Psychonauts

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
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.