So glad to see these on GOG! I never played the earlier titles, but Contraptions and Even More Contraptions are more than worth the asking price---wonderfully tricky physics puzzles, a great visual style, and wonderful music and atmosphere. You can create your own contraptions too. Would highly recommend checking this out (good for younger gamers too).
I should preface this by saying that I'm new to adventure games; I picked up this and The Longest Journey a while ago and only just got around to playing this one. I can't believe I waited so long. This game has one of the best stories ever, no kidding. You wake up in an insane asylum, with no memory and no real idea what's going on. If the premise sounds cliche, I can promise that it only stays that way for about the first five minutes. And then you get to a twist, which I don't want to spoil, but it's awesome. The game trips constantly from hallucination to reality, and it constantly makes you question which is which, or if anything you're seeing is real at all. Trying to piece together the clues that the cutscenes and gameplay provide is immensely satisfying. The game also teases you by including some heavy symbolism in it's environments, and again, figuring out what it all means is a lot of fun. The puzzles are all quite logical (the main reason I went to the walkthroughs is because some of the items you need to pick up are really hard to see. There were also a couple of sound based puzzles that gave my tone-deaf ears some trouble). Really, I can't recommend this one highly enough. The art, narrative, and gameplay combine in really extraordinary ways. If you like games as a storytelling medium, Sanitarium is really something you shouldn't miss. BTW, I was able to run this on Vista without any crashes. I did hit a gamebreaking glitch during Chapter 5, though. Fortunately, starting a new save seems to fix that. You can find saves for the beginning of each chapter here: http://www.mediafire.com/?2zlx2by3ynz. If you hit a glitch just copy them to your save game folder, load the proper one up, and you should be fine :-)
I give Psychonauts five stars not because it's perfect, but because the good aspects of it are so good that the flaws tend to melt away. This is a game that everyone should play, even if you do have to suffer through some parts, because the payoff is incredible. Quick background: you play as Raz, who's run off from home to attend a summer camp for psychics-in-training. Obviously a sinister plot emerges, and you have to foil it. The story is wonderful stuff, thanks largely to the great characters (and voice acting). Most of the action is typical platforming, although the psychic power you acquire (telekinesis, pyrokinesis, levetation, etc) do a lot to mix things up. It should be noted that the action is where the game tends to trip over its own feet. Raz doesn't feel quite as "sticky" as characters in other games you might have played, and as such landing tricky jumps can feel very frustrating. What's also frustrating is the fact that it often seems possible to do things that you really can't, meaning that you'll waste quite a bit of time trying to make impossible jumps. This also comes out in the boss battles, which often dissolve into infuriating trial and error (I wound up consulting a walkthrough at several points). But, look, none of that matters. What matters is that Psychonauts is one of the most ridiculously creative games ever made. The premise of entering someone's mind and roaming around is cool enough, but you won't believe the levels to which Tim Schaffer and his team take it. This is some of the craziest level design ever, and I mean that in the best way possible. The whole game features of wonderful aesthetic--sort of the like the Muppets as reimagined by Tim Burton--and it's still visually engaging years later. But it's in the structure of the levels that Psychonauts really shines. In one area, the street twines around without any regard for gravity, and the level reorients itself around you as you jump from one section to the next. In another, paintings come to life as you place them in their frames. My favorite sequence involves climbing up a tower that looks like something M.C. Escher might have come up with after a particularly hard night's drinking. It's one of the most mind-blowing things I've ever seen in a video game, or any other medium for that matter. Look, you shouldn't expect the game to be perfect. It's not. What it is is one of the most incredible uses of interactive space I've ever seen. This one deserves to be played, if only as an example of just how cool this medium can be. At $10, it's a steal.
