Psychonauts

This is gaming at it's best. Put away your guns, your crosshairs and your JRPGs and pick up this game because it will blow you away. The game has a perfect combination of story, gameplay mechanics, platforming and humor. Especially the humor! This is a quirky, hilarious, creative and perfectly odd game, but it's one of those lost gems which everyone should at least try to experience because this game is what gaming should be about: Creativity, humor and entrainment.

I never played the game back in the day, but always pondered buying it, and finally did so recently. It has some great moments that make it worth playing, but between them you have to wade through some - not bad, mind you - but certainly average sections. The platforming is decent but not great, and the difficulty can suddenly turn from very easy to bloody hard (*cough* Meat Circus). But the concept of getting inside people's minds creates opportunity for some great worlds, and here Psychonauts fully delivers. Whether it's the brain of a grizzled soldier, a crazy conspiracy theorist, or a giant mutated monster, they all feel memorable and unique. I also mention I didn't like the ending, It's not so much as a hint to a sequel, it could be the intro for one. But the sequel never came, so I guess the joke's on them...

In my mind, one of the best things that a game can accomplish is to allow me to recapture the childlike sense of anything being possible. When I was a kid, I imagined that magical and fantastic things were always discoverable if I just looked a little harder beyond the obvious. To me, this game is an explicit attempt to regain that sense of imagination and wonder, and it succeeds magnificently. Amazingly, it manages to do so without being the least bit sappy or childish, too. The various components that make up the game (gameplay, exploration, art design, setting, writing) all come together to form an exciting, fun, and memorable paen to what it is like to be a kid. If your childhood is a place you would like to visit (while playing a fun game with great mechanics), I recommend Psychonauts highly.

Psychonauts has a reputation amongst in-the-know gamers as one of the most original, entertaining games of the past decade. It's well deserved. First of all, it's designed by the legendary Tim Schaefer of Monkey Island fame, as his first game since departing from LucasArts - and if you liked anything at all about the classic LucasArts adventure games of the 90s, you'll see the same polish, warmth and humor throughout Psychonauts. It's beautifully crafted and achieves a cartoony art style that doesn't need to strain graphics cards in order to look good. The storyline is incredibly imaginative for the time - today, comparisons to the movie Inception are easy to come by - but the idea of jumping into the minds of very different characters and experiencing truly different environments is unlike most games you'll see. The levels start out like fairly standard platformers but then evolve: a war-torn battlefield is a dime a dozen in games these days, but the level in which you are a giant and stomp around a city, Godzilla-style is one of the most satisfying experiences in any game. And while it may look like a kid's cartoon, the subject matter is anything but. Carefully balancing the humor is a very serious, darker side of storytelling. A teacher at the camp escapes into her psychedelic nightclub because of a terrible past; it's never explicitly mentioned, but the observant gamer will learn these secrets. And the twisted, topsy-turvy Milkman level isn't just a gravity programming trick, it's a commentary on the darker, hidden secrets of cookie-cutter, picture-perfect suburbia. What the game is best at, owing to the adventure game background of its creator, is really making you feel like you can interact with these imaginary worlds. You can try your skills on almost anyone and anything, and the game likely has a built in response unique to the situation, which is extremely rewarding for just trying different things. There are just some annoying hiccups that will hamper your enjoyment of the game, however. Some of the platforming controls don't work as responsively as you'd like, so you spend a lot of time having to retry certain jumps, and in some levels a mistimed leap will send you to the bottom of the room only to try again, and worse, sometimes death. The last level of the game has some of the most frustrating platforming elements, which is unnecessarily punishing compared to the rest of the game. It's a huge shame to enjoy this game so thoroughly only to give up at the end, as some players might, as the ending to the game is worth it. And it also leaves open the possibility of a sequel, although unfortunately, given the relatively poor sales volume of this game, we may never see one.

I really enjoyed the first half of the game where you explore the summer camp, but as soon as you get to the asylum it goes downhill really fast. The story is incredibly captivating, a summer camp for psychics is probably the most uniqe setting Ive ever seen in a platformer and the diverse cast of characters elevate it even further. The levels being the tortured minds of the characters you encounter is genius, each level feels distict and different both visually and in gameplay mechanics which adds a great layer of variety. The combat is clunky, Im not expecting devil may cry but trying to fight multiple enemies or even just locking on is very janky. The pacing is downright terrible. Once you get to the asylum you are hit with some big roadblocks in the form of the tedious level up sysytem and the cobweb duster. I just dont get why you need to grind to get essential abilities for progression it wouldve been better if you could just discover them in the levels they are needed. The cobweb duster is needlessly exspensive and only exists to pad out the playtime, you never need it for half the game but all the sudden its essential for progression which feels like a slap in the face. I also wasnt fond of any of the levels in the asylum, they steer away from platforming and focus on gimmicks(which is fine) but none of it is executed very well. The play level was just tedious and boring, the waterloo level was frustrating(platforming with enemies constantly shooting at you, hooray!), and the bull level(while beautiful) was also trial and error tedium. And the meat circus, oh my god that part with the bunny was easily the worst part of the game. I really hated the ending too, everyone basically forgives the villain and lets a bunch of unstable mental patients back into society for no good reason. I like the game but Im not gonna ignore the obvious flaws and pretend its a masterpiece.