The best thing to happen to the adventure community in recent years
was Lucas Arts decision to no longer make adventure games.

For now, instead of watered-down
Monkey Islands and maybe one other major adventure release per
year (and the underlying and well founded
fear it may be cancelled), we instead have a plethora of ex-LA employees
with projects in various stages of development: Dan Connors of Telltale working on Bone, Bill Tiller’s Vampyre
Story, a few others
toiling on yet-to-be-announced projects and, of course, Tim Schaefer’s
newest progeny, Psychonauts.

Admittedly, it was a pleasant surprise to learn that Psychonauts had been classified as a platform game, especially as I had just
recently read somewhere that graphics
had killed the platform genre.
Or was that the adventure genre? I get so confused at my advanced
age. But as much as Psychonauts is a platform game, it also has numerous
adventure elements such as dialogue trees, scavenger hunts and inventory
items that will appeal to the adventure gamer.

Being a conscientious
gamer, I purchased the X-box version of Psychonauts at the local
EB (actually, I’m not that conscientious, it’s
just that Majesco deemed us not worthy of a review copy).

For those who have not played a platform game in quite some time,
no longer are they the side-scrolling, Mario jump-fests of the past.
Rather they are open-ended, anything goes smorgasbords of genre mixing
and Double Fine has done an admirable job of integrating the best
elements of both adventure and platformers into a peaceful co-existence.

Psychonauts centers around
a young, big-headed lad named Razputin, or Raz for short (get it?
See your character in a platform game always
dies – a lot – and then is resurrected and the real Rasputin . . ah, go look it up in your Funk & Wagnall). As for that big
head, well, for some reason just about everyone in the game has a
cartoonish, misshapen head which effectively serves to diminish the
effect of anyone actually having a strange noggin. Raz himself is
a likeable but somewhat superficial character and will not engender
the same sort of long-term devotion that has been enjoyed by previous
Schaefer creations such as Manny
Calavera and Glottis.

Raz arrives at the Whispering
Rock Psychic Summer Camp with dreams of becoming a Psychonaut.
To do so, he must develop both his physical
and psychic talents to earn psychic merit badges. The catch? He only
has the weekend to reach his goal as he is a runaway and his beleaguered
father will be arriving soon. Seems young Raz’s pop forbids
him to use his psychic powers.

To develop his psychic gifts, Raz must learn to enter the minds
of his fellow campers and counselors. Once inside the psyche of the
various characters, Raz will learn more about each personality and
gain the experience necessary to face his final challenge.

Of course, every level, er mind, will contain the prerequisite amount
of jumping, climbing, running and fighting. Nothing new there. Raz
must also collect arrowheads (units of currency), earn PSI Power
Upgrades and find scavenger hunt items. Nothing new there either.

What is new is that each
mind has its own unique, surreal look and cast of crazy characters
and this ensures that the game is always
fresh and intriguing (although there are a few levels that seem to
be weird, just for the sake of being weird). Unfortunately, there
is also a good bit of psychiatric hoo-ha: locked suitcases are ‘emotional
baggage,’ mental cobwebs block progress, and so on. I’m
sure some gamers probably consider this pretty heavy stuff, but it
would be considered simplistic if encountered anywhere other than
a video game.

The 3D graphics are simply brilliant: bright, colorful and surrealistic.
Not once was there encountered any problems with determining the
distance necessary for a jump or deciding the next direction to travel.
One neat trick is that thought bubbles can be used to levitate and
float and they can also be used as a defensive shield.

There is actually one
element present in Psychonauts that is absent in most platform
games and that is sparkling, crisp dialogue. Characters
who would have been a bundle of clichés are infused with life
(and humor) by the dialogue. Much of this can be attributed to co-writer
Eric Wolpaw, a former games magazine reviewer (belying the theory
that magazine reviewers have no other discernable talents). A special
nod goes to camp janitor Ford Cruller (and his bacon) who reminds
one of a crazed Mr. Whoopee and consistently had me in stitches.
The excellent dialogue is brought to life and punctuated by the best
voice-acting to ever be featured in any platform game.

Another nice touch is
the ability to save almost anywhere! In a console game! What an
innovation. There are also a host of running
gags (I’ll not spoil any of them for you) that elevate the
game to the next level. There are though a few console annoyances – such
as needing to defeat the final boss twice – that could have
been eliminated.

So this is what gaming
has devolved into – a developer who
was once responsible for what many consider the best adventure game
ever made, has now made a platform game that many are ordaining the
best platform game ever. But is it really? Or is it just that previous
platform games have become so shallow that by comparison, any attempt
at creativity would look superior? That’s a hard call, but
a fair question.

Psychonauts is creative
mayhem, and is at times crazy fun to play. I occasionally got the
impression that the game and characters were
created with a possible Cartoon Network series in mind, but that’s
to be expected in today’s marketplace. Fluffy and funny, Psychonauts is a treat much like the smell of bacon in the morning.

Final Grade: B+
(find out more about our
grading system)