Razputin "Raz" Aquato

Lore & Background

Raz is a young boy whose family life is complicated by his mother Dorothea's volatile psychic nature. Dorothea, a powerful psychopath in the psychic sense, has a tendency to lose control of her abilities, and her kidnapping by the villainous psychopath Gwynpool sets the entire first game in motion. Raz, who has always felt a little apart from the world around him, sees the crisis as his chance to prove he belongs somewhere — and that somewhere turns out to be the Institute, a sprawling summer camp on a lake where kids like him learn to harness their gifts.

Under the guidance of Max Wellman, the camp's warm and slightly disheveled headmaster, Raz learns the fundamentals of psychonautic training: entering a person's mind, navigating the literal architecture of their thoughts and memories, and using psychic abilities to overcome obstacles. His journey takes him through the minds of fellow campers, each one a wildly different world — a boy who lives in a fantasy kingdom, a girl whose mind is a vast desert, a teenager whose subconscious is a crumbling city. Each dive teaches Raz something about himself and about the people he's trying to help.

In Psychonauts 2, Raz is older, wiser, and still just as prone to leaping headfirst into danger. The sequel expands on his relationships, deepens his understanding of his mother, and places him at the center of a new threat that tests everything he's learned. Through both games, Raz remains the emotional anchor of the Psychonauts world: the ordinary kid in extraordinary circumstances who keeps choosing courage over fear.

In Their Own Story

The lake was glass at dawn, and Raz stood at the edge of the dock with his boots still wet from the morning swim. Max had told him, in that rumbling, half-asleep voice of his, that the first rule of mind-diving was to know when to pull out. Raz had nodded. Raz always nodded.

But the mind ahead of him — a fellow camper's, tangled and stormy — was screaming in a frequency only he could hear. He could feel the architecture of it: a hallway that kept folding, a door that opened onto a sky full of teeth. His psychic boomerang hummed in his palm, warm as a living thing.

"I'm going in," he said, and the words came out smaller than he wanted them to.

Max was already halfway up the dock, tie crooked, coffee in hand. "You sure, kid?"

Raz grinned. It was the grin he gave before jumping off the highest diving board, the one that said *I might be terrified and I might be wrong, but I'm doing it anyway.*

He closed his eyes. The world dissolved into color and sound. And then he was gone, falling upward into someone else's sky.

Reader's Guide

Razputin "Raz" Aquato is the player-controlled Psychonaut and protagonist of both Psychonauts (2005) and Psychonauts 2 (2021). Think of him as the everyman hero: brave, a little clumsy, and endlessly determined, he's the kid who charges into a burning building because someone's still inside.

His core psychic ability is mind-travel — the power to enter another person's subconscious and navigate it as a physical space. Throughout the first game, he also picks up and swaps between various psychic powers, including a projectile weapon (often described as a psychic boomerang) and other tools for platforming and combat. He doesn't have a single fixed power; his flexibility is his strength.

Key relationships define his arc. Max Wellman, the camp headmaster, serves as a fatherly mentor and grounding presence. His mother, Dorothea Aquato, is the emotional engine of the first game — her kidnapping is the inciting incident, and saving her is Raz's driving motivation. Fellow campers and their minds become his first "missions," and each one reveals a different facet of what it means to be psychologically complex.

A notable in-game moment is Raz's very first mind-dive, where the surreal, shifting architecture of another person's subconscious is revealed for the first time to the player. It's a moment of genuine wonder, and it sets the tone for everything that follows: the world is bigger, stranger, and more fragile than it looks.

In Psychonauts 2, Raz is older and the stakes are higher, but that core spark — the kid who says "I'm going in" and means it — never goes away.

Did You Know?

• Raz's surname 'Aquato' and first name 'Razputin' are both playful nods to the historical figure Grigori Rasputin, the infamous Russian mystic.
• Raz is the only main character in the series who is a 'regular' psychonaut — not a villain, not an abomination, just a kid trying to do the right thing.
• In the first game, the player literally walks through the minds of other characters as physical, explorable spaces, with Raz as the guide through each one.
• Raz appears in both Psychonauts (2005) and Psychonauts 2 (2021), making him one of the few characters to bridge the sixteen-year gap between the two games.