Characters / Psychonauts: Main Characters

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Razputin "Raz" Aquato

Voiced by: Richard Steven Horvitz

^{Click here to see Raz as he appears in Psychonauts and Rhombus of Ruin}

"They may come for me, Dogen. But when they do, they'll be looking for Raz, the boy. What they'll find... what they won't expect... is Raz, the Psychonaut."

The game's protagonist. A circus boy from a family of roma acrobats, who ran away from the circus, which was also his home, due to his father trying to suppress his latent psychic ability.

His greatest wish is to become a Psychonaut, and he thinks Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp can help him do that, but standing in his way is an evil plan to Take Over the World, and the fact that his dad is going to be picking him up in 24 hours because he never got parental permission to be there.

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• Adorably Precocious Child: Despite how capable Raz is, one can't forget that he's still a ten-year old boy, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He runs away from home to Whispering Rocks, confident that he can become a full-fledged Psychonaut in the very brief window of time he has until his dad comes to pick him up.
• Adventurer Outfit: Raz throughout the games wears a variant of the "Airman" outfit: flight helmet with goggles, bomber jacket (a trench coat on the second game), leather gloves, light boots, and a turtleneck in place of the traditional scarf.
• All There in the Manual: His last name, "Aquato", is never officially mentioned in the first game (it only appears on a poster). It later appears in the trailer for Rhombus of Ruin, and is finally officially mentioned in-game in the sequel.
• Almighty Janitor: He's merely a camper in the first game, and an intern in the second (an intern to the mailroom, no less), and he still saves the world both times nonetheless.
• Ambiguously Brown: He has tanned skin, a Russian first name and a vaguely Italian last name. His backstory explicitly shows him as Roma however (though from a fictional eastern European country).
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: In 2, he has to complete a lengthy scavenger hunt to earn back his outfit from 1.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: This is how Frazie sees him in the sequel if you use Clairvoyance on her. Considering he's walking on eggshells to avoid upsetting his family during the events of the second game, it's unclear how accurate this is, but he does have a habit of being deliberately annoying to people older than him if he isn't trying to impress them and can get away with it.
• Archnemesis Dad: One of the game's final bosses is Raz's personal perception of his father: a twisted, sadistic individual who wants his son to drown. As it turns out, his actual father isn't anything like this.
• Art Evolution: Raz in the first game is considerably more lanky, having twig-thin legs and a square-ish head, due to the Aviator Helmet he wears, and having dark yellow skin. From Rhombus of Ruin onward, his body and legs are much better proportioned, his legs are a little bit wider, his head is no longer cube-like (even with the helmet on), and his head shape has been made more consistent with that of the other characters, such as Lili. His skin tone is a bit lighter in 2 for the same reasons.
• Ascended Fanboy: He'd memorized all of the True Psychic Tales comics before getting a chance to become a Psychonaut himself. He even cites an incident from a specific issue if you go to talk to Coach Oleander about the bear running around the camp.
• Awesome Backpack: Whenever he gets a new ability, Raz does his Pstandard Psychic Pstance, and the merit badge flies around before landing on his backpack. It's also able to hold quite a few weird things in it, like a dowsing rod and several large black velvet paintings that are larger than the backpack itself (albeit the latter is in a mental world).
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: At the end of 2, he's officially dubbed a Junior Psychonaut.
• The Baby of the Bunch: When he enrolls in the Psychonaut Internship Program at the beginning of 2, Raz is quickly recognized as the youngest in the group.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: Not only does he wear a rather slick suit in the tutorial stage of 2, he can swap to it, or any clothes he has for that matter, in the cafeteria bathroom after the player unlocks them.
• Badass Longcoat: Psychonauts 2 sees Raz wearing a new jacket, which is slightly longer and darker than his original one, after his old clothes are stolen from him in a hazing ritual by the Interns, and Sasha provides him his smallest hand-me-downs. Doubles as a Continuity Nod, given that it makes him look like how Sasha sees him under Clairvoyance in the first game.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Somewhat at the beginning with Lili, as he's mostly unaware of Lili's advances until she spells it out for him, and starts to feel the same way. It's resolved when he becomes Lili's boyfriend (out of her saying so, rather than on his own volition), and both share a few kisses in the last parts of first game.
• Big Brother Instinct: How he treats some of the younger kids, like Maloof, Dogen and Lil' Oly. We learn in the sequel that he's close to his two younger siblings, so it makes sense he developed it.
• Borrowed Catch Phrase: He adopts Bobby Zilch's Victory Dance as his own.
• Brain Bleach: He often registers shock and/or disgust with a snide comment or a true WTF look on his face.
• Broken Pedestal: Downplayed in 2: He's ultimately left confused by the feelings he has over Ford Cruller's actions in covering up the true nature of Maligula, the death of his grandmother, and brainwashing his great aunt and his father to think they were mother and son. It was a situation with no good options.
• Butt-Monkey: Being a Child Prodigy does not protect Raz from getting remorselessly picked on and humiliated by bullies in both games and his own family in the second. His unshakeable good humor in the face of this is, of course, what makes him a hero.
• The Cameo:
  • He can have a likeness of his head chiseled into a mountain in Brütal Legend, shows up as a dancer in Double Fine Happy Action Theatre, and his goggles/helmet and turtleneck are wearable in Iron Brigade.
  • Raz is playable in the "Good Friends" DLC for Runner 2.
  • He also shows up in the Queensland level of Alice: Madness Returns. Given the nature of the game, he's somewhat... worse for wear.
• Commonality Connection: With Lili. Both have a certain thrill for adventure, both are gifted psychics at a very young age, both got along well with Dogen and always trying to look out for him. Plus they're some of the more saner and serious of the campers and know how to make a good joke or two. Psychonauts 2 adds even more connections, such as both being the grandnephew/niece of one of the original Psychic Seven (Lucrecia Mux in Raz's case) and both having a notable Power Stereotype Flip involving their shared talent and interest in setting things on fire.
• Child Prodigy: Raz was able to learn every psychic ability in the camp's curriculum, pass every obstacle course provided to him, fight armies of censors and monsters in the mental world, cure the mental-illness of four insane individuals, rescue Psychonauts with years of experience ahead of him, find and rebrain every one of his fellow campers, dismantle a world-domination plot and become history's youngest (unofficial) Psychonaut all over the course of a single day. At age ten.
  • Even before receiving any training, Raz has psychic defenses fully-trained Psychonauts cannot penetrate, can Double Jump, and perform acrobatics like nobody's business. The latter due to his father's Training from Hell.
  • In the second game, his acrobat training allows him to use Hollis' thought connection power like a grappling hook. Something which, given the other students' reactions, no-one else was aware is possible. He also learns Time Bubble and Projection, cleanses the minds of five of the Psychic Six (including Nona/Lucy/Maligula), and uncovered and thwarted another world-endangering conspiracy that was brewing within the Psychonauts organization.
• Children Are Innocent: In spite of Raz's usual precociousness, the references to drugs in PSI King's Sensorium fly over his head, and he assumes the "tumble in the net" his parents like to partake in is a cocktail. On a more serious note, this is the set-up for a twist at the end of the first game: his lack of an adult perspective is the reason he misconstrues his father's Anger Born of Worry as hatred, and his real father turns out to be a normal, flawed person who just wants him to be safe.
• Circus Brat: His circus training explains his talent as a trapeze artist.
• Circus of Fear: Appropriately enough, areas of his own mind.
• Compressed Hair: His aviator hat almost completely hides his hair (a bit of his bangs peek out). When Raz is bare-headed, he's quite handsome.
• Crazy-Prepared: Exactly what prompted him to keep a pair of goggles for the express purpose of not getting his eyes plucked out?
• Daddy Issues: Raz has very serious issues with his father in the first game. Said complex is actually one of the game's final bosses, as Raz ultimately learns that the things he believed about his father were untrue and they just need to communicate better.
• Damsel out of Distress: In Rhombus of Ruin, Raz spends the entirety of the mission tied up in a chair, but his unusually high resistance to psilurium lets him save the day by Body Surfing to get them out of the mess they're stuck in.
• Dance Battler: Thanks to his lifelong training in acrobatics.
• Deadpan Snarker: Raz is pretty snarky at times, and he gets a couple in during both games.
• The Determinator: He isn't one to give up easily. Even being reduced to a disembodied brain, his first thought is to TK throw his own brain at the brain of his opponent and psychically wrestle him into submission.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: His abnormally powerful mental defenses actually work against him in the endgame: they force him to go up against the Meat Circus alone, before his father finally makes his way into his head just in time for the final boss.
• Embarrassing Nickname: His mother and grandmother call him "Pootie" while his siblings call him "Pooter".
• Everyone Has Standards: Despite being the mole even Raz is disturbed at the idea of letting Gristol be used as a human Guinea pig for Sasha’s experiments.
• Fan Boy: Of all things related to the Psychonauts, with his greatest wish is to become one as well. Seemingly fulfills his dream at the end of the first game, only find out at the second that one day of training, as much as he managed to accomplish in that time, is not enough, especially not since his recommendation came from the disgraced Ford Cruller. He also finds out that the stories he read in True Psychic Tales were sanitized for the public, and real Psychonaut business is a good deal more complicated.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: Raz's father hates psychics, and spent as much time as he could pushing his son away from the idea. Him ripping up the Whispering Rock Pamphlet was the final straw, leading Raz to run away. This is ultimately subverted, however, as most of the things Raz assumes about his father turn out to not be true. He doesn't actually hate all psychics but knows their family has many enemies due to their own past and inherent psychic abilities, keeping Raz from exposing himself to that world was a misguided attempt to protect him.
• Fatal Flaw: Impulsiveness. Raz is extremely prone to making decisions without considering all of the factors or consequences, which tends to snowball into bigger problems later down the line.
  • When Sasha Nein leaves him alone with the Censor creating device, he chooses to set it to the highest setting and causes the situation to balloon wildly out of control. Granted this turned out to be partially intentional on Sasha's part, but he did exploit Raz' impatience to test him, it just ended up backfiring at the end... Later, his decision to go into Boyd's mind leads to him letting out the Milkman arsonist personality implanted by Oleander, which puts the entire Thorney Towers ruin into danger. Raz' decision to run away from home to become a psychic, while ultimately beneficial in many ways, also leads to a point in the Meat Circus where he has to face his inner demons alone because no one who is familiar enough with him and his mental defenses is there to help him out.
  • In the sequel, his impulsiveness leads him to alter Hollis Forsythe's mind, and in the process accidentally implant a severe gambling addiction to near disastrous consequences for the Casino Mission. His decision in the previous game to run away also puts a strain on him and the rest of his family's relations when they come to find him and also nearly brings back a dangerous villain locked away in the subconscious of his great grand-aunt Nona due to her returning to the Motherlobe where Raz was currently at for the first time in decades, and thus allowing her repressed memories to begin resurfacing.
• Forgot About His Powers: Somewhere between 1 and 2, Raz lost the ability to make a shield, turn invisible, or create confusion grenades, which would have been very useful in 2. Given that Clairvoyance is similarly unavailable until Raz reaches a situation where he realizes it'd be useful in the beginning levels, it's implied that Raz literally forgot about some of his psychic powers - which arguably makes sense given how many of them he acquired in rapid succession over the course of a single day, and then the further troubles during The Rhombus of Ruin.
• Full-Contact Magic: He tends to use telekinesis as an extension of his limbs, throwing "PSI-punches" that mirror his physical movements but with much greater reach and force.
• The Gadfly: While he's a good kid, he's not above teasing some of the other kids at the camp, and can give back insults as quickly as he's given them to bullies like Bobby or Kitty - for example, teasing Elka with the button he got from Sasha Nein, claiming he found it on Nil's bed and that it came from a girl's dress. He cranks it up when dealing with his enemies, rarely missing the chance to provoke them and rub his victory in their face. Occasionally, it proves useful.
• The Gift: Raz is an extremely gifted and talented psychic. Despite having little to no training, he was able to block Coach Oleander's attempts to read his mind and is also a quick learner, able to master in days what other psychic take months (or even years) to learn. Turns out it's a family trait.
• Goggles Do Nothing: Lampshaded by the G-Men in the Milkman Conspiracy. Later answered to the Den Mother, that level's final boss, as being to prevent his eyes being plucked out...
• Gypsy Curse: The cause of his (and his entire family's) Super Drowning Skills. Except not really.
• Hates Their Parent: Raz hates his father for hating psychics and trying to dissuade him from becoming one. As a result, Raz runs away from the circus in hopes of becoming a Psychonaut like the ones he's always admired. This is ultimately revealed to be a bad misunderstanding and they make up at the end of the first game, leading to them having a much healthier relationship starting with the second.
• The Hero: Of course.
• Hero Unit: He's basically Fred's Hyper-Competent Sidekick in Waterloo World, and in the context of Fred's mental world, Raz is the Hero piece of Fred's army.
• Iconic Outfit: His turtleneck, helmet, and of course, his goggles.
• I Just Want to Be Badass: He's a big fish in a little pond, making him comically eager to blitz past proper training and get straight to the cool spy stuff. While it works just fine for him at Whispering Rock, his impatience and naivete make him an easy target for manipulation.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: He has a lot of fun riding atop the funiculars in 2. The funiculars crawl up and down the hill at a snail's pace.
• Innocent Prodigy: Raz may be a psychic prodigy, but he's still a naïve, excitable ten year old and acts like it. This makes him an easy dupe for Gristol Malik's Xanatos Gambit, since he's simply too young and dumb to notice all the red flags when "Truman" tasks him, a ten year old intern who literally started work yesterday, with a secret world-saving mission that he's not allowed to tell anyone else about.
• Insistent Terminology: Raz would like you to know that True Psychic Tales is a graphic non-fiction periodical, not a comic book.
• Instant Expert: Despite being a naïve, dorky amateur, Raz is able to quickly master any psychic power he learns due to a natural talent for it. This is part of why he's accepted into the camp. Not only is he able to master all those powers, he's skilled enough with them to cure five people, including himself, with a bit of help from his father, of their psychoses. All in one day!
• Ironic Fear: As his last name would suggest, his family used to specialize in aquatic acrobatics before the curse. He's also hydrokinetic.
• Ironic Name: Despite being an Aquato, he's hydrophobic.
• It Runs in the Family: 2 suggests the Hand of Galochio was actually created from an inherent talent for Hydrokinesis passed down from his Great Aunt, Maligula, one of the most powerful masters of Hydrokinesis ever.
• Jack of All Stats: He's nowhere near as skilled at each Psychic Ability as the specialists in each, but his sheer variety adds a lot of versatility that goes a long way towards his success.
• Jumped at the Call: Or chased the call down and pestered it to choose him until it caved, rather.
• Kaiju: Upon entering the mind of a giant mutated lungfish, he finds himself in miniature city populated by fish people. It's not exactly clear if Raz is really big, or the city is just really small, but he can't seem to resist pretending to be one of these.
• Kid Hero: He's ten years old by the time of the game.
• Kill It with Water: The Aquato family was supposedly cursed by another psychic family the Galochios to "die in water." It routinely manifests in the form of a hand made of water ready to drag Raz into the depths and drown him. Or it could just be in his head. After defeating Maligula, this becomes a Subverted Trope as now the Hand of Galochia actively helps him out.
• The Knights Who Say "Squee!": Ran away from home to become a Psychonaut, and gets to interact with and even save the lives of his heroes. Using Clairvoyance on the senior agents reveals Ford sees him as a Psychonaut already, Sasha sees him as a younger version of himself (and even tells him that outright), and Milla is very fond of him as well. It's implied Lili is very much the same way about them.
• Kung-Fu Wizard: As he was raised as an acrobat rather than a psychic, and tends to use his psychic powers in a much more tactile manner than other psychics. This often opens up avenues for psychic powers that other psychics simply hadn't considered, such as using mental connections as a grappling hook or extending the reach and power of his punches with telekinesis.
• The Lightfooted: Comes with being a Circus Brat.
• Little Professor Dialogue: Nerding out on the Psychonauts his whole life has turned him into something of an armchair psychologist.
  Raz: I believe you're suffering from extreme sensory deprivation. Years with no physical input has caused your memory and identity complexes to atrophy.
  PSI King: Oh, I am not ready for words that big yet.
• Mage Born of Muggles: Not just Muggles, but psychic-hating Muggles. Or so he thought.
• Magic Knight: Or at least the psychic equivalent, but he's got psychic powers and acrobatic skills and uses both to pull off Mario-level platforming.
• Making a Splash: The revelation his family's curse was actually a placebo created by Ford to keep Maligula at bay (and that Maligula is his great-aunt) implies Raz might have tremendous untapped potential for hydrokinesis, something supported by the fact the Hand of Galochio starts saving him from drowning during the postgame in 2.
• Manic Pixie Dream Guy: Lili thinks of him as a (admittedly kinda dorky) Knight in Shining Armor here to rescue her from the greatest monster of all—boredom.
  Lili: Everything's new to me now thanks to you!
• Meaningful Name: Mr. Aquato has a Super Drowning Skills curse and (an altered spelling of) the first name of an infamous hypnotist monk who supposedly died by drowning (eventually).
  • The "Raz" part of his name comes from Razmig "Raz" Mavlian, a concept artist who works at Double Fine.
• Mentor's New Hope: There appears to be a deep-seated connection between Ford and Raz that is rooted in Ford's guilt over the past wrongs he committed against Nona and her family. This connection seems to be subconscious in nature, but it is strong enough to have influenced Ford's decision to mentor Raz at Whispering Rock. It seems that Ford may be driven by an inner desire to make amends for his past actions, and that this desire has led him to take Raz under his wing in an effort to set things right.
• Messianic Archetype: To Sheegor. Using Clairvoyance on her will reveal she sees Raz as Jesus.
• Middle Child Syndrome: He's right in the middle of five kids. While it's not the only reason he has issues with his family, it's clear even in the first game how this has influenced his personality, and Raz has mixed feelings about reuiniting with them in the sequel.
• My Beloved Smother: Raz's reaction his mom fawning over him indicates this.
• Naïve Newcomer: While he has read every book possible about being a Psychonaut, his view on how becoming one actually works is still pretty oversimplified.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Raz is dubbed "Eggbeater" by Hollis during the casino mission. It may not seem like much, but it's established "egg" is a metaphor for "brain" in the entire series, so Hollis gave Raz a name that means he'll scramble your brain.
• New Meat: As the newest intern of the Psychonauts, he starts off with an adversarial relationship with the other older interns who are either typicalyl dismissive of him or not above pinning their duties on him. Over time they warm up to him and become more willing to help him.
• Nice Guy: He's not perfect, but he's definitely a lot more agreeable and empathetic than a good percent of the other characters. It's particularly noticeable in the final stretch of the game, in which he and Lili are the only campers who stick around to help after he rebrains all of them. Despite having a bit of a reckless streak and occasionally being a bit cheeky, his heart is in the right place, and it's clear he's in this for more than himself.
  • He’s even nicer in the second game, being incredibly sweet, polite, and considerate even to inanimate objects. So long as the person (or thing) in question doesn’t antagonize Raz first, he’s bound to treat them as friendly as possible.
• Oblivious to Love: In the first game, he's oblivious to Lili's affection for him, and it takes him a good while for Raz to catch on, despite all evidence presented to him. Early in the first game, Lili is tending to flowers, and accidentally thinks to herself that she wants to kiss him, not realising Raz can also read minds, but all this leads to is a slightly confused reaction by Raz, who doesn't give it much thought. It's only until later in the first game, when she literally asks to make out with him when in present danger for him to get the message. To some extent it's Justified, as he's only ten years old, so he's not exactly looking for the signs. Not only that, but he has a very busy three days to boot.
• Official Couple: With Lili, though it should be noted Lili did this by force; exclaiming Raz is "my boyfriend" multiple times to various people (and a lungfish). It takes a little longer for him to really process this, but it's sealed by the end of the first game.
• Opposites Attract: With Lili, her being somewhat more tame and jaded between the two of them at times. She a little more of a recluse when compared to how Raz is more gregarious.
• Only Sane Man: At certain points in the real world, thanks to psychics generally being off-kilter at the best of times. Sometimes, quite literally in the mental worlds; he's the only sanity present in some minds when brain-hopping.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: He only needs a single prop for the agents in Boyd's mind to think he's a specific job. Justified because they do the exact same, and it was probably done so for Rule of Funny.
• Parental Sexuality Squick:
  • Raz advises his father to think of the hottest thing he can imagine to use pyrokinesis; his father responds that he'll think of Raz's mother, much to Raz's dismay.
  • Raz is also Squicked by Nona saying that she will fool around with Ford if given the chance. invoked
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: He's already much stronger than he looks without the powers. With them, he can rip fire hydrants out of the concrete and launch them at enemies' faces.
• Please, Don't Leave Me: In the final stretch of Rhombus of Ruin, he panics when it seems like the rest of the Psychonauts are leaving him behind as the Underwater Base explodes. Luckily, they had already carried his body aboard their jet and he simply hadn't realized it due to spending most of the mission hopping from mind to mind with clairvoyance.
  Raz: Hey. Hey, you guys! What about me?! Don't just leave me here! You guys?!
• Please Keep Your Hat On: Maybe it's because we get so little time to get used to it, but when he finally takes his hat off during the very end of the game, he just doesn't look as cool.
• Power Incontinence: While he generally has control of his powers, he can be somewhat prone to accidental and inopportune mind-reading; and his hydrophobia mixes so badly with his innate talent for hydrokinesis that it manifests in the Hand of the Galochios.
• Power Stereotype Flip: A boy with the surname 'Aquato' and the grandnephew of possibly the most powerful hydrokinetic of all time has something of a Pyromaniac streak.
• Puppy Love: He's intrigued when Lili's blurts that she wants to make out with him. By the end of the game, they've officially hooked up and have already shared a few kisses.
• Psychic Block Defense:
  • How he is first introduced as a badass when the camp coach fails to probe his mind in the opening cutscene. Keep in mind, Coach Oleander is a Psychonaut with years of training. Raz received little to no psychic training whatsoever. Others such as Sasha and his father have commented on it being uncommon for someone his age. Though it also works against him at times, such as the final level of the first game, where his strong psychic defenses make it very difficult for anyone to get in and help him when he has to face his personal demons and Oleander's demons alone.
    Coach Oleander: Armored like a tank!
  • It also protects him from the effects of Psilirium to a degree.
• Pyromaniac: He's unusually giddy when it comes time to learn Pyrokinesis.
• Red Baron: He's nicknamed "Goggalor" during the Lungfishopolis stage.
• The Runaway: Running in the opposite direction of most.
  Donatella: I mean, if little children never ran away from home, where would the circus get her workers, huh?
  Raz: Uh...
• Rummage Sale Reject: Wears a bright green turtleneck, a flight helmet and jacket, and a large pair of tinted goggles. His outfit makes a lot more sense once you realize he's deliberately aping how Sasha looks, with his turtleneck and coat directly matching Sasha's own fashion sense.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: Probably might be because he is a ten-year-old kid, but there are multiple moments in the series where he dishes out very shrill screams.
• Signature Headgear: Aviator helmet and omnipresent goggles.
• Significant Green-Eyed Redhead: He has bright green eyes, red hair poking out of his flight helmet, and is the game's protagonist and a psychic prodigy. His father is also green-eyed and a redhead, so it's In the Blood.
• Skilled, but Naive: He's got a lot of talent, but not the greatest sense of how to employ it responsibly.
• Stealth Pun: He's a psychic acrobat—i.e. an expert in mental gymnastics.
• Stronger Than They Look: He's a short, rail-thin preteen who has no trouble performing gymnastic feats requiring substantial upper body strength, and his memory vault shows him effortlessly balancing a 70 lb barbell◊ with his feet while reading.
• Strong Family Resemblance: He has his father's red hair and green eyes, but he gets most of his looks from his mother, as shown when she appears in 2.
• Super Drowning Skills: To the point where even figurative depictions of water in the mental worlds (such as cardboard waves) can damage him. Justified, since his family was cursed by a rival circus family, the Galochios, to always drown when submerged in water. Either Raz has created a psychic placebo, or there really is an external curse. It turns out to be both in a way, as the curse was implanted into his grandmother's mind by Ford, and both his father and himself believe it to the point where Raz sees the Hand which tries to drown him, but after defeating Maligula, the 'curse' is broken, and now the Hand helps Raz out of a watery death.
• Thrill Seeker: Has trouble settling for less adrenaline-pumping activities, and doesn't cope well with getting shunted into the Psychonauts intern program because of it.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Stops hurting animals with his psychic powers between the first and second game, even gaining the ability to pet them telepathically. He'll often sheepishly bring up his behavior from the first game, showing he does regret how he behaved.
• Tuckerization: According to the 20 Double Fine Years book, he's named for former staff member Razmig Mavlian.
• Unflattering ID Photo: Raz was not remotely prepared for his Intern profile photo◊.
• Unreliable Narrator:
  • Almost everything he says about his father, due to a long-held misunderstanding.
  • In his recap of the first game for Psychonauts 2, he insists that he blended in seamlessly with the other campers. He absolutely did not.
• Unsportsmanlike Gloating: Has a habit of doing this to his enemies if they're particularly unlikable.
• Unwitting Pawn: Gristol Malik finds it comically easy to manipulate him, and is all too happy to rub it in his face when Raz enters his mind.
  Raz: It's just a weird puppet show... Hey, wait, I'm in this one!
• Vocal Evolution: His voice in the first game was, for lack of a better term, less "Horvitz-ey" and is more subdued and less squeaky when compared to Ruins and 2, where his voice is basically like listening to Kaos or Zim, just minus the Large Ham aspects of those characters. Considering the 12 year gap between 1 and Ruins, the change in voice is unavoidable.
• Warrior Therapist: Helps alleviate the mental trauma of the minds of those he enters in the series using encouragement, kindness, sympathy, and perseverance. Not to mention his powerful psychic abilities to beat the crap out of the personal demons.
• Weaksauce Weakness: He has Super Drowning Skills, because of a curse on his family to die in water.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: While he never gives any indication of it outright; he seems to simply dislike his father more than anything, the fact that the image of his father that we see in his mind constantly belittles and taunts him for being a disappointment could very well be an indication that he secretly wants his approval.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: A product of his experiences across three games, having seen quite a few adult people, including a few he personally looks up to, and even members of his own family, at their worst, helping many of them through deep emotional issues while learning life lessons and responsible use of his powers along the way. At 10 years old, he's already learned more about trauma than many people much older, and handled himself with empathy and compassion along the way.
  • Though he does have his limits, in the postgame of 2, he admits that he's having trouble deciding whether he's angry at Ford for what he did or not.
  Raz: [upon looking at the mural of Ford in the postgame] I don't know if I should be angry or sad about what you did, Ford. Maybe I'll figure it out later. When I'm not ten.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: He's deathly afraid of water, and for very good reason.
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Early on in 2, Raz learns the hard way that part of being a Psychonaut is knowing how changing people's minds via forced means as a first resort can have dire consequences. He takes this lesson to heart from then on, by asking for consent before entering someone's mind unless it's an emergency.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: Raz's curse is purely psychosomatic, arising from a mix of severe hydrophobia and an innate talent for hydrokinesis.

Lili Zanotto

Voiced by: Nikki Rapp

"You are so immature! (thinking) And cute! When are you just gonna shut up and kiss me?"

The aloof and standoffish daughter of the Grand Head of the Psychonauts, and veteran at the camp, Lili is a powerful psychic and serial truant who would rather garden than go to class.

She falls in love with Raz at first sight, and he rekindles her excitement for the Psychonauts, which had faded into apathy because the world "didn't need them anymore." It is then revealed that she is both an avid fan of True Psychic Tales, more than ready to throw down in a fight, and quite forward in pursuit of a relationship.

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• Action Girl: Her first reaction to getting captured is to try to set her captor on fire. Her first reaction to realizing she's trapped in an old fighter jet is to blow it up with bombs. In general, she's eager to start a fight and has to be talked down from just beating up a bad guy in front of her.
• Art Evolution: Lili's skin tone was changed from pale yellow to a light yellow between Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2. This is perhaps most obvious when you judge her appearance in Rhombus of Ruin with her follow-up appearance in 2 (as Rhombus of Ruin is an Immediate Sequel), as while the model for her is identical between Ruins and 2, her skin tone has noticeably changed. This was likely done to better fit with the skin tone of her father (which has always been depicted as light yellow), as well as keeping it consistent with the other characters. Her hair has also gone from a very dark red and brown, to essentially auburn, making her Fiery Redhead character more obvious.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: At the beginning with Raz, but it eventually dies down.
• Better with Non-Human Company: She much prefers to talk to plants than people and tends to be very curt with or aggressive towards the latter.
• Burning with Anger: In 2, when she confronts Gristol in his own mind, she sets the gift shop around her ablaze as she angrily and violently interrogates him over the whereabouts of her father's brain.
• Character Development: A subtle example regarding her feelings for Raz: in the original Psychonauts, if Raz uses Clairvoyance on Lili, she sees him as a Prince Charming holding a rose, as she fell in Love at First Sight and has an idealized view of Raz. In Psychonauts 2, if Raz uses Clairvoyance on Lili before Raz speaks to her and cheers her up, she sees him as a judge due to thinking she's a terrible daughter to Truman, and that Raz appears to be accusing her of being the traitor. If he uses Clairvoyance on Lili after he speaks to her and cheers her up, she no longer sees him as a Prince Charming. Instead, she sees him as a shining, slightly better version of his real self, dressed in his ordinary outfit. She now loves Raz as his real self, and his image is a slightly better version in her mind because now Raz's real self is preferable to the prince charming image she had before.
• Child Prodigy: She's a veteran of the camp, is a gifted psychic, and has passed every test and earned every merit badge by the time she meets Raz, plus she has a whole other ability that Raz doesn't (herbaphony, the ability to talk to plants).
• Closet Geek: Excitedly rattles off an incident from a specific issue of the in-universe "True Psychic Tales" comic that mirrors what's happening at the camp, then stops half-way through when Raz gives her a Fascinating Eyebrow, to which she sails off in a huff and finds it a little embarrassing.
• Commonality Connection: With Razputin. Both have a certain thrill for adventure, both are gifted psychics at a very young age, both get along well with Dogen, trying to look out for him. Plus they're some of the more saner and serious of the campers and know how to make a good joke or two, and Lili has certain perceived issues with her Dad. Psychonauts 2 adds even more connections, such as both being the grandniece/nephew of one of the original Psychic Seven (Bob Zanatto in Lilli's case) and both having a notable Power Stereotype Flip involving their shared talent and interest in setting things on fire.
• Daddy's Girl: Considering how worried she is about her father, she definitely is this.
• Damsel in Distress: Despite being badass, she still needs to be rescued and it's a major plot point in the first game. It annoys her terribly.
• Defiant Captive: In spite of being at Loboto's mercy with nothing but a head cold standing between her and losing her brain, she still talks back and tries to set Loboto on fire.
• Deuteragonist: A female one, as well as the Love Interest.
• Extremely Protective Child: Once she finds her father's kidnapper, she immediately tackles them, sets their giftshop on fire, beats them into unconsciousness with a plushie, and insults the quality of their merchandise.
• Family Eye Resemblance: She gets her eyes from Truman.
• Faux Action Girl: In the first game, where she spends most of her involvement in the plot as a Damsel in Distress. However, by the second game, she takes a more active role in her own escape.
• Fiery Redhead: She's got a very dark-reddish hair color, and is shown to be incredibly intense and scrappy when in a sticky situation as is shown in her attempt to incinerate Dr. Loboto in the first game, and her burning of the gift shop in Gristol Malik's head. She also prefers to use Pyrokinesis when she isn't focused on her specialty of Herbaphony.
• Girl in the Tower: Is held by Loboto at the top of Thorney Towers after she's snatched off the lakeshore by the Hulking Lungfish, setting Raz's destination for the second half of the game.
• Goth: She matches this trope in style and general attitude, being aloof and brooding and wearing dark clothing and makeup. The garden in the Quarry in 2 has skull shaped bushes which Raz notes that it's for her to work out her "darker thoughts".
• Heroes Love Dogs: According to Campster, she has a dog.
• In-Series Nickname: Later on in 2, Raz gives her the codename "Potato Masher" and she loves it.
• Just Ignore It: How she deals with Elton's romantic advances. Unfortunately due to Elton's complete and utter lack of social graces this means that he thinks she's giving him the all clear to be her boyfriend. Her Campster page shows that her avoiding the other campers means that they also think Elton is her boyfriend because he's their only source of information and humorously leads to a stretch of comments revealing that he's "cheating" on her with Milka that, much like the rest of her Campster page, Lili entirely ignores.
• Little Miss Badass:
  Lili: I'm gonna kill you so much.
• Little Miss Snarker: Ten-ish years old, serious, and critically snarky.
• Love at First Sight: Watch her face and knees in the opening cutscene when Raz starts talking after taking off his googles. A good chunk of her interactions with Raz involve her trying, and failing, to repress this fact.
• Love Interest: Of Raz in the games. In the first game, she tries getting Raz's attention by stalking him, and is completely enamored with him when he drops in to camp at the start of the game.
• Only Sane Woman: Her feelings for Raz and jaded personality aside, she is the only one who takes the de-braining conspiracy happening in the first game seriously, all of the other campers too caught up in their own personal minutia (when their brains aren't gone) to help.
• Opposites Attract: With Razputin, her being somewhat more tame and jaded between the two of them at times. She a little more of a recluse when compared to how Raz is more gregarious.
• Parting-Words Regret: She spends most of the second game agonizing over the fact that the last thing she said to her father was "I never want to follow in your footsteps".
• Power Stereotype Flip: Not only is she not much of a Caring Gardener despite her herbaphony, she's also something of a pyromaniac.
• Punctuated Pounding: Delivers one to Gristol in his mental world towards the end of 2.
  Lili: Where. *thwack* Is. *thwack* My. *thwack* Father's. *thwack* BRAIN?
• Pyromaniac: Even Raz comments how better she is at Pyrokinesis than him.
• Seen It All: You'd think a summer camp for psychics would get a little more excitement out of her. But no, she's been there enough times to be totally over it. Until Raz comes to camp and Oleander's evil plan begins, of course. She's initially more excited because something new is happening at the camp, as opposed to the world being endangered. She's also the daughter of the head of the Psychonauts, so she also has plenty of inside info.
• Self-Proclaimed Love Interest: She doesn't ask Raz out so much as decide he's her boyfriend, and she refers to him as such well before he's comfortable (though not opposed to) doing the same.
• Talking to Plants: She is very fond of plants and has the rare ability to commune with them. Come Rhombus of Ruin, her Psilirium induced hallucination has her speaking to plants. Or rather bombs she thinks are plants. In 2, Lili is seen talking to plants, and that she likely took after her great-uncle Bob, himself a psychic botanist.
• Thrill Seeker: Craves exciting, romantic adventure beyond what a psychic summer camp can bring her. The fact Raz's arrival coincides with a nefarious plot for them to foil only fuels her crush.
  Raz: Lili, a deranged madman is building an army of psychic death tanks to take over the world, and there's no one to stop him except for you and me!
  Lili: Oh my god!... Let's make out!
• Tsundere: She spent most of her time in the first game playfully making snide remarks at Raz before admitting that she likes him.
• Uptown Girl: She is the highly-trained daughter of the Grand Head of the Psychonauts and ends up dating Razputin, a fellow psychic born and raised in a traveling circus, who becomes the newest addition to the Psychonauts.
• When She Smiles: When you take a close look, she does have a fantastic smile for a goth.

Ford Cruller

Voiced by: David Kaye

"This training facility is built right smack on top of the largest Psitanium deposit known to man. It runs under this whole valley and makes this a very critical area for the Psychonauts, so I'm here to look after it. And to make sure you little spoonbenders don't kill each other."

Founder of the Psychonauts, their former leader and all-around Cool Old Guy who has retired from active duty and now works as camp's resident caretaker. Due to his mind being destroyed 20 years ago in a psychic duel and the Psitanium deposit only keeping his mind together at close distances, he developed multiple personas; among which are that of the local docksman, the camp janitor, the camp ranger and the camp salesman/cook.

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• Affectionate Nickname: Lucy/Nona sometimes calls him "Crully".
• Beware the Nice Ones: Cruller may come off as a bit of a goofball in his various disguises, but try to use Pyrokinesis on him in the Main Lodge and he'll threaten Raz with bodily harm.
• Big Damn Heroes: When he comes in to help Sasha and Milla combat Coach Oleander at the top of Thorney Towers, and manages to make Oleander sneeze his own brains out with a witty battle line to go along with it.
• Big Good: He's the founder of the Psychonauts and is Raz's biggest ally in the first game. Even in the 2nd game Truman Zanotto, the head of the Psychonauts is out of commission, meaning Ford is still the most active and helpful Psychonaut.
• Broken Ace: In his prime, he was the one who brought together the Psychic Six, six (really seven) individuals that founded the psychic techniques and technology that would go on to create the Psychonauts. After subjecting himself to the Astralathe in order to protect the truth of Maligula's fate, he was left with a Split Personality, keeping himself (relatively) sane with the large reservoir of psitanium under Whispering Rocks, the rest of the Psychonauts dismissing him as a Scatterbrained Senior babysitting Psychic Children at summer camp.
• Broken Pedestal: Ford is remembered as the hero who stopped a great evil at the price of his own mind. He did stop Maligula, but then violated the Psychonauts' greatest rule about altering people's minds. Altering Maligula's own mind, then that of her nephew so he'd accept her as his mother, Maligula's own sister, whom Maligula killed. Ford also instilled in them their deep fear of water, basically making him responsible for the psychosomatic, hydrokinetic "curse" that has tormented Raz and his family for so long. Furthermore Ford's current state is self-inflicted, not a result of his duel with Maligula, as he attempted to alter his own memories as well. Raz and his father are both quite put out by this revelation, and it takes a toll on Raz's respect for Ford during the later half of Psychonauts 2, to the point that he angrily calls out Ford just before the penultimate level.
• Cerebus Syndrome: His presence in the first game is always played up with humor, such as hiding in Raz's head and only coming out when he smells bacon, and his demeanor is always that of the Cool Old Guy. The complete opposite is true for the second game, where it's learned just how messed up his past is. Throughout, his silly attitude is replaced with one of constant forlorn remorse, anxiety, and well-deserved shame. To be fair, when Ford admits to Raz in the first game he's incapable of being a Psychonaut anymore thanks to his disability, it's tragic.
• Cool Old Guy: He's an old man, but he's also a powerful psychic which is displayed when his mind is stable.
• Companion Cube: In his "Admiral Cruller" persona in the first game, he's oddly protective of one of his canoes, even caressing it while stating "Don't worry now, baby, nobody's ever gonna hurt you again." in response to an apparent rash of psychic-fish-related canoe damage (implied to be Linda the lake monster). Raz even asks him if he's in love with it. Given the reveal in the second game about what he did to protect Lucrecia- who was, after all, a famous hydrokinetic- this oddity takes on a much more serious light.
• Connected All Along: Psychonauts 2 reveals that Ford actually loved Lucrecia Mux, who turns out to be Raz's great Aunt, known to him as Nona, and the evil mass-murdering psychic known as Maligula to the rest of the world. Aware that Lucrecia's madness and actions were not entirely her fault, and unwilling to kill her, Ford ultimately subdued her on his own, taking her along with Helmut Fulbear's recovered brain to the Astralathe where he used the device to seal Maligula inside Nona's mind, restoring her to an amnesiac self and letting her assume the role of her deceased sister Marona, manipulating both her and a young Augustus Aquato's minds to trick them both into believe she was his mother, and implanting them with a deep fear of water lest Maligula accidentally resurface within Lucrecia's personality. This in turn eventually became the family 'curse' and lead to Augustus attempting to toughen up his children to protect them from their 'enemies', in effect making Ford the psychic who cursed the family. Notably, Ford himself doesn't seem to be fully aware of the extent of his and Raz's connection on a conscious level until Raz manages to restore enough of his shattered mindscape, but is implied to recognise it on a subconscious level, hence why he sought Razputin out to mentor at Whispering Rock.
• Desk Jockey: Despite being the Psychonauts' founder and former top agent, he's now limited to the role of a dispatcher because of his advanced age and Split Personality issue. It comes with the added wrinkle that he has to be anonymous while doing so, hiding that he's sending agents on missions from the Psychonauts as a whole, since they all think he's a loon.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Attack Ford and he'll threaten to kill Raz if he doesn't knock his behaviour off.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After sacrificing a lot to protect Lucrecia, including shattering his own mind to keep her safe, and losing out on their relationship so she can safely live with her family, the Playable Epilogue of 2 gives them a Maybe Ever After.
• Eccentric Mentor: He comes quite close to being this, but leans a bit too much to the wacky side to fit. Also, all the other Psychonauts, save for Sasha and Milla, believe him a loon unfit for duty.
• Game-Breaking Injury: His mind was shattered while fighting a powerful psychic 20 years before the game, separating it into several different personalities. His mind is only focused and stable while close to large deposits of Psitanium, but he still isn't as strong as he once was. The second game reveals that it wasn't Maligula who damaged his mind, but Ford himself, who did this to forget the pain over having to tamper with his beloved's memories to save her. After giving her a family, he turned the Astralathe on himself.
• I Banged Your Mom: Or rather, Raz's great aunt/fake grandmother. Raz is not happy to hear the more intimate details of their getting back together.
  Nona: He thinks if he can get me out on a canoe at sunset, I won't be able to resist his advances!
  Raz: Okay, that's enough!
  Nona: He's right.
• I Did What I Had to Do: It turns out that Ford psychically altered the minds of both Lucy and Augustus Aquato (Lucy's nephew) to believe they were mother and son to keep her safe and give Augustus a parent after Lucy accidentally killed her sister and brother-in-law. Raz is distinctly unhappy to learn that the woman he thought was his grandmother was actually his grandmother's killer. He says the trope verbatim when Raz asks him. Downplayed though as even if Ford felt they had to be done, he thinks they were still terrible mistakes and he feels extreme guilt over them.
• Intergenerational Friendship: He's old enough to be Raz's grandfather and is good friends with him.
• Irony: Due to how Psychic Powers work, he could be considered to be The Archmage. He also, as shown in Psychonauts 2, does not believe in actual magic.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Memory Vaults show that when he was younger, Ford was very handsome and well-groomed.
• Love Makes You Evil: Not evil persay, mind you, but he was rather lenient with Lucrecia's crimes (which included flooding peaceful protesters and drowning them) and downplayed how bad they were because he still loved her. Granted, however, she wasn't entirely herself when doing so. He then psychically warped Lucy and Augustus' minds to keep the former from hurting anybody or being hurt, an action that is shown as very wrong and one of the worst things a psychic can do.
• Me's a Crowd: Ford claims that he can psychically project himself across multiple locations at Whispering Rocks (including Raz's mind) as a perk that comes with his shattered psyche, though it's left vague if this is actually the case or if he's just using the underground transit system to get around. With the introduction of the "Archetype" ability in 2, the former is entirely possible.
• The Mentor: To Raz, naturally.
• Mission Control: Serves this role to Raz.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Even if he feels it was necessary to some degree, he is wracked with guilt concerning everything involving Nona and Augustus, this overwhelming guilt is even a major factor that lead to Ford shattering his own psyche with the Astralathe. When Raz calls out Ford on his actions, Ford does not argue with him at all and fully admits he was a young fool back then.
• Old Master: As one of the Psychic Six and the man who assembled the original Psychonauts team, he definitely qualifies as this... when he's actually mentally sane, and not one of his split personalities.
• Phlebotinum Dependence: Downplayed. Ford's mind was shattered in a psychic duel, and without the Psitanium deposit keeping him all-there and reasonably sane, his split personalities start emerging.
• Psychic Teleportation: He's the only Psychic to display this power in the game, using it to pull Raz back to his hideout to regroup when asked to and to send him back to the general vicinity of where he was pulled from. His split personalities being everywhere in the camp without ever being seen walking to their posts is not due to this, being a more mundane hidden cart network instead.
• Renaissance Man: He is a park ranger, a barber, a mail clerk, a janitor, an oarsman, a chef (of questionable skill), and is good at bowling in addition to being a skilled secret agent.
• Second Love: To Lucrecia Mux. She had lost her first husband Gelsin Mux to war prior to meeting Ford and the rest of the Psychic Seven.
• Shattered Sanity: True Psychic Tales tells everyone that Ford Cruller's mind was broken in a epic battle with an evil psychic, and that's definitely true enough if you see him around the camp. In the sequel, you find that his mind is so shattered that you cannot access most of it while Ford is "sane", you have to access his mind while he is in different personas to access those portions of his mind (and return them back to normal). Fittingly, his broken psyche is represented as a shattered mirror, and you have to find the broken fragments to repair him. However, it turns out that his psyche was not broken from a duel with a powerful psychic, at least not directly. He actually shattered his own mind deliberately to hide what he had done to Lucrecia, his once upon a time love and more recently mass murderer Maligula.
• Split Personality: He develops multiple personalities when going out of the Psitanium deposit's range, which manifested in staff members of the camp based on his location. None of the campers notice that every staff member besides the teachers are the same guy.
  • Explored in the Sequel - being summoned to HQ by the smell of bacon, he immediately reverts into 3 seperate personalites, that nobody on base actually recognizes... and you actually get to explore their separate mindscapes this time since Truman gives Raz the mission of trying to Fix Cruller to combat the Delugionist threat, since Ford is the one who defeated Maligula in the past.
• Standardized Leader: Every member of the Psychic Six have a specialization whether it is talking to animals or Hydrokinesis but Ford seems to rely on just being a very powerful psychic.
• Stronger Than They Look: Even though psychics acknowledge Ford as a powerful psychic, he is the only person in either game who can force another psychic out of his mind at will; usually, Raz has to be completely depleted of mental energy to be ejected.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Bacon. He comes out of Raz's ear whenever he brings bacon out. In fact, in the Sequel, Raz is literally able to summon him to accidentally teleport himself to HQ by being near a piece of bacon and slowly backing away from it whilst Ford is distracted by it, until his entire psychic projection is fully pulled out of Raz's head and he physically manifests inside the building, all without fully processing what Raz is doing because he's just that focused on the food — and because it's a specially seasoned bacon that is only at the Motherlobe, and is considered addictive to even non-bacon addicts.
• Unknown Rival: He doesn't recognize Gristol Malik despite the latter considering Ford his nemesis.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: We learn in the sequel that Ford is, to a certain degree, accidentally responsible for basically everything that happened in the story. He and Lucrecia began to perform risky psychic experiments to push the limits on what was possible, which ended up stripping away a lot of Lucrecia's natural mental defenses. When Lucrecia returned to her country to stop a war, the trauma of it awoke something very dark within her that had nothing left to contain it. She went on to become The Dragon for the Gzar, which culminated in her accidentally killing hundreds of her own countrymen, including her own sister and brother-in-law, leading to her snapping and becoming an Omnicidal Maniac. Ford, who couldn't bring himself to kill her after subduing her, erased and altered her and her orphaned nephew's memories to make them think they were mother and son and then implanted a fear of water in their minds to keep Lucrecia's inner demon from returning. The orphaned nephew went on to be Raz's father and the deposed son of the Gzar that Lucrecia worked for went on to be the main villain of 2, as well as the Greater-Scope Villain of Rhombus of Ruin.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Played for Laughs. Will slap Raz if he decides he doesn't want to help save the world.
  • Decidedly not Played for Laughs in the sequel. Ford is not happy at all when Raz restores his psyche.
    Ford: I've done a terrible thing. And so have you.
  • Later is on the receiving end of this. When Raz finds out about Ford's actions concerning Nona and his father, Raz is absolutely furious and calls him out. Ford himself completely agrees Raz has every right to criticize him and admits his past actions were terrible mistakes that now need to be fixed.
• What the Hell, Player?: If the player decides to Smelling Salts themselves out of the Very Definitely Final Dungeon in 2 (Lucy/Nona's mind after Maligula's reawakening), Ford will be extremely upset and chew them out.
• Younger Than They Look: The timeline established in Psychonauts 2, especially compared to the ages of the other Psychic Six would place Ford's age somewhere in his late 50s to early 70s when he outwardly looks closer to his 80s or 90s. Presumably due to the trauma of his shattered mind and all the mental strain that's come along with it, he's aged extremely poorly compared to his companions.

Camilla "Milla" Vodello

Voiced by: Alexis Lezin

"I mean look at my hair, darling. How can hair this fabulous not be on TV?"

A Brazilian party girl known as the Mental Minx, this sexy spy is known for both her levitation skills and being able to throw wild parties. She's also a kind soul who loves working with kids. She's partners with Sasha Nein.

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• Accidental Misnaming: Sasha ended up doing this the first time they met if Raz asks Milla about the pronunciation of her name; she says that her name is pronounced "Mi-LA", given what it's short for, but Sasha accidentally pronounced it "Mi-YA" instead (along with a number of other characters in the first game). She thought it was cute, and allowed him to keep using that version. Eventually, it caught on to the point that she accepts being referred to as "Mi-YA" and actually rather likes it.
• Battle Couple: She and Sasha seem to have shades of this, with vault memories in her mind showing various missions of the two together as though she remembers them fondly. Especially this one.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Despite her friendly demeanor, she's a talented secret agent. Additionally, in Psychonauts 2, after Raz accidentally implants a dangerous gambling addiction into Hollis Forscythe's mind, she threatens to levitate him all the way into space if he ever does something like that to her.
• Broken Bird: Averted despite what you can learn about her. Outwardly she is very bubbly and fun loving (and her mental world reflects that, being a 24/7 disco party), but tucked away in a corner of her mind is a small room that reveals that she used to run an orphanage that burned down while she was away getting groceries, killing all of the children inside. Though she is obviously burdened by this horrible tragedy, the game treats how she locks it away as a healthy coping mechanism, and there is nothing implying that her overall personality is a front for something darker or more depressed.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Before she became a Psychonaut, she ran an orphanage filled with children that she loved and cared for. However, one day while she was away, the orphanage caught fire and burned down. Milla returned just in time to psychically hear the screams and dying words of all the children who were caught inside. At present day, even though it still haunts her, she manages to cope with it by locking it all away in a small part of her mind. It's ever present but doesn't overtake the rest of her life.
• Disco Dan: Her mental landscape overfloweth with psychedelia and lava lamps.
• The Empath: Her other specialty. She spends most of Psychonauts 2 monitoring the global psychic background to try to locate Deluginist activities, based on the fear any mention of Maligula creates.
• Friend to All Children: She has always been caring for children. Prior to her status as a Psychonaut, she worked at an orphanage. But one day, she returned from the grocery store to find the place ablaze. Due to psychic abilities, she heard the voices of the children as they perished among the flames, and the nightmares haunt her to this very day. In fact, using Clairvoyance on her will reveal she views Raz as a baby, which explains her protectiveness. This ends up being indirectly used against her when she's under the effects of Psilirium in the Rhombus of Ruin, as they caused her to hallucinate a scenario around her where a bus full of children was at risk of being run over by a runaway train.
• Hartman Hips: 90% of her torso is hips.
• Mama Bear: If she's taking care of a group of kids, do not hurt them, or else.
• Mind over Matter: She's described by Raz as the world's greatest levitation expert and specializes in Levitation studies at the camp. She hardly ever walks around; if she needs to get somewhere, she usually floats.
• The McCoy: She is the bubbly, emotional, and energetic counterpart to Sasha's melancholic, logical, and controlled Spock.
• Ms. Fanservice: How she sees herself in her memory reel, at least. She even winks while posing in the trailer for the sequel!◊
• My Greatest Failure: The deaths of the children in her care, even though she really wasn't at fault.
• Orphanage of Love: Was once the caretaker of one, filled with children whom she loved and happily cared for. It ended badly through no fault of hers, when the orphanage was destroyed in a fire, and the dying screams of the children haunt her to this day.
• Personality Powers: Bubbly, optimistic, high-energy, and a master of levitation.
• Proud Beauty: She's quite proud of her looks and goes out of her way to describe how fabulous her hair is to Raz.
• Ship Tease: With Sasha in her second memory reel. From the way he speaks about her, he does seem to have a lot of respect for her, at least. Scott Campbell (the official artist) and Tim Schafer, as well as whoever runs the Double Fine official Tumblr all seem to ship the two together.
• Shout-Out: Using Clairvoyance on her in the second game has her see Raz as an Austin Powers lookalike.
• Silk Hiding Steel: Milla might be nice and motherly towards Raz to a fault, but after finding out that Raz messed with Hollis' mind, she drops the friendliness for just the briefest of moments to tell him in a deadly serious tone that he sincerely hopes for his sake he never attempts to pull a similar stunt on her, because she will to levitate him straight "to the moon" if he tries.
• Spy Catsuit: In one reel, as a memory of a former mission. She's levitating into a sewer, Mission: Impossible-style, to retrieve the President's stolen brain, which is being protected by angry alligators.
• Statuesque Stunner: Milla's official ID card lists her height as 7'2". Working with her and the similarly heighted Sasha greatly exacerbated Oleander's Napoleon Complex.
  Oleander: You tall people!
• Stepford Smiler: Averted. Her past is genuinely terrible, but according to Word of God, her mind is an example of what a healthy mind should look like, indicating that she's risen above it.

Sasha Nein

Voiced by: Stephen Stanton

"Remember: Your talent will always set you apart, Razputin. Sometimes isolation is a good thing. It can lead to important discoveries."

Son of a cobbler, this German superspy seems woefully mismatched with his partner, the obnoxiously colorful Milla Vodello. He displays almost no emotion, though he seems to have a weird sense of humor buried deep down. He takes an interest in Raz's psychic abilities and offers him special training.

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• Anguished Declaration of Love: Maybe. Near the start of Rhombus of Ruin right before the jet crashes into the ocean he tries to tell something to Milla. It's especially serious because he's the first person to refer to her by her full first name in the entire series.
  Sasha: Camilla, I need to tell you something.
• Batman Gambit: Sasha reveals after Raz's PSI Blast training he knew that Raz, who after all is a ten year old boy, would get bored with the low setting and overdo it. It was all a part of his training.
• Berserk Button: Tiffany lamps. In the first game, he teaches Razputin to turn his anger into a blast of psychic energy by summoning a tiffany lamp. A tiffany lamp was next to his mother's bedside as she died, possibly explaining it. It was later clarified by the devs that Sasha actually does like tiffany lamps, but he hates cheaply made knockoffs; you can find an actual lamp in his office at the Motherlobe.
• Closet Geek: In Rhombus of Ruin, Milla outs his fascination with aliens and UFOs, one of his big life goals being to use psychic powers to contact aliens in space. He even hallucinates that he is working with aliens while under the effects of psirilium.
• The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: Literally, he's the son of a cobbler and Psychonauts 2 reveals there was a time where he only wore socks with sandals. This is presumably due to trauma surrounding his relationship with his father, and it took some persuasion from Hollis for him to wear shoes again.
• Cold Sniper: a seemingly emotionless German superspy that has mastered the Psi Blast.
• The Comically Serious:
  • His stoicism makes some of the punishment that happens to him like being knocked senseless by The Mega Censor, or being de-brained even funnier than usual.
  • The interns at Psychonauts HQ mock him for this.
• Deliberately Monochrome: His mental world, the Shooting Gallery.
• Dirty Mind-Reading: When he was a boy, Sasha tried to find out what his deceased mother was like by reading his father's mind. Child-traumatizing ensued, no question about that.
• The Dreaded: Has this reputation among the campers solely because he's asked most of them to participate in experiments that have ended poorly, usually traumatizing whoever volunteered for them. Raz wasn't the first camper to be used as a lab rat for his experiments, though it seems he is the only one who came out of it virtually unscathed, it being a bit of a Trauma Button for some of them.
  Bobby: GAH, NO! DON'T PUT ME BACK IN THERE, PLEASE! I'LL BE GOOD!
• Enmity with an Object: Hates Tiffany Lamps and encourages their destruction; the fact that one was near his mother's bedside when she died probably contributes to this. However, 2 reveals he keeps a Tiffany lamp in his office. An interview with Tim Schafer has him clarify that he's a fan of genuine Tiffany Lamps, but that the ones in his mind were cheaply made knockoffs.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: He's in the middle of answering one of Raz's questions, what would happen if Raz were to shut down all of his Censor outlets, when the mental structure behind him begins to rattle violently. It slowly dawns on him that Raz's question is not hypothetical.
  Sasha: Well, there would be a buildup of Censor energy within that would... uh... eventually... Run, Razputin. Very fast.
• Eye Glasses: His tinted glasses move and stretch with his eyes.
• Gender-Blender Name: Sasha is a unisex name of Russian origin, short for Alexander or Alexandra, though it was a common joke to assume it was primarily a girl's name in much of the western world for many years.
• Germanic Depressives: Invoked by him due to his emphasis on mental discipline and self-control, he's almost always poker-faced and unexpressive, down to him not even laughing if Raz uses the Crow Feather item.
• Germanic Efficiency: His mind is so rigidly controlled that it resembles a plain cube floating in a void that unfolds into various structures.
• Herr Doktor: In addition to being a superspy, he's also a scientist, although it's unclear under what discipline. (Unless "psychic studies" counts as a discipline.)
• Irony:
  • His Germanic Efficiency is emphasized in the complete control and compartmentalization of his mind to the point where it looks completely empty at first glance... and yet his lab is a complete mess.
  Sasha: Is that the cleaning-lady? I'll get those files out of your way just as soon as I'm done with these... tests.
  • His Psychonauts HQ lab and office are pristine however, but among the items in it are one of the Tiffany lamps he claims to despise.
• Impossibly Tacky Clothes: Apparently, he used to wear socks with sandals. A passing comment by Hollis Forsythe implies she counts it as a big achievement she convinced him to stop doing that.
  • Could be considered an example of Truth in Television, as it is a German cliche to wear socks with sandals no matter how unfashionable it may be.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: His response to the failed Tumbler experiment and ensuing Psi Blast challenge.
  Raz: Is this where I learn another lesson?
  Sasha: No. Here's your merit badge, we will never speak of this again.
• Mad Scientist: A relatively benign example, especially when compared to Dr. Loboto. Doesn't hesitate to experiment on the kids using the Brain Tumbler, and he's usually seen fiddling with equipment in the lab, but true to his role as a camp counselor, he's always asked for permission from his potential subjects and is hesitant to continue testing when it looks like Raz might be in danger.
• Meaningful Name: He is very repressed and fills his mind with censors to combat any unwanted emotions. So of course, his surname Nein means “No” in German.
• The Mentor: He takes an interest in Raz's development, and offers to help him with Psi Blast training and helping him while he navigates the Brain Tumbler. His mental image of Raz is a miniature version of himself, which is why in the sequel he gives Raz an outfit of his in Raz's size. Additionally he sternly scolds Raz for tampering with Hollis' mind and giving her a gambling addiction. According to him, tampering with another person's mind is one of the worst breaches of trust a psychic can possibly make.
• Missing Mom: She died of illness when he was just a baby. His earliest memories can be seen in a Memory Vault, and consists of a few scraps of happy memories with his mother caring for him, followed by her deathbed, and his despondent father burying her.
• No Sense of Humor: He's the only person in the camp who doesn't laugh when tickled with the crow feather. Instead he just comments that the feather is unhygienic.
• Not So Above It All: During Rhombus of Ruin he acts significantly goofier under the effects of the Rhombus' Psilirium deposit, mistaking the mutant fishmen for aliens and struggling with one over a mock Golden Disk after being freed from the Psilirium's effects even as the Rhombus facility is crumbling around him.
• Personality Powers: He's an expert in use of Psi Blasts — by virtue of being excellent at the emotional control and conscious direction directly involved in their use.
• Secret Test of Character: Sasha allowed Raz to push the Censor spawner to dangerous levels so he could give the young boy a lesson in keeping one's thoughts under control to a reasonable level, while also giving him a better chance to train his marksmanship with the Psi Blast. The Mega-Censor, on the other hand, was not part of the intended training and was Raz's fault for plugging up all of the Censor spawners.
• Smart People Shoot: While all Psychonauts are intelligent people, he's the one that's designed to explicitly show his intelligence. He's a stoic German spy and scientist. His specialty is the Psi Blast, and his own mental world is the Shooting Gallery.
• Smoking Is Cool: Cigarettes. He's even seen levitating one.
• Sunglasses at Night: He can be seen wearing them, no matter what time of day it is.
• The Stoic: Hard to rattle and generally deadpan in expression and speech. His emotionally controlled mind also reflects his stoicism, but it becomes a problem when his mind becomes too repressed and Raz has to help him control his overflowing censors. In 2, when he confronts Raz about his actions in Hollis' mind, it's quite clear he's furious with Raz — but his tone of voice and expression never change.
• The Spock: He's rather logical about many things.
• Tranquil Fury: In the sequel, Sasha in his usual dry manner makes it very clear that he is livid with Raz for tampering with Hollis Forsythe's mind, and would have punished him far more harshly for this breach in trust if she hadn't talked him down earlier.
• What the Hell, Hero?: He gives one of these to Raz after he accidentally gave Hollis a gambling addiction.
• When He Smiles: At least, according to Milla's second Memory Vault.

Coach Morceau Oleander (Major First Game Spoilers)

Voiced by: Nick Jameson, Amber Hood (Lil' Oly)

"Did Washington have a 'chute when he crossed the Delaware? Just jump, sissy!"

The camp's chief counselor, coach and Basic Braining instructor. A short, Mr. Potato Head-like man in military uniform possessing a baton and pickelhaube, he operates like a modern-day Patton, with strong elements of The Napoleon thrown in.

He turns out to be the Big Bad in the first game, acting as the man behind Dr. Loboto's depraved experiments. He wants to use the brains of the campers to put them into "psychic death tanks" so he can Take Over the World. Once Raz and Oleander's mindscapes get combined at the end of the game, Raz discovers Morceau's troubled past regarding his military failures, and his traumas as the son of a butcher. Behind his villainous behavior, Oleander has major childhood trauma that Raz helps him work through (with the aid of Augustus). After these events, Oleander reforms and becomes an ally to Raz in the next two games.

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• Affectionate Nickname: Sometimes called "Morry" by Sasha, Milla and Ford.
• Animal Motifs: All three of his mindscapes (Basic Braining, the Brain Tumbler Experiment and the Meat Circus) feature the presence of bunny rabbits in some way. This is later revealed to be because he never got over the childhood trauma of his father slaughtering a bunny right in front of him.
• Bald of Evil: He has no hair under that helmet of his, and he's evil in the first game.
• Blood Knight: In 2, when finding out that the Psychonauts have a new enemy, Coach gets giddy at the thought of fighting them.
• Blood-Splattered Innocents: He's traumatized by having to watch his father slaughter bunnies in front of him.
• The Butcher: His father, both literally and figuratively. Also the source of the Blood-Splattered Innocents and Oleander's Freudian Excuse/Start of Darkness.
• Butt-Monkey: After the first game, he tends to get the short end of the stick more often than not.
• Companion Cube: Has an almost romantic attachment to his Psycho-Mech Battle Bot plans.
  Oleander: What an amazing couple we would have been. You never got a fair shot, babe. Fools! They never understood us. People would have seen us together and thought, that's good. That's right.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Takes a strict and rigorous attitude with his students tinged with army-speak.
• Dueling Scar: He comes complete with dueling scar and pickelhaube despite sounding suspiciously American.
• Easily Forgiven: Aside from having to give a public apology to the kids, Oleander gets off pretty easily and is evidently still a Psychonaut after all's said and done. Softly acknowledged and Played for Laughs in the game's final scene, throughout which he's... quick to go on the defense. Referenced and joked about in the sequel, as he is annoyed at the other Psychonauts for letting Nona off as scot-free as he was when he tried to take over the world. After a moment where everyone stares at him, he backpedals on saying Nona should be punished. When told about Oleander's attempts at world domination Truman is largely unimpressed, implying that they just see his obsession with world domination as a weird but manageable habit.
• Epiphany Therapy: Once Raz takes care of the Two-Headed Dad Monster, Oleander reforms after all that's said and done, his child self thanking Raz for everything.
• Ex-Big Bad: After the first game, he turns himself around and is an ally to Raz. Justified because he still is a Psychonaut even if he did go off the deep end.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • He lived on a bunny farm, where he cared for and looked after the bunnies in their hutches. However, his father (though, Oleander may be an Unreliable Narrator in this matter) thought bunnies were only good for meat, and didn't let young Oleander keep the bunnies, butchering them in front of him. It's also implied that, driven by his troubled youth, he tried to join the military in order to deal with his trauma. The subsequent rejections only further added to his inevitable sanity loss once he became a Psychonaut and went to the Camp.
  • It's also implied that his father had some level of prejudice towards Morceau being a psychic, a line in the Camp's pamphlet mentioning "father looking at you with shame in his eyes". It's when Raz quotes this that Oleander starts to consider letting Raz stay at camp.
• Foil:
  • To Razputin. Both are physically short, highly talented psychics with strong mental defenses who both have had trouble in regards to their fathers, that shaped the people they end up becoming. Raz is a Child Prodigy who ran away from home in order to pursue his dreams of being a Psychonaut, ultimately managing to achieve much of this goal within a few days. He possessed a fear of his father who he believed to be an anti-psychic abusive monster who wanted to kill him, but whom ultimately turned out to be a well-meaning father who loved his son dearly, but who didn't do the best job in explaining the intent behind his actions. Once the truth is revealed, Raz is ultimately able to snip his personal demons in the bud and reconcile with his father properly. Oleander is a middle-aged man, who only became a Psychonaut after spending years of his life failing to enter the military due to his height. The above humiliation of being rejected, combined with a deeply traumatizing experience related to his father butchering his pet bunny as a child, ultimately festered in his mind for years until it reached a boiling point, leading him to try to take over the world to soothe his inner turmoil, and get revenge on the world for rejecting him. Oleander and Raz are both ultimately unable to resolve their personal demons on their own, with Oleander requiring the aid of Raz, and Raz requiring the aid of his father to put down their combined personal demons.
  • To Maligula/Lucrecia, the sequel's major villain. Oleander is a physically short, gruff middle aged man with a Napoleon complex, and whose turn to villainy who had unresolved personal issues as his Freudian Excuse. Lucrecia was a tall woman with traumatic experiences that pushed her into villainy; in her old age, she suffers from severe osteoperosis and is hunched over. Her dark side Maligula was the end result of a long chain of events where she took part in a traumatic war in her country at a severely vulnerable time mentally due to poorly considered experiments done by her former team, and the trauma of drowning her own countrymen due to the directions of a cruel dictator. She would eventually snap after the above led to her killing her sister by mistake, resulting her being subjected to amnesia in order to hide her existence. Additionally, whereas Oleander returned to his normal self because his sanity problems were caused by outside sources (and resolved through outside help), Maligula is only buried deep within Lucrecia's subconscious due to being a horrifically exaggerated version of her fight or flight complex, and thus cannot be permanently destroyed without harming Lucrecia as well. Lucrecia is also the one who ultimately puts Maligula back with support of her great-grandnephew Razputin.
  • He's also the Foil to Gristol Malik, the true Big Bad of the sequel game. Oleander is driven to madness by his unresolved personal issues, but once his problems are dealt with, Oleander ultimately proves that he is a decent, if very gruff man. Even during his stint as the Big Bad, Oleander is also competent enough to fight his own battles and proves to be a challenging opponent directly, as well as being smart enough to use something easier to control for his Evil Plan via the brains of psychic children, as insane as it is. Gristol Malik's false identity as Nick Johnsmith is noted as being a Nice Guy and is loved by most of the Psychonauts, but the reveal shows that he is in truth a dangerously egotistical and narcissistic sociopath willing to do whatever it takes to revive Maligula for extremely selfish and petty reasons. While a skilled manipulator and planner, he's not a fighter and more or less intended on the revived Maligula to do the gruntwork for him, and severely lacks the wisdom to consider that he is trying to control what is essentially the psychic equivalent of a force of nature. Additionally, while Oleander fully reformed by the end of 1 and gets off with a relative slap on the wrist, Gristol remains unrepentant and gets locked up in the Psychoisolation Chamber where he'll spend the rest of his days as Sasha's test subject.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Oleander has a long scar over the right side of his face, even crossing his eye. In the first game, it was difficult to see due to the low resolution textures. In 2, the scar is far more visible thanks to HD textures and bump mapping.
• Heel–Face Turn: Thanks to Raz beating up the mind-melded version of their Daddy issues, Oleander became sane and stopped his plan. Maybe. In 2, he still has plans for Giant Mecha, and Raz is concerned he's not quite over his plans to rule the world.
• Height Angst: Given that he was kicked out of the military for his height and how extremely he overcompensates in the false memory he shows to Raz, he's clearly got some height-related insecurities.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Rhombus of Ruin and the second game show him to be a big fan of the deceased boy-band All Paul.
  • His signature in Psychonauts 2 shows that his handwriting is very elegant.
• Hypocritical Humor: In the end of the second game he goes on a rant about how forgiving Maligula for what she did is incredible, and then as the rest of the senior agents stare at him, realizes he's in the exact same situation she is and benefitted from a second chance so he immediately does a 180 on his opinion.
• Karma Houdini: After all's said and done, all that happened was that Oleander got off with a slap on the wrist and he still kept his job as a Psychonaut. Of course, given the fact that Rhombus of Ruin shows he really is the good-natured man Raz thought he was at the start of the game, it's not as frustrating as it could be.
• Leitmotif: Coach Oleander's Mental Battlefield. The fact that a muffled version of that song plays during the Blueprint Tank battle reveals he's The Man Behind the Man.
• The Man Behind the Man: He's the one behind Loboto's plot.
• Meaningful Name: Despite his warlike proclivities, he's named for oleander, a popular ornamental shrub with pinkish-white flowers, and works as a camp counselor for kids. Nerium oleander is also one of the most poisonous garden plants on the planet, and Coach is a powerful psychic with a plan to Take Over the World who ends up being the Big Bad of the first game.
  • His first name, Morceau, also means "piece, fragment, part" or the old French meaning for "morsel". Fitting given his damaged mental state, as well as also rather insulting from his parents given his stature. It also sounds like the word "morsel".
• Miles Gloriosus: A memory vault hidden behind a cobweb in a small cave in his mind, only accessible after The Reveal shows that he was, contrary to the claims of an earlier memory vault, rejected from all three branches of the U.S. Military and even its cooking service — just because of his height.
• The Napoleon: As much as his traumatic childhood can be blamed for warping his psyche, inadequacy complexes over his height have done their bit too. Him being rejected from every branch of the US Military (even its cooking service) for being too short probably was the last straw.
• No-Respect Guy: He's been embittered when he was rejected by every branch of the military for his height. In Psychonauts 2, we see that he doesn't get much respect at the Motherlobe, his office being a janitor's closet and his requests to help budget for weapons routinely denied. In the latter's case, it's left ambiguous whether or not he turned evil because the Psychonauts don't respect him, or the Psychonauts don't respect him because he had turned evil.
• Not Brainwashed: In Rhombus of Ruin, he shares Raz's resistance to Psilirium, making his sudden one-man All Paul concert more a case of Skewed Priorities than brainwashing.
• Not Me This Time: After reforming he's quick to say this when another case of kidnapping occurs during the ending. "I was here this whole time! You all saw me!"
• Not So Harmless: His warmongering tendencies and speech about how the kids are going to become soldiers in a war for the human mind turn out to be more than just a quirky eccentricity. He's the Big Bad of the first game, behind a plot to steal psychic children's brains and install them into psychic death tanks which he'll use to Take Over the World.
• Phony Veteran: He styles himself as a military man and his brain is violent and war-themed, but the memory "Oleander's Shame" shows he never actually served because he failed to meet the height requirement for every branch of the military.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: He may be a short angry man, but he's also an incredibly powerful psychic who can actually fight off two fellow experienced Psychonauts on his own.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: When Raz asks his theories on The Mole, Oleander immediately claims that it's Sasha because of his accent.
• Putting on the Reich: Despite being proudly, jingoistically American, he wears the spiked pickelhaube helmet famously associated with the German Empire, with a cork on top. Possibly more because it's a souvenir of having beaten the Reich, but his plans for world domination with giant tanks and Gas Mask Mooks put him squarely in the trope.
• Real Men Wear Pink: He's a gruff man who likes rabbits and and a mermaid-themed boy band.
• Reformed, but Not Tamed: In Psychonauts 2, he's no longer obsessed with war machines... but he's drafting blueprints for a "peace" machine (with a death ray) in order to deal with threats like Maligula.
• Remilitarized Zone: Basic Braining, a section of his mind.
• Reverse Cerebus Syndrome: His desire to build an army of psychic death tanks and take over the world is treated as a very big deal in the first game and whenever he gets villainous he's shown rather dangerously. By Psychonauts 2, he's mostly treated as a joke whenever his intent to build a peace machine is brought up, and offhand comments imply that his stunt at Whispering Rock wasn't the first time he's tried to take over the world.
• Self-Serving Memory: "Oleander's Pride" depicts him kicking butt in every branch of the military, and also portrays him with longer legs than he actually has. "Oleander's Shame" shows the true events of that memory.
• Stone Wall: It's suggested quite a few times that Oleander's specialty is psychic defense. It takes a lot to get into his mind unwillingly, enough to let him No-Sell the effects of Psilirium, and even if someone gets into his mind he's very good about only letting the visitor see what he wants them to see, even faking a memory vault. He's also the source of the Shield power, stated to be stolen from his mental construct Kochamara.
• Take Over the World: Using an army of psychic death tanks, at that.
• Talking in Your Sleep: Idling by the loudspeakers long enough has Oleander grumble in his sleep. At first it starts out silly, but then he begins to foreshadow his evil plot... and then after that he is heavily implied to be having a nightmare about his father killing his pet rabbit.
• Unreliable Narrator: One definite example in the fantasy/false memory you find in Basic Braining, and one possible example in how his mind portrays his father.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: As shown in the final level, little "Oly" was once an innocent child who loved bunnies whose father left some deeply traumatic memories.
• Walking Spoiler: Given his status as the Big Bad of the first game, it's a bit difficult to talk about him beyond his Basic Braining coach persona without spoiling the later parts of the game.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Seems the answer to all problems is "Giant Mecha".
• Wrong Assumption: In 2, asking him about potential moles in the organization has him accuse Sasha, based on just his accent. When the real mole is revealed at the end, Oleander claims he knew all along.

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