Psychonauts

The Good
Where to begin? Well, for starters, this is bar-none the most imaginative game I have ever experienced. Razputin's ability to enter the minds of others to battle their anxieties and insecurities is the perfect pretense to let Tim Schafer and Double Fine's inestimable imaginations run wild. Psychonauts has ten mental worlds in all; each has an entirely unique visual design, and introduces a new gameplay twist.

For instance, the first mental level (available in the downloadable demo) is mostly straightforward platforming. Double-jumping over chasms, hanging off ledges, climbing ladders, that sort of thing. The difference is that it all takes place in the mind of militaristic, bombastic Coach Oleander, which means random explosions everywhere, gigantic cannons firing at unseen targets, foliage made out of ammo belts, and propaganda movies projected onto bullet-scarred walls.

Despite the unique setting, it would be easy to come away from that level unimpressed, expecting the rest of the game to be visually interesting but ultimately uninspired. But the level design only improves as the game goes on. Within two levels, you're rolling Raz around on top of his thought bubble in a kaleidoscopic 60's dance-party-cum-pinball-machine filled with lava lamps, bubble machines, and go-go dancers. Two levels later, Raz has to navigate a twisted 1950's suburb while looking for disguises to help him sneak past trenchcoated government agents. And still later on, Raz takes part in a gigantic hex-based wargame, shrinking down to recruit pieces before enlarging to move them around the board. The variety in scenery and goals keeps things fresh from beginning to end.

As amazing as Psychonauts' level design is, the game's artistic style is equally great. It's frequently been called "Tim Burton meets Pixar", and I think that description couldn't be more appropriate. The characters are strange-looking yet endearing, and filled with personality. The environments are littered with lovingly-crafted, surrealistic details. When even the puffs of dust that appear when something heavy hits the ground are heavily stylized, you know that this game has some serious artistic talent behind it.

From a aural standpoint, the game is similarly untouchable. Schafer's games have long been known for their outstanding voice casts, and this one is no exception. Every character is matched with an appropriate-sounding actor, without a single flat or stilted performance. The dialogue they're reading is typical Schafer - well crafted, flowing, articulate... and full of gut-busting humor. The characters themselves are quirky and filled with personality, even the ones who have no effect on the overall plot.

Peter McConnell, who composed the score to Schafer's previous game Grim Fandango, returns for Psychonauts, and the results are impressive. While I feel it doesn't have as many stand-out tracks as Grim, McConnell's music brings an extra level of texture to the game. Camp Whispering Rock's theme sounds appropriately bouncy and carefree, while the eeriness of Boyd's paranoid mindscape is intensified by its soundtrack's droning electronic hum. Performed with a miniature orchestra, the music makes the game feel even more cinematic than it already does.

The Bad
If you blaze straight through without stopping, the game is fairly short, with around 9-10 hours of playtime. And, as noted in another review, it's extremely easy up until the final level. So, to extend the length of the game, Double Fine threw in a tremendous amount of collecting. In the real world, Raz needs to look for psychic arrowheads, psi-cards, psi-cores, scavenger hunt items, and eventually missing brains. In each mental world, he needs to keep an eye out for figments, mental cobwebs, memory vaults, emotional baggage, and baggage tags.

That's a lot of stuff to keep track of, and many people may be annoyed that the game is pushing them to "catch 'em all". Luckily, most of the collecting is entirely optional. Plus, the upgrades Raz gets for doing it, such as multi-target psi blasts and regeneration, are worth the effort. A lot of the collectables are pretty entertaining to look at too, especially the figments, which are translucent neon pencil sketches that reflect the theme of the mind they appear in.

Psychonauts also has a few small gameplay glitches here and there. Occasionally Raz will be unable to move after walking from a platform onto a tightrope. Collisions with some of the scenery will cause Raz to slide off in odd directions. Some of the in-engine cutscenes have problems, specifically Raz facing away from the camera when it's clear he was supposed to be looking into it, or characters getting hung up on obstacles when trying to run somewhere. Aside from these, there are a few other small problems that might've been solved with some extra QA time, but they're hardly game-breaking.

Finally, I wish this game had sold better! Its sales in the United States were dismal considering the time and effort put into it, which is a shame. I feel this is partly because of its unusual look and theme. But, I think it's mostly the fault of a misleading advertising campaign that made it look like a typical kid-oriented platformer, and the immense difficulty publisher Majesco apparently had getting copies of the game into stores (something which they are, as of the time of this writing, about to be sued over). Here's hoping that it has better success in Europe when it's released there next month.

The Bottom Line
This is one of the best platformers of this console generation and, moreover, of all time. It doesn't do much to reinvent the genre, but instead takes what has gone before, tweaks it, and injects it with a rarely-seen level of craft, imagination, and painstaking detail. Anyone who, in recent years, has stared at shelves full of cookie-cutter first person shooters, racers, and RPGs and believed that creativity in game design was dead owes it to themselves to give Psychonauts a try.

The Good
Tim Schafer. One of my gaming industry heroes, and the famous creator/co-creator of games like Day of The Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango. When Psychonauts was released, discerning gamers everywhere proclaimed it a masterpiece.

Well, it is. This is a wildly imaginative, hugely varied, very entertaining romp disguised as a platformer. You play Raz, a boy with psychic powers who sneaks into a "psychic summer camp". You get merit badges throughout the game which give you special psychic powers like Telekinesis, Levitation, etc. I won't give away anymore, but the areas in the game are essentially the minds of very quirky individuals, and the developers play this concept to the hilt. I think that this is the only game I've played where every area requires a different type of gameplay. Unlike most games that introduce some core gameplay principles at the beginning and then just crank up the difficulty as you go along, Psychonaut's levels are all very unique, and very well done, despite the variety. You might be playing a wargame by recruiting and moving pieces on a giant board, or you might be rolling and floating Sonic-style inside a disco inferno. It has to be played to be believed.

There's also tons of stuff to do if you like collect-a-thons, and believe me, if you want to collect everything, you'd better have some skills and patience.

The Bad
Well, most all of the bad aspects come from the way this game was ported to the PS2. For one, framerate issues. Some people might find it less obnoxious than I do, but the framerate in the PS2 version tends to fluctuate wildly. The game is still highly playable, but really there's no excuse for this kind of thing in a professional product.

Loading times in the PS2 version are also sub-par. This is not unusual for these kinds of ports, but it's still annoying.

Also, the way the game handles save files is not PS2 optimized. You have to create a 1500KB profile save file that contains 5 save slots. The problem is, you can only use these save slots for the game you're in. If you start a new game, you have to create another massive 5-slot profile. The problem with this is that you never need more than 1 slot, as the game is mostly linear, and does autosaves anyway. Which means that if you live in a three-gamer household like me, there will have to be three massive save files on your memory card, and all each person will ever use will be 1/5 of their save slots. Given that games like Ratchet and Clank can support up to six totally separate game files in a 350KB file, this limitation is a bit silly, and feels like the the porters just used the PC-style save system with no modification.

To be fair to the original developers, an external porting house did the conversion, but this is still the least desirable version of this great game.

The Bottom Line
Psychonauts is truly a great game, and every serious gamer should definitely play it. But unfortunately, for the best experience, you should certainly go with the XBOX or PC versions.

The Good
I would like to take this opportunity to rather untactfully point out that I'd already considered Tim Schafer to be Lucasarts' brightest talent before he made 'Grim Fandango'. 'Full Throttle' was one of the best adventures the company produced, so why everybody forgot it and heaped their praise instead on a game about a dog and rabbit solving mysteries is a mystery to me. 'Psychonauts' is perhaps his most creative offering yet, and everybody has forgotten it already. Haven't you? Yes, I'm talking to you!

You wouldn't have forgotten it if you've played it, but apparently nobody has. I even had to get the game on import because it hasn't been released in Britain. Madness. Sorry if I sound bitter, because normally I wouldn't buy a hyper-colour PC platformer with a child protagonist either. But 'Psychonauts' is so cool, you just have to own it.

Firstly, and primarily, it's perhaps the most imaginative thing ever (with the possible exception of "Katamari Damacy"). Schafer's games always suggested that his head was so swimming with ideas that it needed to express them in order to stop it exploding in the night and covering his bedroom walls with bits of crazy characters, strange plot-lines, and whacked-out situations. Fortunately (for his health), he decided to make a game where you go inside people's minds, which gives him a lot of room to be creative. Every mind is a separate world. Different characters, different places, different times, different everything. The ideas are rampant. You get hit with something new and interesting almost every 10 minutes. It's like nothing you've played before and, with the exception of one moment which I will come to later, you won't ever get bored. Wonderful.

One of the potential pitfalls in creating a game so diverse is that it will require immense effort to make each world rise above the average and actually feel distinct and fun by itself, regardless of how different it is from the other worlds. Double Fine have leaped over this problem. The work gone into each level is stunning. They don't just look and sound different but they "feel" different. This attention to detail shines through everywhere. About half-way through the game, you gain an ability which allows you to see yourself through the eyes of another person. Use this power on Gloria, a once-famous actress, and she sees you as a walking autograph-book and pen. Use it on the girl who fancies you, and you see yourself as a Romeo figure holding a rose and smiling. Once you get it, you can go back to any level you've played and use it on any character you find just to see how they see you. It's an ability that barely has to be used in the game if you don't want to. If you take the effort to explore, you'll see just how much work they've put in. This is just an example. The love that has been poured into 'Psychonauts' is unbelievable. Normally I admire dedication to your art, but in this case, I think Double Fine probably ought to spend a little more time with their families. The divorce rate is high enough.

The characters are fantastic. Bobby Zilch is one of the best characters in the history of gaming. Know how much screen time he has in the whole of 'Psychonauts'? About 3 minutes.

The voice acting is as good as it gets.

The score is by Peter McConnell.

It's not really a platformer.

It's occasionally ball-achingly funny. When's the last time you laughed out loud playing a game? The characters you see in the 15th screenshot were responsible for tears of laughter hitting my keyboard.

It's occasionally very dark. There are a couple of secret rooms in some of the levels that shed a lot of light on certain characters. Some of them are so unfunny and unexpected that they'll make your jaw drop to the floor. You never know what to expect in "Psychonauts", not for a minute. They're constantly throwing curve-balls at you.

The animation is top-drawer. When was the last time in a game that a character's physical movements intentionally caused you to laugh?

In fact, everything that I don't mention in the next section has been done well. It was pointless of me to try and isolate separate parts (the graphics, the music, the script, the acting...). It's all first rate. Schafer clearly doesn't mess around...

The Bad
...except with the controls and the level of difficulty.

Some reviews of this game have stated that it's "unplayable" without a joypad. This is ludicrous, natch, but the game is slighted with camera difficulties simply because it's in 3 sodding dimensions. Since the dawn of 3D gaming, getting and keeping the right viewpoint on the action has been a consistent pain and maybe always will be. Still, "Psychonauts" is no worse than any other third-person game except with the boss fights.

The problem is that the bosses are huge and as such, require you to run away from them most of the time. So, given that, where should the camera go? It's a difficult question. Put it behind the hero and you can't see the enemy. Put it in front of the hero and you can see him and the enemy, but you're running into the camera. The developers chose the latter option, which is the wiser choice, but it still doesn't play well. It's far too awkward.

The only other mild snag is that the game is almost never a proper challenge. Nothing special there I suppose, since gaming is now mainstream and all games are dead easy. They may come with harder difficulty settings but that doesn't usually work because the games aren't really designed to be played on "Impossible". Psychonauts won't ever tax you. Sure, you'll lose some lives occasionally and have to replay sections a few times, but you won't shout expletives. (Until you come to the very last level, which is actually a bit tricky. Consequently, you'll hate it, because you'll be fumbling over the keyboard like a drunk, looking skyward, and shaking your fist as you remember the golden days when games were fair and only made in two dimensions.)

Finally, as I mentioned much earlier, there is only point in the game that will bore you. You have to collect shards out of the ground with a divining rod. You do this by running around and tapping "F" a lot. It's horrible and will make your blood pressure rise. Thank God you don't have to do it for very long.

The Bottom Line
Just because one of the world's greatest game designers can't overcome the Everest-sized hurdle of making a non-first-person game set in a 3D environment accessible and enjoyably difficult, doesn't mean "Psychonauts" isn't a game that everyone should own. It's one of the best of the year and perhaps the best ever of it's type for PC.

The Good
Psychonauts is the craziest, most deranged and one of the funniest games I have ever played. You take control of Raz (short for Razputin), a kid who’s run away from his circus family to sneak into Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp for psychic kids to become a member of the famed Psychonauts. The cast of characters be they your fellow camp psychics, the teachers, or the many people running round inside people’s minds that you'll bump into - all are fantastical or horrendously stereotypical and most are hilarious. There’s Bobby Zilch, the camp bully or Dogan, an extremely short chap who wears a foil hat because he blew someone’s head up “well, once kinda,” you don’t want to see what happens when he gets cornered by squirrels. Much of the story or happenings are bordering on insanity.

Your first task is a basic training level, Coach Oleander sucks you into his mind and barks orders and 'encouragement' as you leap crevices, get blown up and run for cover from machine gun fire, all to the sound of a WWII bombing campaign, vintage style projections of falling bombs light up the walls as you clamber up camo-netting, you’ll catch up with plenty of your fellow students as you go. Each level, or mind, that you enter is heavily themed. One of the most surreal is a twisting mess of suburban roads, hedges and identikit houses (gravity changes to which ever way happens to be down for each section), cartoon 'spies’, shifty chaps with high coat collars, red eyes and fedoras are busy going about their undercover business. At one section, they claim to be the road crew "We are the road crew", “We work on the roads", “My back is killing me”. You’ll need an item to get through each section to prove you’re one of them. Another involves matching a theatre play with the right set and mood (good or bad) - sounds kind of run of the mill, but like much in this game its unexpected and bonkers. Not to mention Lungfishopolis.

Between the story, which is mainly told through humorous cut scenes (I laughed out load many times, there’s always something hilarious, even if it's just the perfectly executed reaction on a characters face), the action is of a uniformly platforming style but with vastly different tasks to perform, huge boss battles are common and are, traditionally, at the end of each level.

Raz acquires psi powers such as levitation - a ball of energy you can bounce on and turn into a balloon type thing to float down slowly and ride up drafts, invisibility and telekinesis, to name but a few, as he gains ranks, the powers also increase as you go. There's plenty to collect, each mind is populated with figments - 2D sketches of stuff, usually crazy looking stuff, that are either just lying about the place or floating through the air, collecting 'em helps you gain those ranks, there's also mental cobwebs that can be cleared with the mental cobweb duster (available at the camp store) these can be redeemed for psi-cards (which you’ll see bobbing about from time to time) combine enough psi-cards with a psi-core (also available at the camp store) and you gain an entire rank. Smashing stuff can yield positive mental health, aggressive psychic energy (used for psi-blasts) and arrowheads, the camp currency is arrowheads as Whispering Rock was founded on an ancient Indian burial ground. There’s also emotional baggage, wailing suitcases and purses and the like which you’ll need to find the corresponding tag to clear, clear them all and you can access primal memories from Raz’s journal, which appear to be concept art for the game, and hopping vaults, punch these and you get a memory reel (comic strip style story board). Memory reels and cut scenes can also both be accessed from Raz’s journal for each level.

The camp consists of several different areas that you can travel freely between in-between missions, if you decide to take some time out to collect arrowheads, visit the camp store or just explore.

The music and voice acting are superb, spot on voice acting for the characters and very very funny, I particularly liked the adventurous secret agent style Psychonauts theme that plays in Ford Cruller’s underground HQ.

The Bad
The platforming can be awkward at times, as per usual.

The Bottom Line
Brilliant, the furthest out game I've played, so to speak. While it’s a completely different game in many ways than Grim Fandango, Creative Director Tim Shafer's previous game, it’s got a similar quality of style to it. I don't suppose there’s much chance of the sequel, but I'll be looking out for Double Fine’s second game sequel or no.

One third genius, one third insanity and one third hilarity!

The Good
Many of today's games are entertainment projects which don't fall short of movie productions, especially in terms of the artistic effort put into their visuals. Few games, however, are as convincing with their setting, characters and plot as Tim Schafer's Psychonauts.

This immersion is achieved on more than one level. Schafer creates a familiar little childhood world in which players feel at home - a summer camp. The twist: it's a summer camp for psychically gifted children. Our curiosity is piqued! Enter the hero, Razputin, a slightly kooky, yet immensely likeable and adventurous kid with the grand dream of mastering this little world and claim its reward: employment as a psychic government agent.

The test Raz has to overcome takes on greater proportions when the "usual" training he is supposed to undergo gets disrupted by a villain bent on harnessing the camper's psychic energies for his own purpose. During his journey, Raz studies with many mentors and enhances his mental powers. The learning curve and enhanced abilities that must be unlocked wake fond memories of prime genre representatives like Legend of Zelda in which players get an increasing feeling of skill and mastery of the surrounding world.

In terms of gameplay, Psychonauts translates into mental worlds which Razputin has to visit. Once there, he has to use his skills to solve the problems inside people's heads, helping them to overcome their personal demons and advance the story. Among the game's highlights are visits into a paranoid milkman's mind or the battle with an actress' inner critic in a world resembling a giant stage. While the premise gets weirder and weirder, it remains perfectly comprehensible because players are introduced to everything one step at a time. Like Raz, they only have a vague idea of what awaits them and are led deeper into the world of Psychonauts through exploration, an integral part of this action-adventure.

The game's graphics are the kind of bent-out-of-shape cartoon designs one would expect from Tim Burton, only less bleak. Bordering on the abstract sometimes, they can be a little hard to get into but radiate an appeal that's entirely their own. The presentation is topped off by a superb voice-over. Not a single character is miscast and no small part of the fun is exploring the "real" world tying together the mental ones and talking to many memorable characters and find out about them. No character in Psychonauts is two-dimensional and it speaks for the game's appeal that running around and talking to people is something players will want to do, even though it's not necessary to beat the game.

The Bad
While one of the most original games around as far as presentation and story are concerned, Psychonauts doesn't offer much in terms of gameplay that can't be found (and often better) in other action-adventures. The game isn't a cookie-cutter jump 'n' run, yet it's a far cry from brilliant gems like the aforementioned Legend of Zelda which offer better level design and a combination of action and puzzles elements.

Also, while Psychonauts is brilliantly written, it shows that Tim Schafer used to create equally brilliant adventure games for LucasArts. A slight disadvantage in this case as most of Psychonauts' main problems play out like classic adventure puzzles, but are far easier to beat because the solutions are action-based rather than brainteasers.

The Bottom Line
Psychonauts is a game players will play primarily for its story and characters. Giving a story-based approach the fair chance it deserves, it's easy to lose oneself in Tim Schafer's delightfully weird world populated by an incredibly strong cast. However, people who are looking for an experience in gameplay first and foremost may be turned off by this as the game's strength lies in its funny and intelligent plot.

The Good
The core gameplay (platforming, puzzling, and...uh...adventuring) is very good. Most of the gameplay challenges in the game are fun and satisfying. The puzzles aren't so hard that I got stuck but, at the same time gave me enough of a hard time that solving was satisfying. The gameplay is woven very well into the level design, one level may be more about platforming, while another might be more about puzzle solving, etc., but each one has enough balance and flair that it still feels like a coherent experience.

The story is not bad. There is a particular plot point towards the beginning that's introduced a little clumsily, and the ending is a little predictable, but, other than that, the story is good and the dialogue is quite funny if you dig odd quirky humor. Unlike a lot of other comedic games, Psychonauts knows how to pull off the serious moments well. The characters come across as well-rounded and real despite the game being anything but real.

The level design is outstanding. Without giving anything away, you'll truly be surprised level to level, the brilliant art direction and architecture the folks at Double Fine have come up with. Saying the levels have some variety would be selling them too short.

The Bad
The controls can be a little slippy sometimes. Sometimes you might try to make a jump and maybe miss a little, and it's not entirely human error, but it's not a huge problem and it's kind of a sticky area because it really depends on what you individually think of the controls.

The load times between each area can get bad. We're talking time-to-take-a-nap bad. This really only happens in the overworld, not the actual levels themselves, so it's more of a small problem then a major one.

The voice acting is spotty. Some characters like Raz the protagonist are really well done. Some characters, though...the actors sound like they just drank a gallon of cold medicine and decided to stand on their heads. In other words, they're in it for an easy paycheck.

The Bottom Line
Psychonauts is a great adventure game with a funny and endearing story and characters, and level design that may challenge you to rethink your opinion of games. A couple of technical issues keep it back from being perfect in my eyes, but to all others, I say jump right in.

The Good
The story line was fun to play through. Graphics for the game were really weird which made this game really cool to play through. Level designs were really amazing. Characters were cool and they had very different personalities. The powers to fool around with made the game never boring. This game is defiantly replayable because sometimes the first time you play it through you might miss somethings. Most of the powers were really cool to use and made the game very fun.

The Bad
The bosses seemed a bit easy to over come so there really wasn't much of a challenge. Some of the powers weren't really much of use besides for one point of the game. Such as the confusion grenade powers.

The Bottom Line
This game is different from any other game you have ever played.

The Good
Definitely the best thing about Psychonauts is that it looks at psychology and the many aspects that belong to it, then imagines a way to visualize it with a sense of humor, how to give it context within the story, how it could be used as a gameplay mechanics and then also add a reward system for it. Because of this all the little side-objectives you can do in the game, as well as the way many of the mental disorders are portrayed, work very well and are genuinely entertaining to interact with.

The game is also very good at immersing you in it's own little world because everything you see and do fits the theme perfectly. As I played through the game I could clearly feel that Tim Schäfer was calling the shots because only he can manage to pull off immersion this well.

The characters are simply amazing, not a single one of them is generic or "just an NPC". Every character has a name, a personality, a background and something that makes them utterly and completely unique. Even the characters that get less lines than protagonist of the first Saint's Row game have secrets to discover. I also liked it how you don't just run into a profile of a character like in Alpha Protocol, but had to befriend them and hear them out to slowly figure out who they were (or even eavesdrop on them). There are some real surprises too!

The overall humor of the game is rather lighthearted, but just like with the immersion of the world it has that specific style that you can only trace back to good old Tim. Honestly, I owe the world an apology for claiming he is overrated in my Brütal Legend review because he is just a good game designer (that game was just a misstep). The humor is timeless and clever, if you're the kind of person who likes pop-culture references and memes that only exist for like a month before disappearing than Psychonauts might shock you and put a proper sense of humor in your skull.

The way the levels works is pretty original and can only be compared with the paintings from Super Mario 64. The idea is that all the levels are based on the minds of the people around you and you have to enter them in order to fix whatever is wrong and obtain the items or services the characters have, but refuse to give. My favorite level is definitely the Battle for Waterloo, where a descendant of Napoleon has to win a board game from his ancestor for reasons I won't spoil.

Because you see so many different worlds Psychonauts is naturally rich with variety and that is a good way to keep one interested enough to keep playing it. Another good thing about the levels is that you get some very interesting colors thrown at you. From a rather standard level that switched between overly cheerful and very dark and grim, I went to a very beautiful level based on a certain genre of paintings which focused a lot on purple and dark blue. That level, despite been the most boring from a gameplay perspective was probably the most beautiful level I have ever seen in a game.

Just like in Ocarina of Time you are able to contact help to provide information on enemies and how to kill them. I really liked this because uninspired wailing can only be fun for so long while constantly having to adapt to different enemies with different weak-spots is much more enjoyable and challenging. The combat is not fantastic and it's hardly the most challenging game out there, but this at least made smaller fights interesting enough to bother with (whereas I would skip over all the fights in Brütal Legend).

The controls are overall very nice and tidy. Platforming with Raz is made functional enough to be entertaining rather than frustrating, there are several ways to get from A to B faster than walking and switching between different psychic powers and items is made easy enough to prevent been annoying.

The Bad
The biggest problem is that the Steam version of this game never seems to bloody work. The first time I played the game it was fine, but the second time (when I wrote my original review) the game would constantly crash for no apparent reason. Now that I have tried it a third time I got through the entire game, but the sound was downright horrible. The music was okay, but when characters talk it would often skip or repeat a word or just glitch out entirely. It was so annoying that I just read the subtitles before the characters could even start and then hit a button to skip through the dialogue.

There is one part in the game where you will suddenly need the Cobweb cleaner which up to that point was a mandatory item. I didn't buy any other items, but still I was short 400 arrowheads (currency) for the damn thing, so I had to go out of my way to grind myself silly for three hours. I really think this item could have been better implemented if they were going to make it mandatory for the later stages anyway.

The last level of the game is downright horrendous and totally unnecessary from a story, gameplay and graphical viewpoint. Without trying to spoil anything: You pretty much have to sit through one more level after a pretty climactic boss-fight, but this stage is so poorly designed and makes such a lot of use of fixed camera angles that I just call it void and stop. The villain is beaten, everything is back the way it should be and we have seen everything the game had to offer, so don't put out just another level for the sake of having it. I also hate how we already visited this place, so the design is not special anymore and how it doesn't use any tricks or challenges we haven't done before.

The entire story happens over the span of a single day, which doesn't make much sense to me. The second you start playing Raz has just arrived in the camp, yet he knows pretty much everything there is to know regarding basic information of the people around him (names, activities and so forth). Raz also goes from a complete newcomer to the greatest hero that has ever lived in just this one day and overall it just leaves me with the impression that even the developers noticed this was rather tight for the adventure they had intended. Which leaves the question: Why didn't you change this completely trivial matter? I also like how the teachers clearly state that Raz may not attend to camp activities, yet is order specifically to come to basic training at the beginning of the adventure.

The design of the characters doesn't really rub me up the right way and I doubt it will for anybody. When I first played the game's demo it took several weeks and a sale to finally get me to buy it just because of this fact. The characters don't really look very Human nor stylized enough to be cute and forgiven for this fact. Some characters have huge eyes, some faces are completely malformed and some characters look like they came from that old show: "Doug Funny" or whatever it was called.

The Bottom Line
Psychonauts is definitely one of the better platforming games that came out after the Nintendo 64 era. The humor is clever, the gameplay is entertaining, the story is interesting and the design of the levels is simply beautiful. Get this game on any system other than PC and you can already scratch away my biggest complaint, but even then it doesn't matter that much because the game is overall very good.

I will say that Psychonauts is not as good as the old Nintendo 64 games, but it's still quite a nice game. If you are one of those people who believe games are art (like me), you are obligated to play this at least once. Younger people and people in their 30's will probably have fun with this as well, but the average shooter fan will probably get annoyed by the heavy-story and difficulty curve.