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Reviews » Psychonauts [PC]

Many games have a long tumultuous history behind them. Throughout the industry there are plenty of stories of games that just barely squeaked out the door, innovative masterpieces cancelled before their time, and forgotten gems that were never appreciated as they should have been. Luckily, the story of Psychonauts is one of the few that turned out just about as happily as possible.

Before really digging in to what makes Psychonauts a great game, and why you should stop reading immediately and run to the store to give a copy a good home, I feel compelled to give a bit of history, and give some frame of reference of why we should all consider ourselves blessed to ever see the game at all. First: "Why you should care who Tim Schafer is." This is pretty simple, really. Remember all the great older LucasArts games that weren't Star Wars related? Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango and others? Tim worked on all of those, and was one of the handful of people writing all the dialog for them, additionally he did game design for some of the later ones. For the earlier games, the humor and the excellent writing were two of the main contributing factors to why they were such good games, and why you were playing Monkey Island instead of all the other adventure games of the time.

After completing Grim Fandango in 1998, Tim stuck around for a bit at LucasArts and then packed up his toys and led some of his development team away to start a new company: Double Fine. Psychonauts is Double Fine's first game, and it is just as amazing as all of Tim's previous games. Now for some slightly more recent history. Initially, Psychonauts was pitched to Microsoft for their then-new Xbox. Microsoft liked it, so they inked a deal to be publisher, and get the game as an exclusive for the Xbox. Unfortunately, in March of 2004, Microsoft dropped them. I don't have official word on hand as to why, but I'd wager it was partially due to delays and partially due to a quirky funny platformer not fitting well within Microsoft's other X-TREEEEM first party titles.

After several sketchy months of skating by without funding from a publisher, Double Fine and Psychonauts were saved from folding by Majesco, who swooped down and offered to publish the game. Another nine months later and Psychonauts was finally being released, and not just as an Xbox exclusive, but also as a PC game with a PS2 port in the wings.

That's how we got from there to here. So what's the deal with the game? Psychonauts is, at it's base, a very solid third person platformer. Run, jump, shoot, kill, collect, solve puzzle, jump, shoot, shoot, jump, etc. What makes Psychonauts special is that you will probably never see it as a platformer, or ever really think of it as just another platformer, because you will be too distracted and amazed by the wide variety of lush settings, the top-notch writing and voice acting, the refreshingly bizarre humor, and the unparalleled attention to detail to ever care about the game being "just a platformer".

Psychonauts places you in the sneakers of Razputin, a kid with strong but unrefined psychic powers. Like all budding psychics, Raz hopes to one day be accepted as a member of the Psychonauts, a team of psychic secret agents who fly around saving the world from destruction using the amazing powers of their massive overactive brains. Unfortunately, his Dad doesn't approve of these aspirations, so Raz runs away to Whispering Rock Summer Camp, a camp run by the Psychonauts, specifically for training otherwise-outcast young psychics.

While he's there, Raz learns the ropes of being a Psychonaut. He learns how to control powers like telekinesis, pyrokinesis, invisibility, clairvoyance, levitation, and overall how to prove himself as a worthwhile candidate for becoming a Psychonaut. And, of course, along the way he happens to stumble upon and thwart a horrible plan for world domination.

The overworld of the game is camp. You can wander around the campgrounds, visit the assorted lodges, and talk to the other psychic campers, each of which has a personality of their own, plus a backstory, and tons of dialog. They're not just cookie cutter [HELLO I AM A CAMPER], they're a complex and multidimensional set of ~20 psychic kids who were sent here for the summer. This is one of the examples of just how in-depth Double Fine went, this is the kind of attention to detail they put into their NPCs. Anyways, out on the overworld there's stuff to visit, stuff to collect, stuff to buy from the camp store, kids to talk to, and quite a large world to just cruise around in and explore.

The game is split up into two main parts. The first half is all about getting your basic Merit Badges, which permit you to use assorted new powers, and to get you used to how all the game's basic features work. You also quickly get introduced to the way the levels of the game work, which is innovative and detailed in itself. Rather than some lame contrived level or mission system, Psychonauts is all about jumping into people's heads. The levels you visit are the troubled minds of people around camp. To get your initial badges, you dive into the minds of your instructors, who teach you how to use a certain power. In the latter half of the game, you'll be diving into the much less friendly and much more disturbed minds of the denizens of a conveniently adjacent mostly-abandoned mental institution.

All minds - like their owners - have their own unique personality and feel, generally extrapolated from the question of "I wonder what the inside of this character's head would be like, if it were a level in a video game?" In every mind, though, there are some common elements, most of which are collection based. Please, don't groan. This is a platformer, there has to be collection. In Psychonauts, there are things to collect on the overworld: scavenger hunt items, brains-in-jars, cards, etc; and things to collect in the individual minds: emotional baggage (in the form of weeping sets of luggage, for which you have to find the bag-tag), mental cobwebs (which you can extract and refine for bonuses), memory safes (locked away thoughts in living cartoony safes), and figments (neon sprite outlines, tailored to the specific level, which are just sorta all over the place). Collections are generally worthwhile in the game. At the base level, nearly all collection items increase your level. Higher levels yield new ways to use existing powers (like faster lock-on for pyrokinesis, longer range for telekinesis, or chaining ammo for your little mean balls of hate) at regular intervals. Safes reward you with little sketched slide-shows of your host's shameful repressed memories. Collecting all the cobwebs or mental baggage may unlock more bonuses, like production sketches for the level you're in.

The collecting also really isn't all that hard. From the hub world - the collective unconscious (a mental street with quick-access doors to all minds you've visited so far) - you can see which collections you've completed for which levels. From within the levels it's pretty easy too, since everything either glows, is animated and swoops around the room, or is audibly weeping in the corner. Need to save the duffel bag from it's misery? Run towards the annoyingly loud sobbing.

The levels themselves are really where the game shines. Especially the latter half, when you're hopping into the minds of the insane, uninvited. When I say there's variety in these levels, please trust that I mean it. If you can't tell that the game is going to be weird once you finish the well controlled rotating cube mind of Sasha Nein, one of the camp's counselors, then it definitely hits you when you jump into the head of a giant mutated lungfish. The lungfish's mind - Lungfishopolis - is a large active city, full of happy little lungfish. Then Raz shows up, and - understandably - is an appropriate size compared to a lungfish. This makes him comparatively hundreds of feet tall, and is immediately christened "GOGGALOR" . . and the game suddenly turns into a Godzilla parody. You lumber through the city, being attacked by Lungfishopolis Self Defense troops, crashing through buildings, and causing all kinds of giant-monster havoc. Some of the residents seem to know you fight for good, so they enlist your help in destroying a big antenna on the other side of the city, which ends up being a mind control device affecting the mental state of the actual lungfish you're inside.

If that still doesn't give you a good idea what kind of strangeness awaits you, how about the level immediately following Lungfishopolis? Right after you reach the asylum, you're confronted by an obviously disturbed security guard named Boyd. He has the gates locked, and doesn't seem to want to listen to a word you say. He keeps mumbling about "The Milkman", and all around him on the walls are huge complex conspiracy theory diagrams worked out in chalk. A quick trip in into his head reveals that yes, Boyd is completely paranoid. His mind is a twisted but still sugar-coated version of 60's suburbia. It's a happy street, filled with well groomed shrubberies, happy little identical cookie-cutter houses, but . . twisted. Literally. The street and the connected houses are really all there is. It's all floating in a bright happy blue world, which you can quite easily fall off of. The street itself bends every which way through reality, folding up on itself, and twisting around itself like a mobius strip, leading you to seemingly impossible jumps from one curve to another, made possible through the game's wonderful implementation of Special gravity.

The Milkman Conspiracy is also twisted in the other way. Stop paying attention to the shrubbery long enough and you might notice it rustling out of the corner of your eye, and maybe you'll see the binoculars. Or perhaps the fire hydrants with concealed security cameras and satellite dishes. Boyd obviously thinks everyone is watching him, so in his delusional mind, everyone is watching him. Then there are the actual occupants of the level, Undercover Agents wearing trench coats and fedoras, pretending to be members of assorted utility groups. One set is the road crew, working on a quarantined area of the street, where everything has been broken up. They work on the road crew with their special stop signs which prove to Boyd that they're part of the road crew. To get through, you have to find and equip a road sign. These groups are scattered all throughout the level, and to proceed you have to blend in with all of them at one time or another, to uncover just who is The Milkman, and why is his milk delicious? It's an application of an adventure-game-ish item collection puzzle, made to work in the context of a platformer, and then integrated perfectly into this already complex and bizarre setting.

I won't go too deep into the story, or too deep into the assorted neuroses of all the characters, because that's part of the fun. Trying to write them all out and explain them really wouldn't do the game justice. Just know that the plot is good, not incredibly contrived, covers everything you could want it to, and has an actual well-written ending that provides closure while still leaving you wanting more.

Now, no game is perfect, and Psychonauts did have a few flaws. Unlike other games, though, the flaws are both rare and minor. First: compatibility. When they were dropped by Microsoft, Double Fine was thereby released from their Xbox Exclusivity agreement. This means ports could be made. However, those ports were accomplished in just over a year, which doesn't seem like much. The main problem this creates is with regard to the game's controls. All initial development was done for the Xbox, so the input is tailored to the Xbox. If you get the PC version, sure, you'll be able to use the mouse and keyboard just fine . . but I don't personally endorse it. You'll want to go get a good gamepad if you don't already have one. You'll at LEAST need something with dual-analog. On top of that, you'll probably want something with the same number of buttons as an Xbox controller. If you have other consoles already, I suggest getting a converter, specifically an Xbox Pad->USB converter or PS2 Pad->USB converter. I played through the game using my PS2 controller, and it was wonderful. If you don't have a console, or just want a real gamepad, go get one. But again, be sure to get dual analog plus lots of buttons.

Further expanding on the compatibility issue, when you open things up to PCs, you always have a huge number of weird bugs that might crop up due to the staggering amount of hardware configurations you can have. Therefore, some people have expressed problems with audio sync, audio glitches, video glitches, etc. Personally, I haven't come across any problems whatsoever. If you have problems with the PC version, head to the official Psychonauts website and grab some patches.

Compatibility problems don't stop there, though. Reports from the most-recently-released PS2 port indicate that there are quite a few problems. Slowdowns, lower-resolution textures, even more audio glitches, and more. I wouldn't recommend the PS2 version unless it's absolutely the only thing you have that can run the game.

The only other real problems are puzzle related, specifically in the last level. Yes, the last level may seem incredibly difficult. Luckily, Tim has informed us that if you have problems getting knives to stick, to use your shield. And if you're repeatedly getting fried, he has reminded us that you can't shoot what you can't see. Any other causes of confusion or infuriation are probably going to come from not understanding how to do a puzzle. I know this may be hard for some of you, but this game will involve thinking and decent puzzle-solving skills. But of course, if you don't have said skills, that's what FAQs are for.

So if you're looking for a wonderful truly unique experience of a game, full of well-written funny dialog, intuitive puzzles, a huge complex and incredibly detailed world, all wrapped tight around a solid platformer base, and packed into an already-cheaper-than-normal-retail box, please go get Psychonauts. Even if you don't think you want these things, go get Psychonauts. Even if you think you're burnt out on platformers after the hundreds you played over the past generations of consoles, go get Psychonauts. It is worth it.

Psychonauts - PC / Xbox / PS2

Presentation

The Graphics, Sound, and overall attention to detail in Psychonauts is truly astounding. Attempting to say more wouldn't do it justice, because it's truly that good.

Gameplay

The gameplay is standard platformer fare deep down, but apart from that, everything built ontop of it is new and fresh. Or if it isn't entirely new, it's done in a different enough way that it feels new and fresh.

Replayability

As great as Psychonauts is, once you beat it thats pretty much it. The only stuff left once you beat the game is any collecting you didn't finish.

Value

~If you can find it, Psychonauts is cheap. The price started off below usual retail price for PC, and has dropped since release for Xbox and PS2. If you aren't already sold on the game, that means it's only a $30 risk. And if you are sold on the game, it's like Double Fine handed you a free $20.

Overall

Psychonauts is simply one of the best games I have played in years. It's quirky, funny, incredibly detailed, creative, innovative, and all around just plain good. And on top of all that, it's cheap and available for three major platforms, so no one has an excuse. Go buy it now.