Psychonauts 2 is an endlessly creative game. Sometimes, this creativity shows itself in spectacular ways, such as when you find yourself on a musical journey through the senses in order to bring a psychedelic rock band together. Other times, it sinks the game to new depths of grossness, and one boss battle in particular is one of the worst examples of this I’ve ever seen.
I’m not a prude when it comes to games being silly or messy. In the wake of the newly announced reboot, I’ve written a couple of pro-Saints Row pieces, both on the ridiculous drama around it being ‘woke’ and the previous soft-reboot, Agents of Mayhem. Saints Row is one of my favourite series of all time and the fact you’re able to squirt feces on buildings, get your car tuned up at Rim Jobs, and play key story missions while being naked and covered in goo never bothered me. So it's not that Psychonauts 2 gets gross that’s the issue – it's how gross it gets.
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The boss battle comes at the end of Compton's Cook-Off, where you venture inside the mind of Compton Boole to help him win a cooking show. This is his mind’s manifestation of the way he’s always felt judged, analysed, and pressured by his peers. Like everything in Psychonauts 2, it’s clever without being too clever, and goes for comedy more than serious symbolism and introspection. The judges are, for some reason, goat puppets. It opts to be funny and silly first and foremost, and there’s nothing wrong with that – games could stand to take themselves less seriously. But by the end, anything the level might have had to say explodes into a mush of purple goat vomit.
The game can be gross in other ways. A later level has you leaping across platforms in the water, which are only made visible by an anthropomorphic seed belching. That’s all par for the course for the game’s humour, though – Compton’s Cook-Off goes above and beyond.
Initially, the level asks you to prepare various dishes by following instructions. There are slicing machines, blenders, boiling pots, and frying pans, as well as a host of different ingredients begging to be cooked as part of the show. With rail grinding, wall climbing, and mini obstacle courses, the whole level wrings every drop out of the premise. You do this task three times, each cycle seeing the order grow in complexity before the boss battle, which has nothing like the nuance, creativity, or narrative drive as the main level. Instead, these goat puppets vomit on you.
The battle places you in a circular arena with no way to attack them. They will vomit purple liquid onto you, which you can avoid at first by running elsewhere, but once there is too much vomit to be avoided, you will need to climb on the rusty sardine cans these goats are vomiting out. All the way through, a commentator will remark repeatedly on how warm the vomit must be.
That’s not all though. In order to defeat the boss, you need to dig through specific piles of vomit in order to find undigested ingredients. You then use these to create a new dish made of freshly vomited food, and serve the dish back to the creature that just vomited it. As if this wasn't bad enough, this rotten food doesn't just make them run away sick, or take off health by splattering them in the face – instead, the bosses will gorge on this food until they burst, exploding and leaving the arena covered in, you guessed it, more goat vomit. Just like the base level, that means you need to dig through vomit three times to fully complete the boss encounter. Worse, while the first two bosses are kind enough to only upchuck the food you currently need, the third goat is not such a polite vomitter. Instead, they'll make you root around in the mush several times before finding the exact puke you’re supposed to cook.
I think Psychonauts 2 could do considerably more with its premise. Each journey into a brain feels in service to some small advancement of the story, and creative as each world is, rarely explores the ideas of mental health and identity beyond "bit sad, me." Even if it is going for a lighter, less serious touch, it probably could have done it without the goat vomit fight, yeah?
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