Tear Jerker / Psychonauts 2

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

Compared to its predecessor, which took a more comedic spin on the characters and subject matter that it examines, this game has a more dramatic edge, and takes more serious stances on mental health. Expect the story being a lot more intense, even to the point of you going for the hankies.

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• When you boot-up the game for the first time and go through the settings that you want, you are then faced with a mental health advisory that informs you that it's going to deal with some serious subject matter that can be triggering.
  "Psychonauts 2 contains artistic interpretations of serious mental conditions including addiction, PTSD, panic attacks, anxiety, and delusions. There are also images that may be upsetting to people with a fear of dentistry, tight spaces, or vomit. These conditions are usually presented in a light-hearted or even comical manner, but might still be distressing to some players."
• Poor Agent Cruller. The first official trailer shows that his mind has been so thoroughly messed up that it's a Shattered World.
  Cruller: Some brains are better off... broken.
  • Then there's the Maligula symbolism built inside Ford's multiple personalities - you can only progress through Ford's Follices by drowning head lice with Hydrocide, in Strike City the entire germ city is going to be exterminated in one massive spray, and in Cruller's Correspondence you send a letter to his former teammate and lover Lucrecia in Grulovia, only to get a reply from Maligula that Lucy is dead and never coming back.
• Dr. Loboto truly wants to be a better person after the events of RoR, but can't out of fear of his mysterious boss hurting him for snitching. His voice sounds so sad when Raz talks to him about it.
  Raz: Who are you protecting?
  Dr. Loboto: Myself.
  • Even more so as Milla highlights someone has done a real number on Loboto's mind beyond just his own psychosis. His brain is riddled with threatening psychic messages left by a previous visitor along with regrets and doubts constantly on the prowl for anything they can find.
  • With The Reveal of the perpetrator being Gristol Malik, the former prince of a Ruritanian dictatorship that wouldn't shy away from Cold-Blooded Torture, it's almost entirely likely that Loboto was put through extreme torture by Malik.
• Loboto makes two references to his parents while under Sasha's watch. One is a much more lighthearted line where he sarcastically calls Sasha "Dad", and the other is...
  Dr. Loboto: (while heavily sedated) No... no... I didn't bend the spoons, Mommy...
• On a more down to earth level it is genuinely sad to see how poorly the other interns treat Raz at first. It is flat out hazing.^note Fortunately, it's not bullying, since the interns don't continue tormenting Raz; two of them immediately befriend him afterward.
  • On a similar level, once Raz's family arrives, it becomes clear that even though Augustus has no hard feelings about Raz running away and being a psychic, the rest of the Aquatos aren't as lenient. ^note Though some are more upset with the former reason, while others are upset with the latter reason. Seeing Raz's older siblings (one of whom is secretly psychic herself) insulting him and calling his powers "creepy" is sad enough, but even Raz's mother is constantly slinging him with Passive-Aggressive Kombat, constantly reminding him how he "ran away and broke his family's hearts".
• Raz immediately feels wrong about changing the Mental Connections in Hollis Forsythe's mind, and the only reason he did it in the first place is because the other interns talked him into it. Raz does manage to fix his mistake, but seeing just how utterly ashamed he is about his actions is hard to watch, especially when Hollis gets so angry with him that she's about ready to rip him a new one. Thankfully, Hollis immediately calms down and takes pity on Raz, but she (and later, Sasha, who talks to him about the trust that people place on them when it comes to helping them) makes sure that if Raz really wants to be a Psychonaut, he must never do what he did again.
  • And Raz doesn't. For the rest of the game, you can only use Mental Connections on stray thoughts, not to connect Ideas, and he always asks for consent with his patients (except in extreme cases).
  • When you're given a chance to talk with Hollis after the fact, it's implied that Raz's manipulations impacted what little trust Hollis did have in him to the point that she has suspicions of Raz himself being the mole.
• Hollis Forsythe herself has a few moments as well. Going through her past, you have the incident where she drove her boss, Dr. Potts, mad while trying to psychically change him for the better, and it's clear she regretted doing such damage. As you look through her mind in the present, though, you see that she has her own underlying issues fueling the gambling addiction Raz gives her. She's a woman under incredible amounts of stress that tries to swallow her feelings and face everything on her own because she feels like she can't ask for help. But because she thinks she's on her own, she feels like she can't actually fix anything. Her gambling fixation is the magic bullet her mind latches onto because it thinks nothing else will work. Thankfully, she seems more willing to delegate her duties by the end of the game, and the vacation she's got coming her way probably won't hurt either.
  • The reason why Hollis tried to use Mental Connections on her boss? Dr. Potts was plagiarizing her work, work that Hollis put extensive time in. Imagine having to work hard on something, only for someone else to take the credit. No wonder Hollis tried to do what she did! It takes an even more realistic and dark implication given that in her memory vault, the words "race" and "women" were in Potts' mental connections, suggesting he believed he could get away with his theft because she was a black woman. Even in a world where psychics have to deal with their own brand of discrimination, regular racism and sexism still holds.
• Lili is also genuinely sad about the situation of her father. She tries to put up a brave face with Raz but eventually admits that she is just in a terrible mood because of her fear that the damage from the events in the Rhombus of Ruin might be permanent.
  Raz: Do you want to be alone?
  Lili: You can stay, but I'm afraid I'm not very good company right now.
  • Finding Lili outside and talking to her has her admit that she thinks she's guilty of being the worst daughter ever, because she had been such a jerk to her father, and now she may never be able to talk to him again. Poor girl.
  • Even better, every time you start a conversation with her, she wipes her eyes. That's how worked up she is. The girl who used to be so snarky and aloof in the first game is driven to tears because she can't help her father or even apologize to him.
  • Luckily, there is a dialogue option where you can comfort Lili by telling her that "it's nothing".
• After the initial incident with Maligula, most of the Psychic Six have fallen on hard times.
  • Compton Boole has very low self-esteem and is unable to process any outside stimuli without it completely overwhelming him. His mental world takes the form of a cooking game show where he is expected to perform under a time limit while goat versions of Truman, Hollis, Ford, and Otto repeatedly make subtle jabs at him to make him constantly second-guess himself. Even when he and Raz make a dish correctly, the judges' comments come in the form of Backhanded Compliment at best.
    • Compton Boole's backstory is absolutely horrifying for anyone who considers themselves animal lovers or suffers from massive anxiety issues. He completely blows up a whole lab of caged animals who were merely trying to show him gratitude for his activism, but ended up overwhelming his mind in the process. Since then, even after being released from jail by Cruller, Compton became completely unable to function by himself (as the one time he showed any sort of initiative backfired horribly on him), growing more and more paranoid that his friends were secretly judging him as a dead weight unworthy of his Psychonaut status.
  • Helmut's rediscovering his senses is subtly sad, especially when his climactic song is interrupted.
    • After the memory of Maligula is unleashed in Helmut's mind, the shadowy memories seen at the beginning of the level are shown again, this time revealing exactly what they are. Since Helmut has spent the last 20 years being a brain in a jar, as far as he knows, his attempt to bring back Lucrecia is the reason the Psychonauts failed, his friends never bothered to look for the rest of him, and worst of all, his beloved husband thought he had died that day.
    Helmut: You guys! I'm right here! Where are you going? Why did you all abandon me for a thousand years?
    Raz: Twenty.
    Helmut: Maybe in your world!
    • Just before that, when Nightmare Maligula shows up and taunts him, he just screams, "DEAR UNIVERSE, PLEASE SHUT UP!", and sends himself back into the empty void to escape her.
    • When Audi'O/Bob tells Helmut to hurry up and help him, he says, "You know how I get." It sounds like a playful jibe, but Helmut knows how Bob "gets" — he drinks. And drinks. And drinks.
  • Cassie being a victim of her own Mental Projection power - She has created TOO MANY archetypes of herself over the years, to the point she ALMOST has as many personalities as Ford Cruller running around inside her head - she's basically lost sight of which one is the "real" Cassie, since every archetype is technically a small piece of her and thus also believe they are the "real" Cassie, to various degrees of hostility. The worst part is that Cassie is the least visibly unstable of the Psychic Six, but she still knows that something is wrong, and has to quietly request Raz's help so "she" (her Librarian personality) doesn't overhear. She's a prisoner inside her own mind, and fully aware of it. It's basically a metaphor for split personality disorder.
  • The top level of Cassie's library has Paper People copies of the Psychic Six. While Compton was the closest to her, her mental version of him talks about how he falls apart when she's not around and how he's lost without her. There's several ways this could be interpreted, but one is that Cassie, deep down, really does believe he's as useless without her as he himself thinks he is and that she, in the vein of Chie and Yukiko from Persona 4, secretly likes this about him.
  • Bob Zanotto's alcoholism problem - He drinks to forget, which has lead to his mind initially being a tiny island surrounded by fog before Raz intervenes. He was drinking to forget many things, such as finding his mother dead in the family greenhouse as a teenager (which started his alcoholism), losing his husband and fellow Psychonaut, Helmut, to Maligula in the Grulovia mission, and being fired from the Psychonauts by his nephew, Truman Zanotto, for his alcoholism since it was putting everyone else at risk. Poor Bob.
    • It's implied that his mother was also an alcoholic, and that was what killed her.
    • Several vaults (from several different people, including himself) show him breaking down after Helmut's apparent death, and crying for days in his funeral and after it.
    • When you leave to travel through his mind, there's a small but insanely powerful and heartbreaking moment. The moment Raz boards the pseudo raft, Bob yells out, "WAIT! ...Don't go..." Even with all his problems, Bob just wants someone to be with him.
    • When traveling through his mind, there are various isolated islands with projections of people from the real world. Lili is on one island, but her voice is completely different, since Bob's never spoken to her. On another is Truman, whose only dialogue is to tell Bob that he's fired, and on a third island is Otto, who claims that the rest of the Psychic Six never liked Bob, and only pretended to tolerate him because he and Helmut were together.
    • Keep in mind, Lili lives in the Motherlobe. Bob has lived within walking distance of his great-niece her entire life, but has never met her.
    • In the second bottle Raz explores, we hear what Bob said the day he got fired. Hearing him constantly swing back and forth between angry, betrayed, and pleading is heartbreaking, and while we don't hear Truman's responses, bits and pieces of Bob's dialogue make it clear that Truman only fired him because there was no other choice.
    Bob: Fired? You can't fire me! I helped create this place... recruited by Ford Cruller himself! No pipsqueak nephew's gonna fire me! What do you mean what's happened to me? What's happened to you?... What's this phone number? I'm not going to call some... stranger! I don't need help! I just need my job! I made some mistakes, but so has everybody. Yes, people were hurt, but no one died! It worked out in the end! Why are you all attacking me? You're my own blood. Why aren't you on my side? Truman... how could you?
    • There is a depiction of this scene in a memory vault, with Bob walking away... and Truman's expression is pained, almost with tears in his eyes. It's such a blatant contrast to the angry and shallow depiction of Truman you can find on the islands, and the fact that it's in a memory vault makes it clear that on some level Bob knows his nephew was right to do so... and that it hurt him as much as it hurt Bob.
    • It was that incident what finally made Bob snap. He returned to his greenhouse in Green Needle Gulch, threw away the pictures he had with Helmut and his friends and screamed at the sky, lifting the entire greenhouse above the surface and isolating himself from the rest of the world.
    • In Bob's Bottles is a trail of Dark Thoughts, if you grapple through them, there's a figment at the end of a rope.
    • A small detail about Bob can turn sad thanks to Fridge Brilliance. While he was holed away in the greenhouse, his drink of choice was Gŭbiduk, a brew he made from fermented mushrooms. After Bob is reunited with his husband, Helmut reveals that he hates mushrooms, to which Bob responds "I know." Making and drinking a brew out of something Helmut hated was probably a way Bob "punished" himself for (seemingly) not keeping his husband safe.
  • Lucrecia Mux, especially when it comes to her downfall into villainy. She arguably had it the absolute worst out of everyone in the entire game! She was happily in love with Ford but she could not resist partaking in Otto's mental experiments. Eventually, she heard of the conflict in Grulovia and was compelled to do something to help end things peacefully. However, Gzar Theodore had different ideas. Her mind was already in its most vulnerable state thanks to the experiments to open it up entirely, and Theo wished to stay in power by any means so he pushed her to the absolute breaking point. The result? Maligula, a primal urge towards violence amplified into an entire split personality reveling in the destruction!
    • This is really visible at the end, at a recreation of her tipping point. Up to this point in the game, Maligula has been wholly bloodthirsty and vile, reveling in trying to kill even her own adolescent great-nephew. Then you see her come across the dead body of her sister, reliving the moment where she accidentally killed her. Seeing her so vulnerable and guilty makes a strong contrast to her prior behavior, especially when you know what heartache's about to come for so many people.
  • Strike City, despite being Black Comedy on the surface, gets much sadder once you realize what it represents. The germ apocalypse is a metaphor for all those who died in Maligula's rampage, but with signs like "No Ball Rolls Forever" plastered across the city, it also represents the end of Ford and Lucrecia's happy relationship. The vault and end of the level show that it's based on Ford's memories of their first date at the bowling alley. That it's now a city of germs awaiting disinfecting might imply that, since Lucy's Face–Heel Turn, the once happy memory has become tainted and something Ford wants to purge forever. Re-play the level, however, and you'll find the Reset Button has been hit and the germs telling Raz the end of the word is coming again in a few minutes. While this mainly exists so you can still get the collectibles, it might imply Ford's mind is stuck in an endless cycle of destroying and re-creating this memory.
  • The Tomb of the Sharkophagus and the events that transpire in that part of Ford's mind are one of the most tragic parts of the game. It holds many of his deepest and darkest thoughts and memories. You know you're in for a downer when you see Ford's reaction to his mind being more-or-less fixed:
    Ford: Razputin...
    Raz: Agent Cruller! How do you feel?
    Ford: I've done a terrible thing. And so have you.
    Raz: But... we just wanted to undo what Maligula did to you.
    Ford: Maligula didn't do this to me. That's the first thing I've learned in here. The rest... you're gonna have to see for yourself.
  • The true cause of Ford's Game-Breaking Injury was not Maligula, but himself. He was so haunted over tampering with her mind with the Astralathe that he turned it on himself, shattering his own mind. Even after that, he still considers he did the right thing to save his beloved Lucy, despite his regrets.
    Ford: I did what I had to do. I loved her, after all.
    Raz: Wait, what?
    Ford: Someday when you fall in love, you will understand.
    • Ford's downcast and broken attitude throughout the Tomb emphasizes that he's having a massive My God, What Have I Done? moment as he realizes just how much he screwed up Raz's life. As Raz descends, he encounters Ford's alternate selves disposing of themselves, implying that on some level, Ford thinks he deserves to die for what he did.
  • Raz's reasons for escaping the family circus in the first game become Harsher in Hindsight, too. He was so scared by the thought that his father, Augustus, was going to kill him because he was a psychic, a group that the Aquatos were told to stay away from- and Cruller was the one who made Augustus go against them in the first place. Thankfully, Augustus reveals that it is absolutely not the case, but it's horrifying to think about the psychological consequences of Cruller's decisions.
  • The whole fact that Cruller's negligence during his early days with Lucy caused all these events.
• One of the possible conversations after this point is Raz telling Ford that what he did to his family was wrong. Ford doesn't deny it, and apologizes. Given how highly Raz thinks of the man, it's a somber moment for everyone involved.
• After Maligula is reawakened in the late game, Raz rushes off to get help and goes straight to his family and comes upon his mother and siblings worriedly gathered around his despondent father. Now, Raz had been told earlier that if Maligula resurfaced then the altered memories on Augustus would break as well; that his mother had actually drowned twenty years prior and that the woman he was made to believe WAS his mother was his aunt, whom had (albeit accidentally) drowned her. Raz's mother simply says that Augustus had a rough night and that he was "remembering things", which seems to be all Raz needs to know. Before Raz gathers his family to help with Maligula, he kneels down beside his clearly-devastated father and silently hugs him before the rest of the family joins in.
  Augustus: I lost her, Razputin.
• It can be hard to remember due to the large gaps between the games' releases, but in-universe, Razputin (a ten-year-old, mind you) has stopped two separate plots to take over the world, realized that achieving his dream of become a Psychonaut is not as straightforward as he thought, dealt with his family reacting poorly to him running away, faced his Daddy Issues head-on in his own mind, had his own brain sneezed out (and nearly had it forcibly removed again), assisted multiple people with their personal issues by entering their minds and got into a lot of insane and dangerous situations by doing so, and found out that a big chunk of his family's history is a lie thanks to one of his heroes... in the span of a few days. Hollis and Truman aren't the only ones who deserve a vacation.
• There's something deeply tragic about the fact that Maligula almost has a moment of Even Evil Has Loved Ones during the final battle where she painfully relives the moment she killed her sister on accident... ...only to gleefully declare she doesn't care because Nona took the moment of emotional weakness to escape her out of control Id.

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