Level Analysis- Psychonauts: Sasha's Shooting Gallery (Part Two)

Sasha’s Rubik's Cube

The layout of Sasha’s mindscape is unlike any of the others we’ve visited before. Unlike Agent Oleander’s war-torn battlefield or Raz’s whimsical circus, Sasha’s mindscape takes the appearance of a perfect cube with its own gravitational pull.

The cube is decorated with complex geometric patterns that reflect his analytical mind. Inside the cube are multiple sublevels that reflect different time periods in Sasha’s life. If the surface of the cube is what we already know of Sasha Nein, the layers beneath are the aspects of his life he keeps hidden from others.

Sasha keeps these layers well hidden from Raz; the only way to uncover these areas is by overloading his censory output and distracting him long enough for us to sneak in.

This is also the level where Raz is properly introduced to Censors, the most common enemy players will encounter while traversing minds, and—actually, I’ll let Sasha tell you about them.

“This is a censor. An integral part of any sane person’s mind. The censors roam through your psyche, looking for thoughts that don’t belong. Hallucinations, manias, waking dreams—the censors hunt them down and censor them out.”

As Sasha explained, Censors stamp out anything in the mind that doesn’t belong. Even if someone is invited inside a mind, like Raz, Censors will still consider him a foreign invader.

At the beginning of the level, we see the extent of Sasha's control over his mind. He can manage the censor output in his mind so that Raz can practice PSI Blast. Out of all the time we visit, this is the only one fully able to control the Censors.

However, Raz is impatient and eager to prove himself as a Psychonaut, so he turns up the dial that controls the censor output to dangerous degrees, causing the cube to shake and shift out of place. Censors begin pouring out all over the cube in uncontrolled numbers.

This loss of control over his mind immediately disturbs Sasha, causing him to grab Raz and shake him furiously; “Raz, what have you done? This is not control! This is chaos!”

As Sasha rushes off to try and fix it, Raz is asked to do his best to keep their numbers as low as possible. It is here that the Rubik's Cube of Sasha’s mind begins to unfurl, and we can begin to traverse the many aspects of Sasha Nein’s psyche.

The abundance of censors here serves two major roles in this level: gameplay and narrative.

The gameplay aspect is easy to explain. The player can get well acquainted with the main enemy they will be fighting throughout the mental landscape, studying their behavior, weaknesses, and strategizing the best way to take them out. It is also the perfect place to practice fighting with PSI Blast.

The narrative purpose is more complex. We learn later that a person’s psyche can influence what censors consider intrusive thoughts or not. The main thing Sasha wants to teach Raz is control over his emotions and how to vent them in a healthy way, as Sasha explains when first entering his mind.

However, by the time we enter Sasha’s mind, we realize that his definition of control is a bit more stressed than a normal person’s would probably be.

For Sasha, uncontrolled emotions are treated like foreign entities that need to be removed by censors. He finds the idea of less than full control over his mind distressing enough to completely abandon training to fix it first.

Nursery

The first layer Raz uncovers in the cube strongly resembles a nursery for a baby or young child. There is a moon-themed crib in the center, accompanied by matching stuffed animals and toys. Raz is shrunk down to the size of a baby as he traverses this layer, platforming over building blocks and swinging from mobiles.

Figments of imagination, stray thoughts associated with the mind, in this layer resemble baby toys and care products like rattles, milk bottles, tops, and pacifiers. We even see one figment that resembles a woman holding a baby.

The nursery is also where we find the first memory vault of this level. Memory vaults are elusive collectibles only found in the mental world that depict memories that the mind considers significant. These memories are shown to the player via image slideshow and are purposefully vague and difficult to understand.

Sasha’s first memory vault is titled “Sasha’s First Loss.” The slides are drawn from Sasha's point of view as a baby. The first three depict Sasha being cared for by his adoring mother. We see her as Sasha remembers her, a loving maternal figure, doting on him. His father is only present in one slide, simply overlooking his wife as she plays with their only son.

From just these three slides, we are able to gauge a lot about Sasha’s early life. He was very close to his mother, perceiving her as an ever-present force who always took care of him. His father, while distant, was a looming presence over him.

While the first three slides show happiness and comfort, the next three depict grief and tragedy. As if from nowhere, Sasha’s mother suddenly becomes gravely ill and dies shortly after. Sasha watched as she passed away in her bed across from his crib.

Sasha and his father are distraught; his father was never able to overcome the grief her loss left him with. He became an empty shell, unable to properly care for his son or himself. This is shown in a slide that depicts Sasha left alone in his crib while his father looks out the window at his wife’s grave longingly, too distracted with his thoughts to attend to his infant son.

This memory vault reveals Sasha’s early childhood and gives an explanation as to why he is so emotionally distant. With the death of his mother and his father barely holding it together, Sasha’s childhood became very lonely.

This may also be the reason his memories of childhood don’t extend farther than infancy. To him, the time with his mother was the only part of his childhood worth remembering.

His life was devoid of familial comfort, leading to him being unable to understand complex feelings of affection, something he has demonstrated numerous times with Agent Vodello, a woman he has romantic feelings for but is unable to properly express them. It gives nuance to his prickly demeanor when the player understands the circumstances behind his childhood.

This memory vault also serves another purpose: explaining the origins behind Sasha’s one and only weakness that he demonstrates while training Raz.

“Say something hideous and horrible jumps out at you. Something so disgusting that it simply must die.”

Ugly furniture.

“Ach! So tacky! I can’t look directly at it!”

What initially seemed like nothing more than a funny character quirk now has a whole new meaning. Throughout the slides, if you have been paying attention to the decor, you might have noticed something. The furniture is ugly. Sickly patterned couches and tacky lampshades everywhere.

It becomes clear that Sasha’s mother enjoyed this type of furniture. After her death, his dad replaced it all with more modern decor.

This pet peeve demonstrates a classic case of negative associative memory in Sasha. Associative memory is a psychological term that describes the ability to remember connections between two or more things that are not inherently related. For Sasha, he associates tacky furniture with the death of his mother, causing him notable distress; his first knee-jerk reaction is to immediately destroy the source with a well-placed PSI Blast.

“There. Now the world is a better place.”

With the first sublevel conquered, let’s move on to the next layer of Sasha’s cube, the Cobbler Shop.