YMMV / Psychonauts

• Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin
• Psychonauts 2

Franchise Wide

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Psychonauts are a real thing, believe it or not. But instead of exploring the mind with cool sci-fi tools and psychic powers, they used mind-altering substances and techniques. So if the Psychic Seven using the Astralathe to open their minds but leave themselves extremely vulnerable in the sequel seems like something else, it may have been deliberate.
• Magnificent Bastard: Among the people encountered by Razputin Aquato, these three have proven to be the most brilliant and amoral.
  • Ford Cruller is the founder of the Psychonauts and its greatest agent. After forming the Psychic Seven from several powerful Psychics, Ford fell in love with Lucrecia “Lucy” Mux. When Lucrecia left to help her home country of Grulovia win a war, she eventually was driven mad when she accidentally killed her sister Marona, taking on the name Maligula and terrorizing innocent people. Ford and his friends traveled to Grulovia to stop Maligula and Ford was able to subdue her. Ford then sealed Maligula away inside Lucrecia's mind and made her believe that she was Marona in order to protect her and Marona's son Augustus. Ford then shattered his own psyche out of guilt and convinced the world that Maligula was dead. His broken mind caused the Psychonauts to dismiss him as a "loon" but Ford found a way to temporarily restore his sanity and helped to organize the Psychonauts in secret. When Augustus' son Razputin Aquato came to Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp to become a Psychonaut, Ford began secretly training him and frequently gave him advice as he worked to stop the machinations of Coach Oleander. When Raz restored Ford's mind, the two worked together to permanently seal away Maligula and Ford was reunited with his beloved Lucy.
  • Coach Morceau Oleander is a respected Psychonaut who secretly harbors dreams of world domination born from trauma he suffered as a child. Teaming up with Dr. Loboto, Oleander had him mutate a lungfish into a monster, who he then sent to kidnap the campers at Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp and bring them to his base at Thorney Towers Home for the Disturbed. Oleander would then have Loboto remove the campers' brains and put them into Brain Tanks that Oleander developed which he planned to use to take over the world. Oleander also implanted the persona of The Milkman into Boyd Cooper in order to destroy the evidence of Oleander’s scheme, and also managed to capture famed Psychonauts Sasha Nein and Milla Vodello by luring them into a trap. When Razputin Aquato managed to rescue Sasha, Milla, and Lili Zanotto, Oleander battled Sasha, Milla, and Ford Cruller. When his own brain was removed Oleander took control of one of his Brain Tanks and nearly managed to defeat everyone before Raz was able to restore his sanity, returning Oleander to his normal heroic self.
  • Dr. Caligosto Loboto is a dentist turned freelance Mad Scientist who, despite his insanity, manages to be one of Razputin Aquato's most dangerous adversaries. Teaming up with Coach Oleander, Loboto mutated a lungfish into a monster to kidnap psychic children to power their Brain Tanks. Taking control of Thorney Towers Home for the Disturbed, Loboto has Crispin Whytehead guard the way to Loboto's lab, shielding him from Psychic interference for good measure. Loboto forces the brilliant Sheegor to be his lab assistant by holding her pet turtle hostage. After being defeated, Loboto was hired by the evil Gristol Malik to put his brain into the body of Truman Zanotto. Loboto kidnapped Truman and set up a new base in the Rhombus of Ruin, mutating several fish to help him and capturing Raz and his friends when they arrived. When Raz restored his Moral Compass, Loboto freed everyone and destroyed his base before being captured. When the Psychonauts tried to figure out who hired Loboto by tricking him inside of his mind, Loboto saw through the deception and took back control of his mind, managing to defeat everyone but Raz. Ultimately Loboto is able to escape Psychonauts HQ consequence-free.

First Game

• Accidental Aesop: The Censors, who almost exclusively say "No!", generally wear suits, and stamp out the weirder parts of people's minds, are an obvious mockery of Obstructive Bureaucrats whose job is to censor risky content, with Raz beating them up en masse. But in the game itself they're also established to be the main line of defense in people's minds to keep them mentally healthy, which leads to the interpretation that while these people can be boring and frustrating, they're often necessary to keep tense situations under control.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: As this is an extremely psychological game, this could apply to a great number of characters.
  • Is the Hand of Galochio real, or is it Raz's own psychic powers unconsciously manifesting his fears brought on by his family's superstition? The sequel confirms it to be the latter.
  • Augustus, even the evil zombie version in Raz's mind, DOES have a point. All the Psi Cadets at Camp Whispering Rock were more proficient with their psychic powers, but it was ultimately Raz's acrobatics that allowed him to save the world. If they were able to fly like Milla and Sasha, we would have seen them using those skills in Basic Braining. Not even Lili would have been able to scale the upper levels of the asylum or avoid the bull in Black Velvetopia. Augustus insisting on Raz training physically before psychically could have been due to the Aquato family's traditions. Supported by older Aquatos using psychic powers in the trailer for the second game. Augustus simply didn't want Raz to start training so young. After the sequel it's also possible that Augustus' refusal to let Raz go to Whispering Rock was not hatred of Psychics but a subconscious resentment towards the Psychonauts, as the repressed memory that they hypnotized him into thinking his aunt was his dead mother may have resurfaced slightly.
  • Since the only real image we see of the Butcher is a single memory, which may or may not even be true to what happened, he could be seen as anything from a simple family man who failed to properly explain the concept of raising animals for the slaughter to his impressionable son to an all-out sociopath.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The game depicts Napoleon as having a descendant living in America who presumably isn't from France (given his lack of an accent). In the real world, Napoleon's brother Jérôme Bonaparte married an American woman. They had a son, Jérôme Napoléon Bonaparte, who lived in America for most of his life and had kids of his own, resulting in an American branch of the Bonaparte family.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The final boss of the game. You get big, beat it up until you run out of juice, you turn invisible, and then you wait to regain enough energy to turn big again. Even if your invisibility doesn't last long enough, as long as you turn it off and on before it runs out, you're still safe.
• Awesome Music:
  • The main menu theme, and all its variations.
  • The Meat Circus track.
  • The music that plays when Raz earns a merit badge.
  • The totally boss electric flamenco guitar that plays throughout the Black Velvetopia level.
  • As an added bonus, the music at the end of the game that plays when Raz, Lilli, Sasha, Milla, and Oleander fly off to rescue Truman Zanotto. Literally perfect!
• Best Level Ever:
  • Lungfishopolis, because, honestly, who wouldn't love to fulfill their Kaiju-related fantasies by going all Godzilla on an entire town?
  • The Milkman Conspiracy is loved for being a crowning level of funny as it's home to the G-Men, Boyd's insane ramblings and of course, The Milkman.
  • Black Velvetopia often gets cited as an exemplary level, because of its Awesome Music and distinctive visuals, and because of how well the level's structure represents Edgar's psyche.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Nightmare fights. Originally they were going to be a running subplot in the game, but got dropped somewhere in development. The two that are fought are merely a leftover.
• Breather Level:
  • The Milkman Conspiracy level is much less action-oriented than the other levels of the game, with the focus being on Raz finding different objects in order to progress to certain areas. There are no enemies besides the two Nightmares and the Den Mother Boss Battles and the platforming, while present, is actually fairly tame.
  • Waterloo World mostly involves simple puzzle solving and is the only Asylum level without a boss fight.
• Camera Screw: Perhaps inevitable in a third-person platformer, but most notable during the Meat Circus, where the camera switches angles mid jump several times.
• Cargo Ship: Admiral Cruller and his canoe.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • The second part of the fight in Black Velvetopia. You fix your mess by protecting Edgar in bull form from an insufferable matador, make the evil matador think he is the real El Odio (even better, since he torments Edgar, this is not completely wrong) and listen to his funny lines as you throw banderillas at him.
  • The final boss. After the Nintendo Hard difficulty level of the preceding Meat Circus section, a Curb-Stomp Battle made for the perfect palate cleanser.
• Cheese Strategy: Barring Dragon, the luchadores in Black Velvetopia can be easily defeated if you ram into them over and over with the Wrecking Ball upgrade for the Levitation Ball. Telekinesis can also stunlock them if you keep using it over and over, which prevents them from attacking you at all.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Out of all the psi powers in the game, it's best to just stick with Marksmanship, Levitation, and Telekinesis or Shield unless a situation requires another power to be used. This is because the former two, by virtue of how early they are unlocked, as well as their practicality for combat and platforming, are the most useful powers in the game, while TK sees heavy usage in the game's later levels, and Shield can completely shut down attacks from bosses and the strongest Demonic Spiders. In comparison, Clairvoyance and Confusion are extremely situational and have little practicality outside of their respective levels, Pyrokinesis is slow and leaves Raz wide open to attacks (as well as the fact that the player can accidentally set themselves on fire), and Invisibility, while helpful for avoiding attacks, is outclassed by the Marksmanship and Shield, and only lasts for a limited amount of time.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Clem and Crystal have suicidal tendencies, which wouldn't be funny normally. Seeing Crystal admit cheerfully and nonchalantly that she and Clem were trying to kill themselves is so audacious that it can loop around to being hilarious.
  • Seeing Milla's Nightmares? Terrifying. Getting an achievement for doing it called "I'm sure she's over it"? Darkly hilarious.
  • Removing someone's brain? Horrible. Inducing them to sneeze out their brain? Hilarious.
  • Raz's childhood memories of his family and the circus painting his father as a horrifying mental monster who tries to kill him? Sad and scary. Said mental version being such an Abusive Parent he proudly proclaims he hates seeing his son happy? Hilarious.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Tragedy variations of the stage actors are some of the trickiest monsters to fight in the game, mainly due to how all three variations appear at once from the first time one changes the mood lighting of the stage.
    • The thistle actors spin like saws, and while they're spinning are effectively invincible until they (briefly) stop.
    • Hell hounds breathe fire at you (which makes Raz run around almost uncontrollable when lit) and can turn to face Raz while they attack.
    • Harpies fire shots at you while suspended in the air, and can push you back with a screech if you manage to get close.
  • The exploding rats in the upper floors of Thorney Towers, while easy to kill, come at you frequently in big enough numbers that you might not be able to shoot them all from a distance in time, can sneak up behind you if you're not looking, and take off a chunk of your health if you get caught in their explosion leaving you confused and vulnerable to more exploding rats.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • Even by the standards of the rest of the cast, Dogen's not all there. He has massive self-confidence issues brought on by Power Incontinence (many of these moments having led to heads exploding, which definitely would not have helped his mental state) and tends to have panic attacks. When Dogen's brain is stolen, Raz tries to warn everyone around him, only for anyone he tells this to to respond with some variant of "he's just like that".
  • Gloria's two default moods are "docile" and "hostile", her transitioning between moods seamless and triggered by something as simple as a change in mood-lighting. It's so bad that she seems to possess a very loose grasp of her surroundings, mistaking various flower pots for an adoring crowd in her passive state and confusing Raz for someone she possesses an Unstoppable Rage towards in her manic state, all symptomatic of a manic episode. This implies that she has an extreme (bordering on cartoonishly inaccurate) case of Bipolar Disorder or some form of dysphoric mania.
  • Fred seems to suffer from dissociative identity disorder, specifically a form of DID where he is consciously aware of his actions while the alternate personality is in control to the point of holding conversations with it. Given his backstory and some of his implied failures in the past before the game, he might also have a case of Learned Helplessness which cripples his ability to fight back against Napoleon.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • Give how majority of the game is not overly difficult, the massive spike The Meat Circus presents right a the end of the game is incredibly jarring. Many players and critics (such as Yahtzee Croshaw) believe it to be one of the few flaws in the game. It seems even the developers agreed because, as detailed above, under Author's Saving Throw, a later PC release of the game made the level easier a fair bit easier. The Specific criticisms of the level are also detailed below, under Disappointing Last Level.
  • In general, the game picks up in difficulty once you enter the Lungfish's brain. This is both reasonable from a game play perspective, as the first round of mental worlds are basically tutorials, and completely justified in the story as all the previous minds were camp counselors willingly letting children in to teach them psychic abilities, in specially-constructed parts of their trained minds, and they were all generally sane. Starting with the lungfish, however, you are an intruder upon the minds you enter, and they are all much less sane.
• Disappointing Last Level: The final level, Meat Circus, is often cited as one of the worst parts of the game. While it does a good job storywise with wrapping the plot up, the level itself is incredibly frustrating to play through. The first segment is a pseudo-Escort Mission where you have to protect Oly from constantly-respawning enemies while also holding a rabbit in place long enough for him to catch it... four times in a row. Not helping is that you're constantly at risk of falling from the extremely vertical level and having to redo a huge chunk of it, along with Oly constantly screaming and whining throughout it. The second is Raz's father's obstacle course, which demands very fast, precise platforming and has tons of Checkpoint Starvation, along with you having to put up with his constant one-liners. While the bosses are a lot easier, they end up being downright anti-climatic due to how hard the other segments were.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • D'artagnan, a character cut from the final game, who nonetheless appears in lots of fanart, occasionally shipped with the hero Raz.
  • If you look you can find a following for just about every student in the camp.
    • Dogen Boole, one of the side characters, is well-liked by fans for being a funny and Ugly Cute character who is on good terms with Raz. It helps that the sequel game gave us two characters who are directly related to him and mention him in conversation.
  • The asylum inmates are rather well-loved in fandom, too.
    • Boyd Cooper's level is one of the most popular ones in the game, and with his simultaneously disturbed/disturbing and amusing character and meme status, he's arguably the most popular character of the quartet in turn.
    • Fred has quite a following, as a chill and easygoing guy who many find endearing, with a distinctive design and level concept.
    • Edgar's a favorite with a number of fans, as payoff to the ways in which his (and his level's) striking aesthetic and symbolism encourage connection to his character. Unsurprisingly, more artsy fans in particular tend to identify with him.
    • While Gloria is almost certainly the least popular of the inmates, possibly due to Raz having the least extensive interactions with her (unlike Fred and Edgar, she doesn't appear as a character in her own mind) and opinions on her level being mixed thanks to some confusing gameplay elements, her nature as a tragic character and her surprisingly dark backstory have also endeared her to fans and allowed her to stand out as strongly memorable along with the others.
• Fandom-Specific Plot:
  • There are more than a few stories about the kids of Whispering Rock growing up to become Psychonauts. A popular subset of these fics involve adult versions of Raz, Lili and Dogen becoming a Power Trio.
  • A lot of fans like to speculate what became of the Thorny Towers inmates after the events of the game, and will often have Raz or the Psychonauts check up on them in one form or another. The fact that they were at ground-zero of Oleander and Loboto's Evil Plan (and in Boyd's case, was a deliberate pawn in) will have this Played for Drama, the Psychonauts keeping tabs on them in order to keep them uninvolved in any other paranormal shenanigans.
• Fanon:
  • Loboto being Bobby's father, due to the similarities in their appearance and personality. The fact that his last scene in the sequel has him mention having to pick up his kid from camp only added fuel to the fire.
  • A large portion of the fanbase believes that following the orphanage burning down, Milla ended up in an asylum (it being Thorny Towers is optional) for a brief time due to her powers causing her to hear the dying screams of the children inside, with either Sasha or Ford discovering her and training her to control her often newfound powers.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Psychonauts has since become one of the four fandoms that make up Mystery Kids alongside Gravity Falls, Coraline, and ParaNorman.
  • There's a bit of an overlap with the Persona fandom, primarily among Youtube analyst channels. Specifically Persona 4 and Persona 5, which, like this game, feature levels set inside the minds of their characters, filled with symbolism of their mental issues.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The chain blast upgrade for Marksmanship. Once unlocked, it makes pretty much all combat a complete joke for the rest of the game, as you can take out large groups of enemies by simply shooting at the same one repeatedly since enemies tend to group together and don't have very much health to begin with.
  • Levitation in general. Not only does it grant Raz a large speed boost, it also allows him to reach high ledges and far-off platforms by bouncing or floating respectively. On top of this, a Good Bad Bug allows Raz to straight up fly with the ability, completely breaking the platforming in half, and allowing him to skip entire levels with ease. Double Fine seems to have caught on, as this ability was heavily nerfed in the sequel.
• Genius Bonus: The Waterloo World level's background music is composed of the lesser-known portions of the 1812 Overture. For the record, the piece celebrates the defeat of Napoleon's army (though not at the Battle of Waterloo).
• Goddamn Bats: The exploding rats in the asylum are quite possibly the most annoying creatures in the game. They will make a beeline to you and their explosions quite big, worst of all though is these explosions are bursts of confusion energy so impact will result in a hazy effect overwhelming the screen and your controls being reversed. This makes you a sitting duck for more rats to hit you or completely wreck your platforming. And even using the shield ability doesn't stop the confusion effect.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Due to the ability's animation, levitation gives you a very small amount of height when you're hovering in the air. Fine enough, but there's no real limit to how many times you can use this effect while suspended in the air. Thus, with a series of quick button inputs, you can activate and deactivate Levitation repeatedly for what effectively amounts to flight. For a platformer, this is a godsend, and it breaks the game so hard that the sequel had to considerably nerf the ability to prevent any further Sequence Breaking.
  • By abusing Psi-Blast, it's possible to reach Kochamara Island in Lungfishopolis after clearing the level (normally it becomes inaccessible after defeating Kochamara due to the boats used to cross the water disappearing) then climbing the radio tower to trigger the level end cutscene again. Doing this allows you to return to the Asylum and Camp after the Point of No Return, allowing you to finish off any remaining collectibles in the overworld. This can be triggered as many times as you like.
  • It's possible to use Psi-Blast to clip Raz's head through walls. Doing so in a specific spot in Gloria's Theater allows Raz to speak with Bonita without needing Invisibility, effectively allowing the player to complete the game without ever unlocking it. Speedrunners exploit this to complete the game at rank 20 rather than rank 30 (reaching rank 20 is required to unlock Telekinesis, which is needed to defeat the Brain Tank and the Butcher), since there's no other spot that requires Invisibility.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Admiral Cruller's borderline-romantic obsession with his canoes in this game became far less funny once the sequel was released, considering his relationship with Lucrecia Mux, who specialized in hydrokinesis, and the symbolism in his mind indicating that he closely associates them with her; during the first trip into his mind, we witness the very beginning of their relationship budding while taking a long canoe ride through a Lake Oblongota.
  • Loboto's "if the tooth is bad, we pull it" comment is a bit less amusing due to The Reveal in Rhombus of Ruin — namely, that his psychic-hating parents had him get a lobotomy to get rid of his powers.
  • Ford's self-disgust at not being able to leave his sanctuary to help Raz becomes even worse when the second game reveals Ford shattered his own mind on purpose to forget what he had done to Lucrecia and her family. This means every time Ford went back to his sanctuary, he had to relive what he did to the woman he loved, how his and Lucrecia's actions had destroyed their friend's relationships with each other, and permanently ruined Ford's reputation with the Psychonauts. Adding onto the fact that Raz greatly respects Ford when Ford knows dang well he doesn't deserve it, and it's no wonder why he was so disgusted at himself.
  • When Raz first opens up to Ford about his family and why he believes his father hates psychics, that they "murdered his whole family" and then "cursed" him and his descendants to die in water, there's a weighty pause before Ford simply says "... Whoa." With the hindsight of the second game, it seems very likely that this is the exact moment that Ford puts two and two together and realizes who Raz is - the son of the orphaned little boy he left in the care of his girlfriend-turned-madwoman, the woman who drowned the boy's parents, believing they'd both be safe so long as he brainwashed them into believing they were mother and son and having pathological fear of water - and just how heavy and far-reaching the consequences of his actions many years ago truly are.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: You get an achievement on Steam for listening to Vernon's entire story foreshadowing the asylum called "Wolpaw Says Thanks". This is very similar to an achievement in another, later Eric Wolpaw-penned game, Portal 2, where a very similar thing happens if you save the Prometheus/Oracle turret.
  • The Phone Operator G-Man's line about mobile phones making land lines obsolete. This was before Blackberries and iPhones were everywhere.
  • The fight in Black Velvetopia against Tiger. Richard Horvitz would later oppose El Tigre, a tiger-themed luchador hero, as the evil Dr. Chipotle.
  • Speaking of Richard Horvitz' career, after Raz went kaiju in Linda's mind, so would Alpha in the crossover comic Justice League/Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers
  • A brain inside a tank that is being led by a psychic that wants world domination? Where have we seen this before?
  • Raz's line "See you in hell!" became this when Richard Horvitz voiced a denizen of hell 15 years later.
• Ho Yay: When Vernon is re-brained, he heads to the main lodge to work on writing a new story. If the player examines the paper he's writing on, it's a picture of Elton with hearts around it. ^note The paper is actually Milka's, she can be seen drawing it early in the game. Given how she turns invisible whenever the player gets near, unobvservant players are likely to not notice her or the picture.
• Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: "You guys wanna split a cab" for Edgar/Fred/Gloria/Boyd.
• Les Yay: Seemingly subverted between Franke and Kitty (the most they do in-game is hold hands, something relatively standard of girls their age), and they refer to each other as "sista", but their Campster profiles list music and TV shows known for Les Yay, like t.A.T.u.., Xena: Warrior Princess, and Ellen. Kitty also has "Dating, Serious Relationship (Women and Men)" listed under "Looking For..." Franke's only Interest is Kitty, and she's listed as being in an Open Marriage.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "This hatbox needs a hatbox tag!"^ExplanationRaz says this line when he comes across a hatbox with an associated tag that has not being picked up yet. Naturally, since hatboxes tend to be seen first by the player, players heard this line quite a lot, enough to become a meme.
  • Pretty much every line, but the gems given to us by The Milkman Conspiracy deserve special mention.
    • "I am the Milkman. My milk is delicious." Helped a lot by the serious but flat delivery of said line.
    • "What is the purpose of the goggles?"
    • Basically, everything about the G-men.
  • GOGGALOR!^ExplanationRaz's in-universe nickname while in his kaiju form.
  • "YOOOOUUUUUUUU CHEATED."
  • Dogen and Among Us ^ExplanationDogen's squat, bullet-shaped body has frequently drawn fans to compare him to the Among Us crewmates, who have similar body types. Sometimes this comparison is made towards his grandfather Compton, who has a similar body type.
• Padding: Despite the residents of Thorney Towers making up four of the game's final five mental worlds, only Boyd Cooper has any real role in the overall narrative. The other three residents only matter briefly by helping Raz get past Crispin Whytehead to the upper part of the tower. That being said, the levels are often considered some of the best parts of the game (The Milkman Conspiracy and Black Velvetopia in particular), and the characters are likable in their own right, having some very funny and memorable moments.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The PS2 port features numerous sound glitches and framerate issues and almost always crashes during a playthrough, especially in the minds of the Lungfish or Gloria.
  • The Mac port is also really bad, with numerous sound glitches and occasional screen-blurring. Thankfully, Double Fine has a dedicated team working on patching the Mac and Linux ports, and most of the issues have been ironed out, though the Mac port is frequently considered to be the inferior version.
• Presumed Flop: The game is often referred to as a notorious flop, but as creator Tim Schafer noted in the 2015 documentary series What Color is the Sky In Your World?, its sales were nowhere near as disastrous as reported at the time. It was reported to have sold about 100,000 units when it actually sold about 400,000. Still not great, but far from a disaster. That said, it didn't turn a profit for quite a few years and its sequel has taken 16 years to come to release, so this may have only been half-defied.
• Praising Shows You Don't Watch: Naturally, as arguably gaming's most notorious Acclaimed Flop, although its availability through Steam and other Digital Distribution services have helped it reach more people than it did at first.
• Retroactive Recognition: Elton's voice actress, Cristina Pucelli, would later receive recognition for her role as Luan Loud on The Loud House.
• Signature Scene:
  • The most remembered stage, of course, is The Milkman Conspiracy.
  • The Milkman waking from his slumber is probably one of the most memorable moments of the game. Even non-fans know about it, largely due to Memetic Mutation.
  The Milkman: I am the Milkman. My milk is delicious.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • After Maloof and Mikhail become associates, they can be seen by the cabins playing ball together. The animation for them playing ball involves the both of them briefly adopting a Pstandard Psychic Pstance as they bounce it over to each other. However, the animation makes it looks like they're hitting the balls with their faces instead of their hands.
  • If you're viewing the opening cutscene on a TV with widescreen, it's revealed the silhouettes of the campers end at their heads.
• Strangled by the Red String: Unless you watch all the cutscenes where they interact, (some being trigger-cutscenes) you'd be very confused at how fast Raz and Lili hook up.
• Suspiciously Similar Song
  • Raz's "Badge Get" musical sting sounds very much like "Gotta Fly Now".
  • The track "The Censors Unleashed" contains a few bars from the beginning of Mozart's "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik".
• That One Achievement: "Christmas Shopper", a secret achievement for purchasing something from the camp store on Christmas Day. It being the only achievement that can only be earned on a specific day is annoying enough, but on the PlayStation 4 version, it's mandatory in order to get the platinum trophy, meaning it can take players literal months to complete the game (depending on when they play) if they don't want to change their console's internal clock in order to get it.
• That One Level:
  • The Meat Circus, infamous for its difficulty. It combines Timed Missions, Escort Missions, Rise to the Challenge, a Timed Jumping puzzle where the boss is trying to knock you off with attacks from offscreen, and three incredibly similar boss fights. Five years after the game's release on Steam, a patch was put to that attempted to address this. While it didn't exactly made the level easier, it did apply some Anti-Frustration Features, namely making it so that the escort mission and the rising water segment no longer took away extra lives on failure.
  • The upper levels of the asylum. They're dark, have some tricky jumps, and are home to some really annoying enemies.
  • The Race section of Milla's mind. While the race itself isn't that bad (you just have to outpace Bobby Zilch by going on the speed boosts, which the track provides you amply with), when it comes to getting the figments, it's downright terrible. It takes over twenty minutes to go over all the routes thoroughly, most of the figments blend into the track around them, and when you finally reach the end and realize that you're still missing a few, you won't be blamed for wanting to throw your controller at the screen.
  • There will come a moment where you'll eventually have to begin grinding for the expensive cobweb duster, either by killing enemies for about an hour or by doing the immensely annoying Dowsing Rod minigame where you have to nearly break your keyboard in half as you tap like crazy to rip out another arrowhead from the ground. It's even worse if you waited until the Milkman Conspiracy stage (which is when the Duster is first needed), as you'll have to attempt to find arrowheads in a dark camp full of psychic animals, meaning you don't even get the benefit of hunting for deep arrowhead deposits.
  • Gloria's Theater can be a pain to get through because of all the intentionally awful acting which plays for each set and mood, the path to progress being rather obtuse on the first playthrough, and just generally not being as entertaining or creative as the levels that come before or after. The second part also features some tricky platforming on tight catwalks with lots of enemies, along with a ton of Camera Screw.
• That One Side Quest:
  • Collecting all the figments to get 100% Completion. They are hundreds of them in each level, they are 2D, they move, they fade in and out, they are neon which makes them hard to see in several levels, and there is no radar or anything to help you track them down. This is at its worst in Milla's Dance Party, where the color scheme of the level combined with the figments being heavily spread throughout the racing portion make it difficult to find all of the figments there without a guide.
    • Waterloo World deserves a mention as well, particularly due to an infamously hard to find pink fairy figment, which, unlike the rest of the figments in the level, is located outside the board meaning you'll be fruitlessly searching around for hours if you didn't know this in advance.
  • Coach Oleander's Target Course, which involves punching successive targets. As you go through it, you get more targets and less time to punch them in, with the final difficulty levels forcing you into split-second reactions. You lose one point for failing to hit a target, and lose two points if you hit a friendly by accident. And you have to go through every level to increase your PSI Cadet Rank.
• Ugly Cute: About half the characters in this game are sort of adorable, Sheegor in particular.
  • Linda is pretty cute once she's not being mind-controlled. What a magical lady...
  • Oatmeal (the psi-popper teleporter) is a weird bug thing constantly blowing what look like snot bubbles. Despite that, its design and trumpeting noises are adorable, and it's very helpful for the teleportation service it provides.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Confusion is obtained at the tail end of the penultimate mental world, and its only required uses are for two boss fights that follow immediately after obtaining it. After that, it's never used for the rest of the game. While it can be used to make enemies attack each other, it's much more effective to simply psi-blast or burn them, not helped by the small amount of confusion grenades you can hold at a time. It can be used on the bunny in Meat Circus to make the escort mission easier, but most players opt to use TK since it's more reliable, and most players aren't aware that it's even possible to confuse the bunny in the first place. This power notably does not return in the sequel.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Quentin has a fairly androgynous design and prepubescent voice, so it's not obvious that he's a boy.
  • Franke has long hair, but her style is very '60s/'70s, so she could easily pass for a long-haired boy.
  • Bonita Soleil has a very pretty, feminine design... and a very gruff, masculine voice. If it wasn't for the other characters in Gloria's mind referring to her as "she", it'd come across as ambiguous whether she's a masculine-sounding woman or a feminine-looking man.
  • This was apparently one of the reasons D'artagnan, the original protagonist, was scrapped in favor of Raz: his hat made him look too much like a girl (the other reason was that his hat was also a pain to animate).
• Viewer Name Confusion: There's more than a few fans who have misspelled Dogen's name as "Dogan".
• Vindicated by History: Critics loved it, but it wasn't until years after its release that it started selling well. In the years between its original retail release and its eventual digital release, word of mouth spread about the game's quality and helped elevate it from being a Cult Classic prior, but what really put it on the map was its inclusion in a Humble Bundle that got its sales numbers exceeding its lifetime retail sales within hours.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Between the cartoony art style, the main character being ten, and the fact that the surface-level writing doesn't delve into inappropriate topics, nothing about the game would immediately give the impression that it's not for kids. Then you suddenly start unpackaging extremely mature themes such as child abuse, depression, suicide, Family-Unfriendly Death, and the Meat Circus.

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