On Psychonauts

           Psychonauts is not like other games. It's ostensibly a platformer, and you do spend a lot of time in the game jumping, swinging, and climbing. However, to just label the game a platformer and call it a day would be doing it a tremendous disservice, because the platforming is probably the worst and least important part of the experience. In fact, if you were to break things down and describe everything that is wrong with the execution of platforming in Psychonauts, it would probably sound like the most horribly broken game in the world. But Psychonauts is not like other games.

          It seems like other games at first. It has a hub world, in the form of Camp Whispering Rock, a summer camp for young psychics; it has collectibles; it has a double-jump. So far, so good. Or at least it would be, were it not for a number of small problems that make moving about the world an occasionally frustrating experience.

          

          The main culprit for most of these problems seems to be the game's level geometry, although if you want to trace it back to its roots, I suppose you could blame the art direction. The art in Psychonauts is very Tim Burton-esque in that nothing seems to rest at a proper angle. It's visually striking, and it does a nice job of making a game whose graphics are technically unimpressive (mainly due to a lot of blurry, low-res textures) look good anyway. This can become a problem, though, when you're trying to navigate some of the game's trickier areas. With everything sitting at strange angles, it's not uncommon to land on something only to slide right off. Depending on where you are, this can mean repeating a short jumping section or, alternately, falling to your demise.

          Dying typically isn't too big of a deal, provided you don't do it too often. If you lose all of your lives, though, you'll be treated to one of the game's many long loading screens as you're kicked out of the level. Then, joy of joys, you get to sit through another loading screen as you jump back in. Once you do this, you're right back where you left off, so the mechanism really serves no point other than to make you sit and wait. It's irritating, especially since you spend so much time looking at loading screens anyway.

 

          The controls can feel inconsistent at times as well. There were several instances where I would fail to double jump, or activate one of my psychic powers, only to have it immediately switch back off for no apparent reason. This is highly inconvenient when you're counting on your invisibility to hide you from psychic bears, or your shield to protect you from the rockets of the lungfish navy.

         

          You read that last sentence correctly, by the way. Psychic bears and tiny, militant lungfish are only two of the many bizarre and wonderful things you'll encounter as you play through Psychonauts, and it's what makes Psychonauts different. Throughout the entire game, you'll be meeting characters and taking part in activities that are strange and often hilarious. There's a ton of dialog in this game, a lot of which you probably won't even catch on your first playthrough. I've played Psychonauts three times now, and every time I see or hear something I'd missed before. There's so much, in fact, that as I played, I began to wonder whether it was a contributing factor to all of the low-res textures in the game. On further reflection, though, I'd say the Metal Gear Solid games stand as evidence that it's quite possible to make a beautiful game and also include hours upon hours of voice acting. Still, the amount of dialog in the game is pretty staggering, and it's all well worth listening to.

          This works to the game's advantage because it has so many things for you to collect. Throughout the game, you'll be searching out arrowheads, PSI challenge markers, cards, mental cobwebs, figments, memory vaults, emotional baggage, and—maybe a little ironically—scavenger hunt items. Finding these things never really becomes an especially laborious task, though, because you're likely to come across most of them incidentally as you scour the camp grounds and various levels looking for people having conversations.

          Maybe even more impressive than the game's excellent dialog is the fact that a great deal of the game's story and sense of humor is conveyed without any direct exposition at all, instead relying on things built into the level design and gameplay. The designers had a lot of freedom in this regard because all of the levels—with the exception of the mental institution and the camp—take place inside the minds of game's characters. Some of them, like the topsy turvy world of the Milkman Conspiracy, will undoubtedly make you laugh, while things like Milla's room of nightmares will give you an unsettling look at characters' darker sides. Out of all the games in the world that trade on their deep, complex storylines, only a handful actually have well-developed characters that you feel you understand by the end of the game. Psychonauts takes characters and builds entire worlds around them, most of them designed to not only give you an understanding of why they are the way they are, but to help them come to grips with their personal demons.

         

          The later levels of the game take place inside the minds of crazy people, and by then you've already unlocked most of your psychic abilities (things like telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and levitation). The combination of these two elements allow the game's designers to really stretch their legs creatively, and it's here that their heritage in old point-and-click adventure games starts to show through. While there's still platforming going on, the real focus of these levels is puzzle-solving. Your time in these levels is pretty evenly divided between finding items in order to progress and using your powers creatively to get around obstacles. It's a nice change of pace from straight-up swinging and jumping, and the puzzles definitely have a “Use _____ on _____” mentality to them that will feel pretty familiar to anyone who's ever played an adventure game.

          Psychonauts is a horribly broken game in a lot of ways. Playing through it, you'll most likely die several times due to the poor collision detection and inconsistent controls. It's also kind of brilliant. The game's combination of great writing and inspired level design work to make it into something really unique and totally deserving of the praise heaped upon it by the five people who played it.