Psychonauts

Psychonauts is a weird game, and not at all in a bad way. The game has an art style reminiscent of Tim Burton/Henry Selick stopmotion. The subject matter dealt can be surprisingly dark and mature, but is tackled in a fairly lighthearted and comedic way without disrespecting the subject matter. The story's more engaging than what you'd expect from other 3D platformers of the era. And most of the main characters are really interesting. The platforming has some mechanics that were new for the time as well, such as grinding, vaulting, levitation, and double jumping. The physic abilities make the combat experience varied, which stops it from getting repetitive. The environments have a good amount of variety as well. Overall, I feel that this game did so much more than it needed to in every back when it was made. And it's still an excellent and unique experience in 2024. Nearly everything that made this game unique when it came out still applies now. There are a couple issues playing it modernly, such as poor keyboard controls, poor telegraphing in some areas, and rare softlocking (you can use the bacon to avoid reloading an old save when this happens). But you can rebind the controls (or just use a controller), and the other issues rarely pop up, so they're not enough of a problem to harm overall player enjoyment.

There are definitely some things here that you have to get used to. Every level relies heavily on one or more gameplay elements that are simply allowed to overstay their welcome and without a doubt some of them feel quite awkward even if they are very interesting ideas. With that said, all of them are creative and fun. One has you going around as a kaiju. In another you're playing a board game. It also does have some issues with the platforming that make it frustrating when it doesn't have to be. At times it's difficult to tell the distance between two things you may need to jump. This explores some very mature themes for a game that is okay for young audiences. These include depression, propaganda and perception guiding our actions in the wrong direction. This does a great job of gradually introducing more complexity and giving you more abilities so you never reach a point where you're bored because there just isn't enough new cool stuff for you to adjust to and play around with. It is definitely true the Energy Ball that you use to run, jump and fly takes more getting used to than it should. It honestly feels like they were just so determined to reinvent these three common features that they refuse to let go of something that just wasn't quite as easy to use as a platformer requires it to be. You can do the same things in the first two Earthworm Jim games and there it is completely intuitive. This came out after those and so has no excuse. Basically you go into a lot of individual minds and help relieve the psychological issues that they're dealing with that are the cause of the problems they're facing. This is a wonderful message for the intended audience of trying to help people. Let's be honest we have more than enough games where the solution is finding the right face to punch and then punching it, like, super hard, dude. The graphics are quite good for the time and there's some really solid sound work helping to bring to life the quite ridiculous concepts.

Better than the 2nd game in every way.

The sequal is pretty good too, but this is where it all began.

I cant even really say much you wont hear from others, if your interested not in slop but in genuinely amazing videogames which expresses the medium as genuine ART and not just a finanical investment and moderately interesting use of time for the terminally bored, you should buy this amazing game!