Patterns Psychonauts 2 exemplifies

Pattern	How Psychonauts 2 uses it
metaphor-as-level	The lemma. A psychological condition is the level-design brief: art style, geometry, enemy mix, collectibles, and the central mechanic are all derived from one person's mental state. Performance anxiety produced a timed cooking-show arena; hoarding produced a library; a shattered mind produced four sub-levels in four unrelated genres.
one-shot-level-mechanic	Almost no level verb repeats. Cooking stations, betting odds, sense restoration, book-shrinking, memory bottles, hairdryer airflow, each appears in one level and never again, sitting on top of a stable global movement core. Linear content cost, zero economies of scale, maximum per-level surprise.
shader-as-level-identity	Each mental world gets its own palette, lighting, and post-process stack, and the treatment is characterisation: the Sensorium's extreme chromatic aberration is a brain re-learning to perceive. Hand-drawn 2D line art on 3D geometry reads as "thought, not object" throughout.
restorative-level-goal	Stated design constraint: leave every level in better condition than you found it, the "complete opposite" of a shooter. The exit state of each space is visibly repaired, which reframes every verb in the game including the collectibles.
enemy-as-emotion	Every enemy is a named mental process with behaviour derived from its name. Enablers make nearby enemies invulnerable. Bad Moods cannot be damaged at all; you have to find their cause. The fiction is the behaviour spec, so characterisation costs nothing extra.
loadout-as-budget	Four equipped PSI powers from ~9, on two shoulders and two triggers, plus three Pin slots bought with Psitanium. Unusually, traversal competes with combat for the same slots: Levitation and Mental Connection are slot powers, so a full damage build costs you mobility.
opportunity-cost-loadout	Sharpened by hard counters: Regrets take damage only from PSI Blast, Doubts want Pyrokinesis, Enablers want Time Bubble. A mixed wave can present an enemy your current four slots cannot hurt, and swapping requires a pause-menu rebind.
assist-toggles-no-penalty	Invincibility, fall damage, Narrative Combat, camera assist, triple-jump-to-glide, all individually toggleable at any time, all achievement-safe, none framed as a difficulty tier. Two of the movement toggles effectively hand back a power slot.
collectible-as-repair	Emotional Baggage is a two-part collectible: a crying bag plus its lost tag, hidden separately. Reuniting them stops the crying and pays out characterisation. Six collectible types, six different psychological objects, all funnelling into one fungible Rank stat.
diegetic-ui	The journal is a scrapbook, the upgrade tree is a merit-badge page signed by your mentor, the completion meter for a dentist's mind is a molar-shaped jigsaw, the bestiary is a torn notepad that slides into frame, and area maps are tourist-trap pamphlets.
ludonarrative-resonance	See the full reading. The level is the person; the plot's central crime is the player's own core verb (entering and altering a mind) turned on someone. One loud seam: a hoarding level inside a 1,300-figment collect-a-thon.
hub-and-spoke-world	Mario 64 lineage, with the level select promoted to a place: the Collective Unconscious is a floating brain whose orbiting doors are reachable only by chaining Mental Connection grapples. Reaching a level is itself an expression of the game's central verb.
forgiving-platforming-assists	Magnetised ledge grabs and rail attachments, a long controllable glide, near-free death, camera assist. The movement kit is deliberately small and the forgiveness layer deliberately large, because platforming here is a delivery mechanism for the levels rather than a test.