Nightmare Fuel / Psychonauts 2

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

"Sometimes the idea of someone is more dangerous than the person themselves..."

---

• The first full trailer for the game has its fair share of creepy moments, from Razputin being swarmed by dozens or hundreds of Censors in the midst of a dark room, to a creepy humanoid plant-like thing slowly turning to look at the camera, to the truly disturbing state of Agent Cruller's mental landscape. Ford's narration probably puts it best.
  Ford: Listen, Razputin. There are some vaults that should never be opened. Not all minds are safe to read. Some brains are better off... broken.
• Loboto's mind starts taking over the office scenario Sasha imposed on him, globs of fleshy gums and teeth start breaking through the floor and walls, to face-crawlingly disturbing results. One door has teeth with a giant zipper on it that you have to unzip to open. Morceau even lampshades how disgusting this looks. This section is probably why there's a special mention of "dental phobia" in the pre-game Mental Health Advisory.
• Maligula. In the first gameplay trailer and the E3 2019 demo, Loboto is so afraid of just the idea of looking at her that he screams in utter terror. The trailer ends with her laughing a wicked laugh and the Hand of Galochio coming straight toward the screen, implying she's a member of the family that cursed the Aquatos.
  • Honestly, the fact that she can control water to such an extent that she drowned an entire city in her home country.
  • This becomes a different sort of Nightmare Fuel when you later learn she did it accidentally, by making it rain too much until the dam broke. Which killed her sister, which caused her to snap...
    • A very subtle, but very unnerving instance: During the last level of the game, when Maligula (Lucy's alter ego) sees the body of her dead sister (and Raz's real grandmother), she at first seems to show remorse... only to change her mind and normalize the horrific actions she has done. It's such a stark example of Realism-Induced Horror, as it's very reminiscent of real-life sociopathic behavior.
      Maligula: I killed my sister... But so what? (laughs) I killed lots of people.
  • Her ingame introduction is horrifying. Loboto's boss forces him to watch her, and he screams as Maligula floods an entire city before she roars skywards with golden Glowing Eyes of Doom.
• Hollis Forsythe's mental break due to the bad mental connection Raz makes during the lesson. Oh sure, it makes the 2nd Casino level happen, but Forsythe is aware on some level that she's losing it, but doesn't actually understand why she's losing it until after Raz fixes it.
  • Even scarier; Forsythe's memory vaults show a similar thing happened in her past - she wanted to change her bad boss's mind to make him ashamed of stealing her work with Mental Connections, and the result turned him so insane that Truman Zanotto - the actual head of the Psychonauts - had to show up in person to undo the damage she caused.
  • More unnerving, it demonstrates just how much power a Psychonaut actually has not just with their own minds, but over the minds of those they enter, something pointed out in-game by Sasha. Just by changing a couple of mental connections, Raz was able to change a mentally stable, cautious, and responsible adult into a gambling addict fully willing to abandon and endanger friends, colleagues, children, and herself for the sake of trying to win money at gambling. This was what a child with effectively no training could do on accident. Imagine what a professional could do to a person on purpose.
    • And we do know what a professional could do. If you remember in the first game, Oleander hypnotized Boyd Cooper, a man with symptoms of schizophrenia and a history of destroying a store, to repress his destructive tendencies into an a psychic manifestation called The Milkman and work as a security guard. When Raz frees The Milkman, Boyd becomes focused on destroying the asylum.
• Hollis's reaction when she realizes Raz was the one who messed with her mind. She's absolutely livid and looks like she's ready to kill him for it. Luckily for Raz, Hollis decides to give him another chance, but it's still chilling since she never gets that terrifyingly enraged at any other point in the game.
  • Worse, an optional conversation has Milla of all people suddenly drop her bubbly personality and coldly threaten Raz if he even thinks of doing the same thing to her. This is the ''only'' time she ever gets genuinely angry at Raz, and does a damn good job of getting across just how much of a line Raz had crossed if Hollis and Sasha hadn't hammered it in enough.
• When we first encounter Helmut Fullbear, he's but a mere brain in a jar that hasn't had any sensory stimulation in 20 years. When Raz first enters the brain, it's just an empty void with a small speck of consciousness. Later on, Helmut states that, to him, the 20 years he spent in that state felt like a thousand. Tim Schafer even mentions how this was inspired by his fear of being in a coma.
• The Panic Attacks, which first appear in the comatose brain mentioned above. They're lightning fast, skull-throwing Animalistic Abominations fought in an unnerving Amazing Technicolor Battlefield, and the first one is a Hopeless Boss Fight that requires the PSI King to completely shut off his senses just to escape. The worst part is the Realism-Induced Horror factor: anyone who's experienced a panic attack will know that everything the PSI King says while you fight them is scarily accurate.
• Towards the end of Bob's Bottles, Raz needs to climb a giant figure of Helmut on top of the giant wedding cake. The last Bob Bulb burps, blowing off the figure's face to reveal a skull beneath it. A realistic human skull underneath a cartoonish figure. And you need to enter the skull's mouth to proceed. It's unnerving if you don't see if coming, and even worse once you realize it likely represents Bob's belief that Helmut is dead.
  • The final boss of Bob's Bottles is Truheltia Memonstria, three plants that represent Bob's traumatic memories of Truman, Helmut, and Tia (his mother). The Tia and Helmut plants repeatedly sling hurtful accusations at Bob (such as Plant!Helmut saying "This is what you get for leaving me to die!"), while the Truman plant breathes fire. As Raz is fighting off the plants, the obnoxiously unhelpful moth (which represents Bob's alcoholism and is the reason he hasn't been able to confront his traumas) tries to "help" Bob by wrapping him in a cocoon; when Bob finally starts fighting back, the moth resorts to physically dragging a struggling Bob away from the plants.
    Moth: Come... on! It's not safe here!
    Bob/Raz: Hey!
    Moth: I'll keep you safe! You won't feel this at all.
• It is pretty unnerving that Nick Johnsmith who just works as the mailman for the Psychonauts and doesn't even have psychic abilities still got debrained by the mastermind and then mailed back to the Psychonauts. Either something went VERY wrong or the mastermind behind this plot is incredibly twisted.
  • We later find out that Nick is The Mole and did that on purpose to draw attention away from himself. He knew that the Psychonauts would all jump to the same conclusion: that the Mastermind was some nutjob who de-brained the local Nice Guy for no good reason, nothing like Nick at all. And they'd be right - Gristol is not like Nick at all, and was waiting for years Beneath Notice, hating the Psychonauts.
  • He also mentally tortured Dr. Loboto into silence (to the point where his mind is full of posters reading "snitches get stitches", "only pigs squeal", and "she's always watching") without resorting to any form of psychic powers. This was a man who had no issue helping a rogue Psychonaut work on psychic death tanks and yet he is reduced to absolute terror over the thought of revealing that Gristol hired him. Just what did he do to him? (Hint: As the son of a ruler of a Police State, he learned some Cold-Blooded Torture techniques.)
• In order to help Compton Boole, Raz enters the Forgotten Forest to obtain a bee. He manages to catch some, but as he backs away from the hive, he runs right into the fabled Green Needle Witch. Then, in a scene that looks straight out of a horror movie, she sends a swarm of bees shaped like her after a terrified Raz, chasing him out of the forest. It's later revealed that the Witch is just former Psychonaut, Cassie, but there's no way for Raz or the player to know that at the time.
• Gristol's mental world "Fatherland Follies" is a creepy amusement park ride filled with Grulovian propaganda similar to "Journey to the Surface" showing Maligula as the hero and Ford as the villain.
  Ride song: Grulovia, Grulovia, Ford Cruller murdered you, Grulovia, Grulovia, an act. He’ll. Rue.
  • Worse, however, in that as much as a Circus of Fear it has as undertones, it is coherent - Gristol, unlike Coach Oleander, is perfectly sane, just so lost in his dreams of power and ambition he has completely twisted his worldview into borderline sociopathic egotism, one where doing anything to restore his throne is an objectively good thing.
    • "Perfectly sane", however, is a relative term. It might be better to call him delusional. As meticulous and devious as his actions up to this point are, his endgame basically embodies a Missing Steps Plan. He's trying to bring back Maligula with the assumption that she will be more than happy to obey him and install him into power, despite him having no leverage over her and no means of controlling her, and that the people of Grulovia will be happy to have him in charge. This completely ignores the absolute psychopathy of Maligula, the absolute hatred and contempt the people of Grulovia had for his father, and the fact that the instant that Maligula comes back, every government agency and military in the world would immediately mobilize to stop her due to her being such a major threat to the world in general. The "Theme Park" design of his mind is a perfect demonstration of where his head is at. As a child, he associated Maligula being out and about with his family being in power and him having the ideal life he had, and her removal being the reason he lost it, and not her as being the cause of his loss of status. In his mind, he childishly believes that bringing her back will magically restore everything to the way it was without any negative consequences for him, rather than set off a senseless cataclysm that will destroy him and those around him if he succeeds. In fact, having encountered them in every other mind so far, Raz fights no Regrets in Gristol's. Everything he's done so far in the name of restoring his deluded idea of Grulovia, Gristol doesn't regret a second of it.
    • The worst part is that you can find a memory vault that shows a scene of Lucy saving Gristol from an assassination plot when he was younger. This is likely the foundation upon which many of his delusions are built on top of, since to him, Maligula wasn't a monster or a destroyer, but rather the hero who came to save him. He doesn't see her as someone who came to save an endangered child, something that Lucy would have done for any child, not just the son of a king, but rather as his own personal protector. While not consciously aware of it, this is why Gristol assumes that Maligula will automatically be on his side when she returns: In his mind, she always was.
  • Despite not being psychic Gristol is still sane (or perhaps just lucid) enough to have full control of his mind scale. Case in point, setting a trap for Razputin on the ride. Raz is taunted with the showing of a puppet show starring him as the puppet, and he’s dropped into a dark void with another maintenance entrance. He walks towards the entrance only for the door to vanish and the room to open up revealing a red sky with silhouettes of the village in the background and a crowd of the dancing cutouts from before now holding torches! It all comes together looking like an angry mob cornering Raz demanding his execution as enemies appear en mass!
  • Another unnerving aspect of Gristol's mind is that, aside from the kitschy theme park ride, it takes place in a completely black void, and you can make that a silent black void by finding and destroying 3 gramophones in the level which disables the background music.^note Odds are you'll do this because there's an achievement for it, and because the music is really annoying. Some parts of the level also employ Gravity Screw, making it even more disorienting. Perhaps this was simply meant to imitate dark rides found at Disneyland and many other theme parks, but it could also be seen as a representation of Gristol's extreme self-centeredness, as there's literally nothing in his mind except his self-serving version of history and his Evil Plan.
  • As an extra-creepy detail, a clip of music that plays near the end of the ride is actually a back-masked clip of the "Grulovia, Grulovia!" song, specifically the lyric "Grulovia, Grulovia, you're always right". It serves to show how deeply ingrained is Gristol's belief that Grulovia would be better with him in charge.
• The idea of the Deluginists, people who worship Maligula and are trying to bring her back. Because the plural means that there's more than just the one defeated at the conclusion of the game. There are more people out there who want to bring her back, and unlike Gristol, they don't have the excuse of wanting to use her as a pawn to retake the throne of their homeland. The motivations of such individuals are impossible to guess, but it may just be as simple as some men just wanting to watch the world drown.
  • Given how someone needed to run the Maliks' finances once they found a safe place, enough to permanently rent a hotel suite, it's more than likely they're Malik loyalists and Grulovian nationalists who have a major Cult of Personality vibe around Maligula, their One-Man Army Minister of War. Which is just as bad, because there's at least some people who saw the destruction she caused, and decided the main problem was she wasn't thorough enough.
• Finding a hidden Room Full of Crazy in the Lady Luctopus casino with plenty of pictures of the Psychonauts, crazy writing and a clear obsession with Maligula is creepy enough... and then Raz finds a picture of his girlfriend Lili with a few notes there, indicating that the mastermind does intend to use her in their plan.
• Maligula's memory vault of the fateful day she became evil: she really WAS just raining off the protesters for the Grulovian Royal Family and nothing more, right up until the Grulovian Dam burst open because there was too much water behind it... due to all the unnatural rainfall she caused on prior protests. Since she had done this previously, the protesters stayed right where they were out of defiance, meaning they had absolutely no time to run or get to higher ground when the water came. And then she finds her sister floating dead in the lake amongst the dead protesters and just loses it, becoming Maligula, the Deluge of Grulovia, and begins a reign of terror that the Psychonauts needed to be brought in to stop.
  • On another note, the same scene is repeated from another perspective in Gristol's vault, and it's a little scary just how little the Royal Family actually cared about this happening - at least Maligula remembers what the protester signs ACTUALLY SAID instead of just "bla bla problems". The Gzar of the time even tried to quietly have Maligula executed after witnessing the dam burst open from Maligula's sheer power, and then later found his executioner floating face down in the palace pool JUST BEFORE HE JUMPED IN IT.
  • During "Ford's Follicles", when you kill the final group of mites, you get a horrific Wham Line: "What have you done?! ...Those were peaceful protesters, Lucy!"
• When Raz looks inside Ford's mind and discovers the truth, that Nona isn't his grandmother and that she orphaned his father when she killed Lazlo and Marona. Raz is so horrified he's reduced to a screaming wreck.
  • As the Tomb of the Sharkophagus loads - the mental world in which Ford reveals the truth -, the loading screen doesn't feature the usual sight of Raz diving into the mental world. No, instead, Ford is just staring right at you. The player. It's incredibly uncomfortable and makes you wonder what the hell is about to happen.
  • It begins with Ford as a gravedigger pointing Raz ahead to a graveyard. Once Raz steps far enough, a giant comb rushes him to a deadend while turning the headstones into the teeth of a music box. He only evades by jumping into an open grave. Ford then appears up at the grave's edge and throws one shovel of dirt inside even after Raz says he's not sure that he wants to see what happened anymore. The game cuts to darkness, then to Raz's arm breaking out of the earth, followed by the rest of his body floating out. The camera turns upside-down. He's at the ceiling of a massive cave from which he half-falls, half-floats as if in water. He's forced to visit three crypts that each corresponds to one of Ford's previous mental worlds. Each Ford aspect utters some cryptic lines before vanishing - shot at high speeds on the bowling lane into the pins, jumping into a giant typewriter's paperfeed, and diving into a vat of hydroxide. Raz eventually drops into an empty coffin in yet another grave, the tombstone dedicated to Maligula. Another cut and the coffin's insides open to hallways that first lead to a bed with two skeletons, which Ford reveals are Raz's grandparents. A new hallway opens and he tells that after Lucy was defeated, he put her into the Astralathe to neutralize her Maligula aspect, and hid her among family. The hallway ends in a door which leads out- and said door is then shown to be the entrance of one of the Aquatos' wagons. Outside, Raz follows the figure of Maligula and when he grabs her arm, the camera pans close to Nona's face as she turns around.
  • There's a growing sense of horror in the last section of the Tomb as Ford begins to very pointedly dance around Raz's terrified questions about what's going on. Especially when the topic changes to Raz's family...
    Ford: That's your grandparents, Lazlo and Marona. They drowned in the Valermo Dam Disaster, remember?
    Raz: (Audibly terrified) What? No. Grandpa Lazlo died, but Grandma made it out and came to live with my father!
    Ford: No, Raz. She didn't.
    Raz: Ford, I just saw her today.
    Ford: No. You didn't.
• The concept of the Astralathe. Otto created a machine that can permanently alter the mind. Really think about that a device that can potentially cause irreparable damage to your mind if used improperly. Just ask Ford assuming he can remember who he is...
  • And Otto sees no issues with selling "home versions" of the machine so people can make "cosmetic changes" to their psyches...
• Raz himself, surprisingly, gives us one when he's in PSI King's Sensorium. With his goggles filled with a swirly shape, along with the eerie music playing whenever he slow dances and grins it's a bit... unsettling. He's just experiencing a drug high via PSI King, though.