The game’s design is a set of discrete levels connected by a hub world (the Motherlobe), each level a messed up psyche waiting to be fixed. The psychic powers of Raz and the other agents literalize the expansion of consciousness promised by LSD gurus like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.” To quote philosopher and activist Michel Foucault, the goal is “not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. Change was supposed to happen from the bottom up and inside out. It wanted genders and sexualities free of heteronormative expectations it wanted family structures liberated from domineering daddies.

Women’s Liberation wanted more than equal pay. It wanted to purge society of racism and class domination. The Black Power Movement didn’t want a Black president. The game’s psychedelic romp from level to level echoes the efforts of 1960s social movements to change the texture of everyday life. The game also cribs from the politics of the sixties, specifically, from the period’s commitment to consciousness-raising, system-wide social transformation and experiments with communal life. It’s not just that the game’s color palette and character costumes borrow so heavily from the hippies and the mods that you’ll be tempted to shine a blacklight on your screen. The psychedelic imagery of Psychonauts 2 wouldn’t have been possible without the cultural scene of the 1960s. The mind is more than a terrible thing to waste, it’s a theater of operations, a target of intervention – a thing to change.

Yet, as any good tutorial level should do, the cavern of toothy terror sets the scene. There are light puzzles to solve, but they are but momentary delays along a linear path to uncover Loboto’s secrets. The game’s tutorial level features tunnels studded with incisors and molars, a dental nightmare that encapsulates the mind of Dr. Sometimes, the trip through the mind is simple. These levels turn the fantasies, anxieties, obsessions and traumatic memories of a psyche into architecture and terrain, as if the brain were a playground, our hidden shames, buried losses and secret pleasures so much exotic equipment over which to vault. Playing as the protagonist Raz, an intern for the Psychonauts agency, you dive into the minds of different characters, each of which is represented as a quirky platforming level. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price. This is an excerpt from a feature story from Unwinnable Monthly #146. The Sixties That Weren’t, or, How Psychonauts 2 Forgets Politics

Psychonauts 2 psi king