Into the Mind of Madness

There’s no doubt, Borderlands 3 has a story problem. The game is fun as hell, but its best moments come despite the story and not because of it. The characters will talk at you, sometimes incessantly, trying to make you care about another quest to save the world when your heroes have no investment in it and even the villains of the story barely seem to care about what they’re doing. Borderlands 3 is the curious game where the action is propulsive but the story sucks all the momentum out of the experience. You’re doing the same things you’ve done in the previous games but it’s much harder to care about it because the game gives you nothing, other than really good action.

So it was nice going into one of the expansions, Psycho Krieg and the Fantastic Fusterclick, to find a story that was, at least in some ways, interesting and enjoyable. Make no mistake, this expansion still has a number of the same issues that the main story did – too many quips, too many weird moments that don’t really tie into what you’re doing, and a whole lot of blather – but when it’s able. To focus on its central character, Krieg, and what he’s going through, the expansion is actually able to carve something like a compelling narrative that makes you want to see the story through. It’s not great, but it is at least pretty good.

The expansion is all about Krieg. We, as the vault hunters, are given the task (from Tannis) to head into Krieg’s mind and help the Psycho out. As it turns out, Krieg is of two minds, literally. There’s the sane, “good” part of his brain (who we see in glowing blue with a halo above his head), and the insane, “bad” part of Krieg, the psycho (who we see in red, with horns… the game isn’t really subtle). Krieg wants to escape himself. He wants the vault hunters to go through his mind and help extract the sane part of himself from the insane part. That would leave the psycho in charge of the body, but, as the sane half puts it, at least he’d be free.

To do all this, you are tasked to wander through Krieg’s mind and collect three golden items (a buzzaxe, a gauntlet, and a mask) to restore the great statue blocking the way to the center of Krieg’s mind, Vaulthalla. If you manage all this, then it’s just a battle against the Psychoreaver (a massive, hulking Psycho who, somehow, is the connective insanity of all psychos across the universe) and, finally, free Krieg’s mind from the torture of himself. Only then can Krieg be free… if he actually wants it anymore.

In basic concept, Psycho Krieg and the Fantastic Fustercluck isn’t really that different from a previous expansion we looked at, The Claptastic Voyage from The Pre-Sequel. There the bounty hunters under Handsome Jack’s employ were tasked with going into Claptrap’s (relatively insane) brain to retrieve a bit of tech that Jack needed. Here we’re tasked with going into Krieg’s (absolutely insane) mind to get something that Tannis wants. Functionally the two expansions do similar things which, in some ways, make this expansion feel like a pale imitation of another story.

Whether that bothers you or not, of course, depends on if you even played through all of The Pre-Sequel and decided to go through The Claptastic Voyage. I know many players couldn’t get through that side-quel, and the thought of playing expansions for it was right off the table. Hell, The Pre-Sequel underperformed poorly enough that all the expansions that were planned past The Claptastic Voyage were scrapped, so it’s not as though that game had a huge player base that would notice if Gearbox recycled some of its content.

It does feel like recycled content for anyone that did play through The Claptastic Voyage, though. You’re going into an insane mind where normal rules don’t really apply. Whether that’s a Tron-esque world ala Claptrap’s mind, or a psycho-fueled meat palace as befits Krieg, the basic format is still the same even if the designs look different. It feels very much like another Claptrap expansion even though, story-wise, it’s really not. And that’s the key: for once, Borderlands 3 really had to make you care about the story because, functionally, it’s harder to care about the adventure.

It takes. Until the midway point for the story to really get going, so bear in mind that if you get bored of the warmed-over repeat of a tale we get here it won’t actually find its feet for a little while. It eventually does, though, when the story finally finds its heart, and that’s all thanks to Maya. As long-time fans of the series will know, Krieg has a thing for Maya and, in a roundabout way, she was sort of sweet on the psycho. This was all presented in the debut trailer for Krieg’s character, “A Meat-Bicycle Built for Two”, and it’s been a core part of his character since (even though he hasn’t shown much in the interim). Maya (spoilers) dies in Borderlands 3, and if any character were going to grieve her it would be Krieg. The second big mission of the three parts of this adventure is about Krieg’s love for Maya, and it forms a solid bit of story that really gets you invested in Krieg. She’s gone, but he still carries a part of her in his psychotic mind, and, in a weird way, it’s really quite lovely.

This chunk of story gives the back stretch some momentum, which is then carried by the third act showing us Krieg’s back story and how he became a psycho. I wouldn’t say it’s as investing as the Krieg/Maya story, but it does at least fill in some gaps and makes Krieg more compelling as a character. He wasn’t born psychotic, it was done to him, and he’s been fighting ever since to try and be better than the insane mad man someone tried to make him into. It’s not perfect storytelling, but it’s at least decent character development in a game that is, otherwise, sorely lacking in it.

It feels weird to praise an expansion with only so-so storytelling when, if this were part of a different game, we’d complain that the writing is rote and basic. But that’s the thing with Borderlands 3: the writing for the game is otherwise so terrible that a marginal okay story with a few really good moments stands far above everything else we’ve had to experience. This should be the low bar for writing in a video game, but somehow Borderlands 3 failed to even meet that level. Were it not for the solid action and great gameplay, which this expansion continues to use well, Borderlands 3 would be an absolutely unplayable mess. Even here, in a good expansion, it feels like it’s teetering on the edge of falling completely apart.

Psycho Krieg and the Fantastic Fustercluck is carried by the fact that, for once, the game actually invests in some of its characters and gives them a real, meaningful story. I liked this adventure because I liked Krieg and Maya and this story really gives both of them closure. It would have been nice if they hadn’t killed off Maya so that, in turn, it didn’t feel like they fridged her to give Krieg some emotional growth, but at least these two events didn’t run one after the other. Instead we get a lovely piece about grief and loss in the mind of a psycho which is probably the best way this otherwise terribly written game was going to be able to handle it. I’m still not impressed by the writing in Borderlands 3 but this expansion at least takes us from rock bottom to somewhat passable. It’s a huge improvement but, for many, I’m not sure if that’s going to be enough.