is handled incredibly badly, so while it makes for an interesting mechanic for a level, writing wise it’s pretty offensive and bad. Still, it’s…it’s workable, I suppose. Gloria is the only person with an actual real mental condition and it’s really not that surprising it’s written poorly. That ASIDE, the actual symbolism of the stage and all that’s going on is really good. The inner fight between your personal critic and your muse, your negative and positive, it’s expressed really well here. It’s important to note that unlike say Boyd’s “Den Mother” keeping his mind control trigger hidden, we don’t KILL the Critic. We just reduce the unhealthy amount of noise he’s throwing Gloria’s way. In that sense, I do like this level.

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#32

Couple of things here. I really like how the stage feels totally different from the rafter area with the phantom. It feels very much like a different world altogether. Additionally I was actually somewhat surprised that Bonnita wasn’t the phantom after seeing the character model, which could easily go into a self sabotage metaphor. The critics complaints at the end were a nice touch, as it really nailed home it being Gloria’s inner critic.

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#33

New video time, now from the position of Having A New Job That Has Morning Shifts! Hoo boy.

Zodi Plays: Psychonauts [17] Vive le France

Video Length: 25:35

Today, we head past Gloria and her garden into the Asylum proper. Within the hallowed, hollowed out remains of this building we find our next two levels. Fred Bonaparte, and Edgar Teglee. We’ll deal with the very angry Ed later, and instead focus on Fred. Though first, we find out WHY we’re dealing with this mental patients. Which is to say, Chrispin Whitehead, Doctor Loboto’s evil assistant, is keeping us from getting further up the Asylum. He’s half blind, immune to psionics, and unflabable in his desire to not do anything. So we’ve gotta get a disguise to get past him. We’ve already got the claw from our lovely friend Miss Gloria. Next up we’ll be diving into the mind of Fred, someone who’s…having some trouble, lets say.

A lot of people hate this level. I’m going to continue my trend of being weirdly controversial when it comes to Double Fine games and say this is probably one of my favorites? I don’t know, but something about it feels nice. It doesn’t feel much like a mental world at all of course and I dock it points for that, but as far as an actual gameplay conceit it’s pretty cool. There’s three tiers, the two players (Fred and his genetic memory of Napoleon) being tier 1, tier 2 being walking around the game board as if you’re the player, and tier 3 is down at the gritty, piece level. I actually like this, even if it is a little tedious. For some reason for me it’s the FUN tedious, where I don’t mind doing it. Maybe it’s the mini, non threatening platforming challenges that are involved here. Maybe it’s the sort of pointed commentary that makes me think of cooler ideas than this. I don’t know, but whatever it is I just sort of like Waterloo-World.

Of course you can assume all of that praise I put on this level is almost entirely directed at the gameplay of it. The writing is…much to be desired, though the comedy in this chapter works the best I think and we’ll see better examples of that next time. The actual CHARACTER writing is…bad, badder than normal for this game even, and while I’ll touch more on this later Fred Bonaparte is…really not good at all, and while I can think of how he ACTUALLY is meant to come off as, it just doesn’t work either way.

Anyway, that’s it for today! Hope you all enjoyed, I’ll see you guys next time!

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#34

Oh hey more of this!

Zodi Plays: Psychonauts [18] Continued War Games

Video Length: 23:32

In this episode, we continue tackling Napoleon’s boardgame of the mind. Making use of pieces, collecting snails for the Hearty Knight, all that fun stuff. Ultimately there just isn’t a lot to talk about this one, it’s just more of the same. Which is probably why so many people DO dislike this level. Some of the jokes are good but otherwise it’s just…lots and lots of this exact same thing.

I do hit some pretty incredibly glitches though, I think. And I slowly but surely learn to respect pyrokinesis. Never should of let my initial thoughts due to keyboard controls get me down, fire is a friend!

But yeah, that’s it for this one. This and the next stage are gonna take three videos to complete due to just being so long, but honestly they’re not all that bad. Hope to see you tomorrow for the conclusion of war!

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#35

Forgot to write this in advance due to work OOOPS.

Zodi Plays: Psychonauts [19] War’s End

Video Length: 15:22

This one’s a little short since all we REALLY do in the grand scheme of things is finish off what little needs to be done to complete Waterloo World, then clear up the stage of all figments and stuff. That said, there’s actually a fair bit to talk about in terms of game design and the actual flavor of the world, which we’ll get into in a bit. For now let’s tackle that first thing I mentioned. Unlike every other stage in the back half of this game, Waterloo World does NOT have a boss at the end. Another reason why I actually like this stage. It ends on a positive note, instead of jamming a boss fight into a game which is just not suited for them. And by defeating Napoleon at this board game, we’ve freed Fred from his madness, leaving him free to…take a nap. But once he’s done having a nap he’s definitely going to kill Whitehead.

We’re the good guy, right? Ah well, that’s it for today, I’ll see you guys next time!

Now, as I mentioned in previous episodes, this is probably the worst stage in terms of actual flavor. The idea that losing, even multiple times, to a mental patient caused Fred to become insane and develop the genetic memory of Napoleon into his brain is…obviously ludicrous and offensive and basically just stupid. That being said, I will at least do my best to present it in a proper way, since Fred is clearly dumb and Raz is ten so neither of them ACTUALLY know what’s wrong. What’s actually wrong with Fred is that, he really DOES care. The problem is that he’s very easily discouraged. He wants to get involved, wants to be “good at a thing” but the instant he fails, it all comes crashing down. This is best shown with Waterloo World, a board game that happens to be based on the deadly venture of his ancestor. It’s a game he’s probably really good at, so being beaten by Chrispin is…discouraging, to say the least. So he obsessives over it, trying to beat him over and over again, always leading to a lose.

Coupled with the fact that Fred, understandably, probably has read up a lot about Napoleon since he’s a super famous ancestor of his, the obsession over Waterloo lead him to…breaking down, mentally. The game becomes his entire world, and he Napoleon (the guy who always loses Waterloo). As said previously, none of this is actually GOOD, it’s in fact terrible, but it does at least follow it’s own twisted logic.

#36

Hey hey, more Psychonauts.

Zodi Plays: Psychonauts [20] I See A Red Door

Video Length: 22:34

In this exciting episode of Psychonauts, we begin the final level…more or less. I’ll elaborate on what I mean later. Point is, it’s time to help out Edgar Teegle with his problems! The setting of which is the genuinely beautiful and awesome look Black Velvetopia. Styled like a Mexican city, we find ourselves trapped in alleyways by the cruel nature of…El Odio, the bull. This level is, sadly, not very fun. At all. The painting mechanic we do, to open up passages or secrets, is actually pretty neat. The fact that you can use Clairvoyance to get hints is also really cool. But the level itself, avoiding El Odio, constantly getting sent backwards if you’re hit by him, it kinda sucks. Not helped by the fact that this level is REALLY LONG, much like Waterloo World.

Mechanics aside I do love this world though, it’s one of my favorites. It’s just really rough to play through. I don’t think we see the worst of it in this one, platforming wise, but we definitely get a full share of how awful the combat challenges are here. The wrestlers we fight to get Edgar’s Queen’s are…not BAD, really, just tedious and unfun. It’s like I said with Waterloo World. The stage with the least amount of boss fights has been the most fun. It’s almost as if those are bad in this game. For the most part, of course.

But yeah, that’s all I’ve got to say today. Hope you all enjoyed, I’ll see you guys next time…for more bull!

#37

I awaken, and as such it is time for Psychonauts.

Zodi Plays Psychonauts [21] Further Bull Problems

Video Length: 26:05

Starting us off today is another wrestle fight, and it’s probably my least favorite because it proves a point I said like twenty videos ago. The levitation orb lets you ignore ground based hazards if you’re floating on it, and this dragon wrestler is letting out a roar that coats the ground with stank. Just jumping it is fine, but you’d THINK that based on what the game has told you, you can use levitate to ignore it entirely. Unfortunately, you cannot! For some reason, there is not one single instance of “Levitate can help with environmental/ground based hazards” actually being real. Ah well.

With that done, we can continue with the level, which is more of the same as last time, for the most part. We do however learn a bit more about Edgar. About the make up of his mind, and how it’s very clearly an abstraction to deal with the very real life problems he’s had, which are literally buried beneath the surface in the sewers. I feel like Edgar’s mental world is one of the best in the game, and though we will talk more about it next time since I sadly do not beat it this stage (it, like Waterloo-World, is just too long for that) I think it’s pretty clear how good Black Velvetopia is- flavorwise of course, I’m still not ever gonna defend El Odio. Even if the problems are at least partially my fault.

We end the stage, however, in an interesting spot. We’ve been asked by a nice dog to help distract the bull so he can do some painting. This is the only other side quest in the game, the first one being helping Dogen past that mind field a billion years ago. This is also VITAL to do, since if we don’t do this before completing the level the reward will be lost forever, and while the reward is worthless in the grand scheme of things (it’s a life max up) it IS tied to an achievement, so we must do it. But that’ll be for next time. What ISN’T for next time though, is we finally talk to the fabled bull fighter Dingo Caught-in-a-compromising-romantic-situation-with-someone-else’s-lover. And as you can guess from his extremely on the nose name, he’s a bit of a tool. He does however provide us with our final psychic power merit badge, CONFUSION GRENADE. An ammo based psychic power, it can confuse enemies, leading them to attack each other (this is not that useful). It has uses in this stage, and if you cheat the game to get it early you can use it on Boyd for a really interesting result, but otherwise it’s the least interesting power in the game and arguably the least useful as a result. I’m really bad at aiming it, and that’s at least…I’ll be fair and give that 40% to the game’s fault. But yeah, confusion grenade is ours.

Join us next time, where we will take this confusing power up that we got from the brain of some rando to beat up a gigantic jerk. Also a bull. Dun dun duuuun. See you guys next time!

#38

Wow, you really seem to like doing things the hard way. The window painting isn’t just there to show you what’s at the far side of the tunnel - you’re supposed to walk through it to the far side.

The hint about Levitation is intended to tell you to jump and float while the attack passes below you. You can use Shield to block any of the attacks, but you have to time it properly - as you saw, if you activate it too early, the wrestlers will wait until you run out of energy before hitting you. There is also precisely one place in the game with a ground hazard where Levitation will let you cross it safely. We just haven’t reached it yet.

#39

There is? I think I know what it is, but dang if I can’t…ever see why you would do that though. Also I’m aware that’s how you deal with the dragon breath, but it still seems like a natural place TO try out levitation, after the announcer told me to anyway.

Also other people have said that before and…really? Is that not just where you get a figment?

#40

You get figments by putting the window on the other hooks, which is probably the toughest pair of figments to find in the game, but you can absolutely use the window as a shortcut.