Psychonauts

Psychonauts is the best platform game ever to grace the Xbox.

With franchises like Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, and Sly Cooper, the PS2 has been the system to go to for unique and innovative action/platform adventure games. The Xbox, on the other hand, lagged well behind with only so-so platform games. Well, move over PS2! Double Fine’s Psychonauts has come to the Xbox and it is without a doubt one of the most clever and outright funny games I have played in … well maybe ever.

Psychonauts is a stand-out game that, if its history is looked at, probably should not have been. It is the first game by a new development house. It has been in development for a long time (about four years). It lost its first publisher, Microsoft, and ultimately came out from a publisher that has far less than a stellar game track record. But the two things that Psychonauts did have going for it was an obviously dedicated development team that knew what a good game was and the warped mind of Tim Schafer.

If you don’t already know, Tim Schafer is the imagination behind such cult-favorite adventure games as Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango, which were developed while he was employed with LucasArts. He founded Double Fine Productions in 2000. He had this idea for a game and assembled a dedicate cadre of programmers and artists to make it a reality. Along the way they had some hard times with publishers, but perseverance paid off and his vision has come to fruition. And what a vision it is.

The first thing that jumps out at the player as he starts to play Psychonauts is the art of the game. Looking like an unholy union between a Pixar film and Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, the characters and environments of Psychonauts almost defy words. “Bizarre” and “surreal” immediately come to mind. “Twisted” and “beautiful” also go into the hopper. But these words all seem to come up short. Let’s just say the look of the game is almost guaranteed to strike every gamer’s fancy on some level (unless he is a complete curmudgeon) and leave it at that.

Psychonauts is the story of a summer camp, Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp to be exact, and the counselors and kids that make up its population. But it is also much more. The kids at this summer camp are in training to be psychonauts (psychic investigators) and the counselors are some of the most experienced and powerful psychonauts that ever jumped into a brain. And that is where this game vastly diverges from other platformers. If the gamer was just wandering around a real-world camp with psychic abilities it might be fun for a bit, but in Psychonauts the best action occurs inside the brains of the people the player will meet. And since every person’s mind is unique, with his own fears and mental demons, this is where the majority of the game’s appeal comes from.

Playing as Rasputin, a boy who runs away from his circus-acrobat family to follow his dream of becoming a psychonaut, the player is dumped into an adventure that he is not really ready for, in terms of training. The kids of the camp are having their brains stolen to be turned into weapons. Rasputin, or simply Raz, must develop his psychic abilities, find and restore the brains of the other campers, and ultimately wreak the plans of an evil psychic. Of course in the end Raz rises to the occasion and puts ever-increasing levels of his psychic powers to the test.

At first the player will be drawn into the relatively-safe minds of the camp counselors to learn the basics of psychonaut skills. In here he will learn about powers and the things that inhabit the mind. Inside minds the minds are figments of the imagination, emotional baggage that must be sorted, brain cobwebs (I know I’ve got a few of those) that must be cleared, and mental demons that must be conquered. All of these things will give Raz additional experience and level up his psychic abilities. As the game progresses he will obtain new abilities. Useful skills such as levitation, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, PSI blast, shield, clairvoyance, confusion and even invisibility will all be added to Raz’s bag of mental tricks before the game is over.

The game really takes off once the first kid’s brain disappears and Raz is drawn into less-friendly minds. And here is also where the most bizarre of the characters show up. Across the lake from the camp is a decaying insane asylum that has been turned to evil uses. In order to make his way into and through the asylum, Raz has to enter the disturbed minds of the asylum’s patients. These are a collection of some of the weirdest characters that have ever been encountered in a game. Each has a unique mental landscape and neurosis that must be overcome before they can be cured and help you.

Everyone who plays Psychonauts is going to have a favorite world. I still can’t decide if mine is the world within a grotesque giant lungfish named Linda where I played as a Godzilla-like monster named Goggalor (Raz wears goggles) who rampages through the city of Lungfishopolis or the mind of a paranoid named Boyd who had every cliché of conspiracy theorists running around in his twisted mind. No matter which ultimately becomes your favorite, they are all fun to explore and experience.

The storytelling in Psychonauts is way above the average platform game. You can tell Schafer’s background is in adventure games. While the gameplay is all platformer and executed in a rock solid manner with great puzzles to solve, the story never takes a backseat to the running, jumping climbing, swinging and psychic power using. And the writing is what ultimately puts Psychonauts way over the top. At every turn in the game the player will find himself laughing at some line, sound or visual that has been squirreled away for him to run across. The writing constantly surprises and delights. If I may be so bold, if Hollywood studios don’t take notice of this game and the story it tells for an animated movie, they should fire all the folks they have keeping a lookout for fresh ideas.

Control of Raz is consistently tight and responsive. At any one time the player can have three of his psychic powers mapped onto the right trigger, black and white buttons and can quickly change them on the fly. (If you still don’t have an S-style controller, now might be a good time to pick one up.) As with all 3D platform-adventure games, the camera has a lot to do with how good the playing experience is. I’m not going to say the camera for Psychonauts is perfect, but it is absolutely one of the better ones that I have ever seen.