Psycho Patrol R and the EU's Theosophical Collapse

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: A capricious, madcap joyride through the bureau-punk ruins of Western alt-civilization.

Psycho Patrol R is currently in development hell. It will probably be out in like 20 years if I’m being optimistic… Most of the content I had been planning was cut and I started working full time on drawing sexy anime characters... After a year of work what we ended up with was some kind of combination of Angry Birds, Doom, a hentai visual novel and Fortnite. It wasn’t very good and I no longer had the funds to pay my employees. I had to fire them and they got better jobs at some kind of VR amusement park for incels called Sucktorio.

-- Consumer Softproducts on the development of Psycho Patrol R, c. 2022

THE COCAINIZATION OF LIBERALISM

It’s been a very, very long time since I was excited enough about a new game to buy a copy during pre-release. I believe the last time was in 2013 when I bought Rust during Early-Access — back then, you see, I was a multiplayer-roleplay obsessive and so fell squarely into Rust’s target demographic of socially maladjusted teenagers. The years have changed me and I now haven’t played Rust for nearly a decade, and yet I feel as though I’ve come full-circle: I bought Psycho Patrol R when it released into Early-Access last week because I now fall squarely into Consumer Softproducts’ target demographic of cortisol-flooded computer nerds who were promised far too much by our decrepit world order.

Regular readers already know that Consumer Softproducts’ 2021 masterpiece Cruelty Squad is one of my all-time favorites for its innovative gameplay, unique premise, and ingeniously abstract narrativization. At the metatextual level, its release was a much-needed salve for the grotesque sociopolitical dysfunction of the COVID era and the moneyed video gaming industry’s concomitant inhumanity. It was living proof for the new decade that video games could still work as revolutionary artistic statements and make millions of dollars in so doing. So when I heard that its developer was making an open-world immersive sim in which you pilot a mech and profess Reichian psychoanalytical theory, I got pretty fucking excited.

Above: Psycho Patrol R features the most refreshing Early-Access reminder message that I can recall. You will suffer the consequences of your actions, but not in this game. Notice also the character-creation interface — this is a genuine RPG, despite any pretensions to the contrary.

I’ve put about a dozen hours into Psycho Patrol R at time of writing. To say that it defies my expectations would be disingenuous, because I didn’t bother setting my expecations in advance for a game with such twisted promotional material. But I can say with confidence that its gameplay and storytelling are, as in Cruelty Squad, utterly unique among the increasingly vast pantheon of games I’ve played. I’d like to share my first impressions with you this week, with a focus on two central topics:

1. Setting and Gameplay: what kind of game is Psycho Patrol R, and where does it stand as an Early-Access gameplay experience in its own right?

2. Narrative and Theming: as the latest entry in Consumer Softproducts’ oeuvre, what message — if any — does Psycho Patrol R seek to deliver?

I have a feeling that The Spieler will get quite a bit of mileage out of this game in the months to come. Hope you enjoy, and do be sure to go back and check out my writing on Cruelty Squad if you haven’t already.

SETTING AND GAMEPLAY: WHAT THE HELL IS THIS THING?

Psycho Patrol R’s worldbuilding is, like that of its spiritual predecessor, decidedly nontraditional. You are a newly recruited officer of the European Federal Police assigned to the counter-psychohazard division known as Psycho Patrol. The state of Pan-Europa¹ is in the throes of terminal decline as competing agencies with mutually incompatible remits jockey for influence within its punished hyper-bureaucracy. “The battleground of the 21^st century is the human brain,” notes the Steam Store page. “The soul of the planet is on the verge of collapse. Your chances are 0.001%.”

And to tell you the truth, that’s about all I can say with any certainty at this juncture. My as-yet limited playtime is so far characterized by a cascading deluge of gameplay mechanics and early-20th-century psychoanalysis. The currently implemented “main” quest, which sees the player investigating the Pan-Europan citizenry’s sudden and unexplained turn against cosmetics containing sodium lauryl sulfate, is introduced within the game’s first minutes and then swiftly cast by the wayside as distraction after distraction fills the questlog. From my perspective as a Morrowind superfan, this is a very good thing.

Above: Cloistered in our V-Stalker’s cockpit, we navigate the fast-travel interface. The open world is made up of about a dozen levels ranging in size from very large to gigantic, each acting as its own self-contained quest hub. Visible at bottom-left: our mounted 0.45 Gauge shotgun, which fires over thirty-two ounces of shot per trigger-pull. The mech combat in this game rocks.

In fact, Morrowind is perhaps the most stable point of gameplay comparison I’ve found so far, and I say that with full awareness of how insane it must sound to other Morrowind fans. Psycho Patrol R has a similar “go anywhere, do anything” sense about it in that the main quest can be all but totally ignored in favor of random mercenary adventures without significantly impacting the moment-to-moment experience. The fact that you converse with NPCs by selecting from a list of conversational topics is just icing on the sweetroll. The only significant difference from an exploration standpoint is that it’s set in a partially urbanized hellscape instead of a mystical fungus island. Indeed, I’m strongly reminded of that one Morrowind mod set in Soviet Kazakhstan with the tracksuit-wearing Elves — given that we’re dealing with Consumer Softproducts, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a deliberate evocation².

The other game that I was weirdly reminded of was Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, and not just because you get to pilot a mech. Psycho Patrol R has a similarly bisected primary gameplay loop in which you explore and fight both on foot and from the elevated safety of one of several combat mech platforms, called “V-Stalkers” in-universe. Your V-Stalker is highly modular and customizable, renders you immune to small-arms fire, and is powered by the Orgone³ energy field theorized by the Freud acolyte Wilhelm Reich. V-Stalkers are common and affordable, so they’ve become regular fixtures of everyday Pan-Europan society. Accordingly, everyone takes the giant mechs stomping around completely in stride, which produces the same vibe of blissful detachment that I got out of Shogo’s campaign.

Ultimately, I think that Psycho Patrol R is going for a Deus Ex-like narrative experience filtered through the player-directed pacing of a Western open-world RPG. If I’m correct, then there’s something pretty novel going on at ground-level where the mechanics interact — open-world storytelling tends to suffer from a lack of narrative urgency, but I suspect Psycho Patrol R understands and embraces this. Final verdicts on gameplay will have to wait, so we may as well dive into the story and messaging for now.

NARRATIVE AND THEMING: THE EGREGORE OF TWIN TERRA

Every time I try to summarize Psycho Patrol R’s narrative as I’ve thus far experienced it, something important gets left out. My first ten minutes felt like the pilot of a soapy office drama written by Charlie Brooker and directed by Johnny Knoxville. In a significant departure from Cruelty Squad’s narrativization, the people in Psycho Patrol R actually come across as characters with personalities and motivations rather than as walking metaphors for a given thematic motif. Even the protagonist himself gets a little bit of narrative agency when he logs diegetic remarks in his case files.

In keeping with Consumer Softproducts’ established aesthetic, however, most characters present as recognizable archetypes with some kind of morbid curveball thrown in: the grindset-oriented manager obsessed with policing thoughtcrime; the repressed yandere in unrequited love with violence itself; the incel accountant who, for reasons unexplained, is built like Pinocchio. It would be premature to call it a character-based story or to say that the narrative revolves around these character interactions, but conversing with and persuading people is an unmistakable foundation of the secondary gameplay loop.

Above: Our colleague Konrad, whose social media activity betrays his blackpilled hypomasculinity, rationalizes his desk assignment without my having asked. Inset: some of his social media activity.

My early impression of the narrative itself is one of extreme open-endedness, with its various threads broadly disconnected from one another. The Steam Store page summarizes it with the phrase “every quest is a side quest,” which I frankly adore as a framing device. The only reason I sussed out the sodium lauryl sulfate panic as the “main” quest was because I heard about it from the manager character at the direction of a non-diegetic tip in the Help menu, which hopefully gives you a sense of just how open-ended the game seeks to be. Imagine escaping the dragon attack in Skyrim’s first minutes only for Jarl Balgruuf to tell you “who cares about that nerd garbage? Go ask Proventus about my congestion-pricing initiative — it’s Keynesian as fuck.”

I argued several weeks ago that Cruelty Squad’s story is best enjoyed by intentionally losing oneself in the morass and not sweating the details, and that’s mostly true of Psycho Patrol R as well — the difference lies in the RPG quest system and the Morrowind-esque conversationalism, which enable the player to compartmentalize related story details far more easily than was the case in Cruelty Squad. Where that game required theory-crafting just to make sense of the unfolding action, this is more like having a decent high-level understanding of a half-dozen unrelated subject areas and then getting lost in the fine details of each. Perhaps this is an extra-textual metaphor for policy discourse under classical liberalism? Again, too soon to say for sure.

It’s because of this open-ended presentation and loose compartmentalization of themes that a summary to the effect of “Psycho Patrol R is about…” simply isn’t possible as part of a first-impressions writeup. I mean, just look at some of the motifs I identified over my first several hours (in no particular order):

• Western occultism, especially post-Blavatskyite Theosophy

• Second-generation psychoanalysis

• Neoliberal managerialism

• Military-industrial/neofascist statism

• Landian Accelerationism

So, yeah — this one’s gonna be a real doozy to get my head around. I’ll tentatively plan on tackling the most interesting parts piecemeal as part of regular features to come, because I don’t suppose anyone would want to read a 30,000-word dissertation on the thematic character of an arthouse mech-warfare game. Suffice it to say that while I found Cruelty Squad relatively digestible after reading it through Bataille, I’ve had no such luck with an interpretive strategy for Psycho Patrol R as yet.

My first instinct, perhaps unsurprisingly, was to read it as a critique of the presently ascendant New Right. But I didn’t really get that impression from my first dozen hours, aside from some relatively straightforward digs at hustle culture and traditional masculinity. I suspect that Ville Kallio has limited-to-zero interest in directly engaging with US electoral politics, for which I bend low and thank God.

My second instinct was to read it as an evolution of Cruelty Squad’s critique of consumption, which bore at least some fruit. But where the society and institutions of Cruelty Squad were effectively post-humanity, those of Psycho Patrol R come across more like exaggerations of our own. Hence, reading it strictly through Bataille leaves a lot of questions unanswered: Why are some citizens downtrodden livestock while others are politically engaged? Why the heavy focus on decriminalized narcotrafficking? What of the goddamn solar anus?

Above: We chat politics with Moneytoad, a cocaine dealer from the protagonist’s unspecified past. The Anti-Cocaine Task Force’s strictness belies the fact that cocaine is a regulated commercial product in Pan-Europa that gets officially graded and labelled.

I’ve had a little while now to sit with these questions, and the honest truth is that I can offer only limited speculation at this point. Cruelty Squad almost made it easy for me by literally name-dropping Georges Bataille on its very last screen, but Psycho Patrol R has thus far name-dropped only Wilhelm Reich, and I have nothing close to the narrative context or the deathwish I’d need to attempt a psychoanalytical reading of a game that reminds me so thoroughly of Shogo’s anime dramaturgy.

At the end of the day, I’m comforted by the fact that Psycho Patrol R reflects the preposterous quagmire of 2025’s society just like Cruelty Squad reflected that of 2021. In the time since, we’ve given up on containing COVID, elevated reactionary ideologues to high office throughout the world, and pillaged our collective artistic heritage for the benefit of enterprise LLM tech — of course it’s gonna be difficult to make sense of this game, because it’s next-to-impossible to make sense of any of the bullshit that goes on outside in real life nowadays.

PSYCHO PATROL R AND THE SOUL OF THE INDUSTRY

So, would I recommend that you purchase Psycho Patrol R during its Early-Access phase? Well, I would certainly recommend it to 100% of correspondents who got all three endings in Cruelty Squad. It’s more of what you loved, plus an open world and pilotable mechs. Oh, and the music’s even better — the instrumentation includes a lot more farm animal noises, but fewer IBS flare-ups. The rest of you ought to keep a safe distance until full release, unless of course this newsletter sold you on it and you just can’t wait for some wacky adventures in post-European federal bureaucracy.

For my part, this week has been an exhilarating breath of fresh air. As I stood under the flying buttresses of the European Federal Police headquarters and inspected the loadout of my squad-car-on-legs, I couldn’t help but come over all introspective. Assassin’s Creed also dropped a new title in March, and the juxtaposition has been utterly surreal to me as a lifelong gamer — I’m delighted that folks seem to be enjoying Ubisoft’s samurai adventure on the whole, but I’m plagued by a sinking feeling that the AAA spark has simply gone out, never to be rekindled. The first AC game felt like a grand adventure through the Holy Land because it was laser-focused on parkour, exploration, and man-stabbing, with the historical context there to support a charming and engaging narrative. The past several installments have felt instead like eighty-hour sequences of soporifically repetitive RPG combat encounters with extraordinarily pretty environment design.

Above: We take a moment to admire the courtyard at the European Federal Police HQ. Our V-Stalker (left) is configured with the Cruiser frame, which is essentially a ‘97 Crown Vic on a sweet pair of legs. It can do about 120 km/h if you switch on the Type-I Orgone Engine’s afterburner.

Much ink has been spilled on Substack and elsewhere over the gaming industry’s seemingly intractable tribulations of late. Revenue growth is flatlining or in decline even as budgets continue to skyrocket, and traditional strategies of player-outreach are increasingly underperforming. Money and media relationships don’t shift copies like they used to because the gaming public doesn’t respond to marketing or AAA hype-cycles as it once did⁴. I think these phenomena are worth analyzing in detail, because I firmly believe that the industry will continue to flounder unless it returns to the design paradigms that privilege compelling works of interactive fiction over platforms for social media engagement and microtransaction-based revenue models. Lower budgets, smaller scopes, and shorter development cycles obviously wouldn’t go amiss either. No amount of marketing can hide contempt for the medium from its core audience.

Psycho Patrol R is a shining exemplar of precisely the change I hope to see in the industry at large: an audacious creative project based on a mélange of ideas about which the creator was deeply passionate and inspired. It proudly serves a particular niche rather than optimizing for the broadest possible audience, and one can tell just by looking at it that no sleep was lost over adherence to passing trends or obeisance to corporate dogma. Is that too much to ask of the likes of modern Ubisoft?

Well, yes, of course it is — they’ve got demanding fans with specific expectations and gaggles of risk-averse shareholders to satisfy. But how did we even get to this point? It clearly wasn’t too much to ask back in 2004 when Patrice Désilets pitched an open-world spin-off of Prince of Persia’s acrobatic gameplay set during the Third Crusade with a narrative conceit about physically possessing the memories of one’s ancestors. That idea was greenlit and became Assassin’s Creed and, had it not, there would be no Assassin’s Creed: Shadows.

I sincerely hope that the AAA industry will learn the right lessons from this decade’s extremely troublesome first half. I’m sick to death of watching stakeholders who don’t play video games run roughshod over the medium’s most cherished IP, and I pray that the inevitable corporate restructures that we’re already beginning to see will reduce the influence of avarice in high-level game design. Of course, I can take at least some small comfort in knowing that, God forbid the AAA bubble does finally burst and end big-money game development as we know it, we’ll still have intrepid creatives pushing the medium forward with indie games like Psycho Patrol R at a fraction of the cost in money and time.

Til next time friends <3

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1. The Pan-Europan flag is this newsletter’s thumbnail.

2. I’ll write about Emba-5 one day, assuming I can ever get the bastard to run on a genuine copy of Morrowind.

3. I encourage you to look up Reich’s Orgone theory if you have time — it’s one of the 20^th century’s more gut-bustingly hilarious pseudoscientific phenomena.

4. Push to Talk ran an excellent and well-researched piece several weeks ago that takes a much more thorough look through a professional marketing lens.