This is definitely a quirky little game. It's a platform game, so yes, there's lots of jumping around. However, I didn't do too much falling to my doom, which I guess is a good thing. You play as Raz, a young psychic attending Psychic Camp and hoping to become one of the great Psychonauts. Your father, well, he's not very into the whole psychic thing. He's upset you snuck out to come to camp, so he's planning to pick you up. At the same time, you didn't really sign up for this camping thing, so you end up having to prove that you have what it takes to stick around.
The story develops in a comical way and Tim Schafer's influence (he of Grim Fandango fame) is immediately evident. The game has Raz entering the minds of both trainers and students, and because of this the stages are extremely surreal, and yet the developers managed to keep them interesting beyond just the oddness of it. The game is simply fun, and although I found some stages a bit too bizarre when trying to traverse them, in the end I was always able to find my way around. So the game stages are definitely original and my favorite has to be the one where you enter the mind of a lungfish. In there, you become a gigantic monster, causing lots of havoc and destruction around the lungfish city. The news reports about your rampage add that old sci-fi monster movie flavor to it. Fun times. The story also gets darker the deeper you go into the game. Kids are suddenly being abducted and their brains removed, and of course it becomes up to Raz, to save the day. Through it all, Raz also has to battle his own inner demons and we discover why his father is not so fond of Psychic Camp
In order to arm himself for the battles in the psychic realm, Raz needs to get certified in a number of psychic abilities like Telekinesis and Levitation. The game, which is quite open by platformer standards, becomes a bit linear in this, as whatever powers you get you'll end up using in the next stage. Although there are a nice number of psychic powers you can get certified in, you're limited in the amount you can use during gameplay, only being able to access three powers at a time. This actually works in giving a strategic element to the game, even though you can adjust which powers you have mapped to your buttons at any point.
The game makes you go into a collecting frenzy. Although this helps keep you occupied, I found it a little bothersome at times. The collectible that I found the most annoying has to be the purple arrowheads. In order to buy items and power-ups, you have to collect those. Yes, arrowheads. That's the camp's currency and there comes a point in the game that you have to buy a certain device. Without it, you just can't progress and I didn't like being forced to go back and redo stages in order to get enough arrowheads to buy the thing. Up to that point, I hadn't worried a lot about collecting those, and the suddenness of having to worry about it wasn't very enjoyable. There's a scavenger hunt as part of the camp activities as well. While inside the mental realm you're able to collect figments, and you gain a level when you get one hundred of these, and you get to hunt for tags to sort through a bunch of mental baggage. Find the right tag, and the baggage can now be sorted.
Graphics are colorful - very colorful and cartoony, but this suits the game quite well when one considers the comical nature of the dialogue and the absurdness of some of the stages in the game. The design of each of the mental areas matches the personality of the character whose mind you're invading, not only in tone but in the tasks set for you to complete in them. If anything, the levels are definitely unique, and this helps keep you interested in what's going on in the game.
To be honest, I'm not exactly a fan of platformers. However, Psychonauts'! uniqueness and quirkiness definitely won me over. I had lots of fun, and when the gameplay became a little irksome, the humor and story kept me hooked enough to keep me going. This is one of those games that many people might decide to skip because it seems so odd, and yet, when you give it a chance, it's very likely that you'll enjoy it. Many times while watching the TV commercials for it I found myself going Psychonauts! out loud, and getting odd looks from my wife for it. A game that can make me do that, I'll definitely have to say I've enjoyed.
If I had been able to play games while inside of my mother's womb, I'd have done so. The first system I ever had was the Atari 2600 followed by a Tandy Color Computer. From there on, I was hooked. I'm particularly attracted to role playing games (a passion that extended to tabletop gaming through college) and action/adventure games. I don't like puzzle games a whole lot, although I enjoy strategy games, particularly real-time ones, quite a bit. I can have fun with First Person Shooters, often finding them very cathartic, but I tend to avoid survival horroor games because I find myself too stressed out.
I was a software engineer until events in my life gave me a kick on the behind and I found myself exploring my true passion, writing. Other than gaming, I love reading, especially fantasy and science-fiction. I like my games to be challenging, but not frustrating. Although I don't want to see games becoming books with pretty graphics, I don't mind seeing solid storytelling in my games.
