Is anyone else starting to get a little tired of shooters? As much as I truly do love putting bullets into generic Nazis, mutants, zombies, monsters or Islamic terrorists, it tends to get a little old sometimes. The majority of the games I've played in the last ten years have been shooters. Sometimes it's very refreshing to step outside your normal favored genre and into something completely different. Black and White was a good example. Psychonauts is another. And when I say completely different I really do mean COMPLETELY different and more than just a little bit odd.

The lead designer on Psychonauts is a fellow by the name of Tim Schafer. Quite a few people are probably reading this and thinking "Where do I know that name from?". Well, Tim's been involved with a few games that I'm sure quite a number of you have played. Titles such as: The Secret of Monkey Island series, Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Jedi Knight, and Grim Fandango. Basically the guy is a freakin' genius when it comes to adventure/puzzle games with oddly twisted humor. He's also one of my personal heroes when it comes to video games.

I'd seen a few references to Psychonauts around but I'm not usually big on these sorts of games. I'm bad at puzzles and I'd rather shoot myself than play another Myst type game. However when I saw Psychonauts in the store and realized that Tim Schafer was involved I had to have it. And I'm really glad I picked it up.It's definately one of the better games I've played lately.

Premise

The Psychonauts are an elite group of soldiers that fight wars not on the physical battlefield but rather in the minds of their enemies and in some cases, friends. Welcome to Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp the training ground for those with psychic abilities. You are Razputin, child of circus performers and wannabe Psychonaut. You've run away from home to the camp, away from your psychic hating father and are looking for some training. You've only got a few days to prove your worth before your father comes to retrieve you and in the finest Scooby Doo tradition, odd things start happening around the camp. Yes, even odder than people using their minds to bend spoons and blow squirrels up. Within a few minutes of starting the game you get to see some really strange stuff and get a small taste of the games unique humor. And there's so so very much more to come.

Gameplay

Psychonauts is clearly a console port. It's played from a third person perspective and involves a large number of jumping puzzles as well as some things you're going to have to think your way through. Razputin is quite the acrobat and has a wide variety of cool moves to get you through any maze. Your mouse controls the camera in most scenes and your WASD keys control Raz's movement. It takes some getting used to, but it actually works very well once you get the hang of it. Rather than getting weapons you'll be relying on the power of your mind for both offence and defense. I was a little worried but then I remembered it was the mind of the character in game, not my own puny human brain. *whew* There's eight mental abilities that you can learn as you progress through the game, and while you can only have three of them bound to your keys at a time there's an extremely simple to use menu to switch them and your inventory items up at will. Most puzzles can be solved without switching your abilities up too much. The only real problems I experienced with the gameplay was the camera and the save points. The camera occasionally managed to get itself behind a piece of equipment or another part of the level I was on and blocked the view of our young hero. Sometimes the object went transparent after a few seconds, sometimes not. This never actually got me killed, which is good, but it was still sometimes annoying. The save points (And the "return me to the action" after you've made a trip back to HQ.) don't put you back exactly where you were when you saved, you end up somewhere just before that. It's generally not a large amount but a few times I had to fight my way past a nasty spot a few times to get back to where I wanted to go. Yep, definitely a console port. ;)

You're going to be fighting your way through not only conventional landscapes to get to your destinations, but also through the landscapes inside the minds of some very, very seriously warped maniacs and monsters. More on this just below.

You have both lives (Projection Depth) and mental health when you're in the mental worlds of Psychonauts. When you run out of mental health you'll loose one projection depth level and if you loose all of your levels you'll be kicked out of the mind and back to the real world. If you die in the real world, you'll restart automatically at a nearby point. I never had to redo more than a few minutes of the game when I died.

As you go through the game you will have to complete quests and training levels to rank up and gain new abilities. Some are taught to you by instructors and some you'll be picking up around the levels as you advance. When you learn a new ability you'll either get a quick training course from an instructor or a pop up that explains the use of your new toy. As you rank up your already known abilities will get more powerful as well. Rank is gained by collecting cards, figments of imagination (from inside the mental world) and completing assignments. You can also gain rank through other means such as the camp scavenger hunt. You'll also need to collect arrowheads from around the camp to buy items at the store to help you out later in the game, such as the Cobweb Duster that will allow you to clear mental cobwebs from the minds you're in. This will allow you to gain higher ranks as you turn the cobwebs in at the headquarters. You can also open memory vaults and clear out mental baggage in minds by acquiring the proper tag and touching a piece of crying luggage to view movies that contain the memories of the mind you're in. Some of them are quite entertaining.

You'll be jumping from location to location quite often and by using a device found in the "secret" lab of one of the instructors you can access any level you've been to before, or if you've chosen to regroup back to HQ you can request Ford (head of the Psychonauts) to return you to near your previous location. Inside the camp you can take the "secret" tram to any location you've discovered on foot already. The dev team obviously spent a bit of time figuring out how to cut down boring travel time and they did a great job of it.

If you get stuck you can request help from Ford, the crazy old guy who runs the Psychonauts and also seems to do most of the jobs around the summer camp as well. Wave bacon (yes... bacon) under your nose and he pops up and offers advice on dealing with enemies, beating puzzles and he can also recall you to HQ if you need it.

As an important note, one of the hardest part of any game (or book, or movie) to get right was indeed done right. The ending is good, and it's worth getting to the end of the game to see it and feel the satisfaction of a job well done.


Graphics/Environments

The environments of Psychonauts vary from a mental disco and a nightmare circus, from a scenic lakeside camp to the dank, dark depths of said lake to the rather windy heights of an abandoned asylum. Did I mention that the summer camp is built on an Indian burial ground? (Somehow I saw that one coming.) And that's just a few of the areas.

In one of my absolute favorite levels you're playing Godzilla (Goooogola!!!!) through a city of tiny fish people, trying to free a horrible monster's mind from the control of the maniac who's taken it over. In another you're in the mind of Fred Bonaparte, ancestor of Napoleon. You have to assist Fred in beating the big N at a strategy game sort of like chess, with you both as one of the pieces and as the player. In another you're calling the shots on a theatre stage and trying to catch up with the mysterious "Phantom". The variety of worlds and minds is amazing, and they're all twisted and warped in their own unique and often disturbing manner.

The graphics are cartoony but very good. You can see from the system requirements (Geforce 3) they're not doing anything amazingly detailed, but frankly sometimes it's nice to see a game that's pretty without being stupidly hard on your computer.

You can interact with almost everything in the game in one way or another. Most items can be broken open to get mental health, ammunition and arrow heads. It's fun to smash things good. :)

Sound and Music

The audio portion of Psychonauts obviously got a great deal of work from the devs. The voiceover work is very well done and professional, the sounds are good and the music is inspiring. There's a wide variety of music depending on the level you're on all the way from ambient to disco to metal. Some of the tunes remind me of the music from Nightmare Before Christmas and Beetlejuice. Really gets you in the mood for the level you're on.


Weapons of the Mind and Body

As mentioned above Raz is quite the acrobat thanks to his circus training. He can swing on bars, balance himself on ropes, rail slide on almost anything that's angled and double jump to get to those hard to reach places. He's also got a huge arsenal of mental abilities at his disposal, both for offence and defense.

Levitation - The ability to make a little thought bubble and ride on it like a... Ummm... like a rolling bubble thing. You can also use it to float gently to your destination while airborne.

Confusion - An ability gained later in the game, confusion allows you to throw a mental "grenade" that stuns enemies for a brief period of time. Some enemies also use this on you.

Telekinesis - The ability to move objects in game with your mind. It's very satisfying to pick up an opponent and throw them into a wall... Or off a very very high ledge.

Pyrokinesis - The ability to set things (or people) on fire with your mind. Burn them. Burn them all. One of the most entertaining skills.

Invisibility - They can't see what they can't hit. Turn invisible for a limited amount of time. Also handy for sneaking your way into places you're not welcome.

Shield - Use your mind to shield yourself from enemy attacks for a short time. Regrettably you can't use it when you're moving.

Clairvoyance - The strangest ability of all, and one I didn't get until I hit some of the puzzles that require it. Clairvoyance will allow you to see through the eyes of another character or certain objects in the world. It's really cool to just look through the eyes of everyone and see how things look, especially when you're wearing some sort of a disguise or your target is a little coo-coo.

PSI Blast - A channeled blast of hate that hits your enemies like a fireball. Lots of fun. It's important to hit your lock button before you use this one, as it's hard to hit without.

Puch - If all else fails, punch the heck out of things. If you jump in the air and punch Raz will come down in a devestating area of effect punch attack.

All of the abilities are used extensively in the game. You can have up to three abilities equipped at any one time, and you sometimes have to play with your abilities a little bit to find the right combination. It's simple to switch them up though, it only takes a few seconds. It's really neat having so many to chose from and it's fascinating to see how the puzzles are put together to make you use them all.

Humor

Tim Schafer is well known for the rather twisted sense of humor in his games and Psychonauts is no exception. There's quite a few scenes in this game that give you the giggles and snorts and some that are just so delightfully twisted you look around to make sure no one's looking before you laugh. There's a book repository with a little girl up top with a sniper rifle. There's a little city filled with tiny fish people.. and you're huge, wearing goggles and destructive.. As you enter the city and start your rampage a tiny fish appears and screams "GOOOGOLA!" Bwahhah. When you learn Pyrokinesis your instructor says "You have to promise me to only use this ability when it's very very important, or really really neat. And if you're using it to impress girls make sure none of them are wearing a lot of hairspray." The whole game is filled with entertaining references and little jokes that'll keep you chuckling.. Nice work Tim.


Bugs/Bad Stuff

Other than the camera sometimes deciding to hide the character from me, the only other bug I found was when doing a rail slide in the upper floors of the asylum Raz got stuck and couldn't jump off the rail and I was forced to reload from my last save point. Pretty minor considering the pipe I slid on wasn't even the way to get up to the next level, I was off the beaten path a bit. A few of the jumping puzzles took quite a number of tries to get right and were starting to annoy me a touch.

Conclusion

An truly amazing game that kept me entertained and intrigued the whole way through. For the first time in quite a while I was actually playing a game that I really cared about. I really wanted to get Raz to that next mental realm and see what was in store for him. The characters are interesting and I often found myself feeling pretty sorry for some of the crazy people whose minds I was inside. I also got pretty creeped out on some of the odder levels such as Boyd's brain where everyone is out to get you and the world is populated by spys and assassins and there's a camera inside pretty much every innocent object. It's sort of hard to explain the game, it has to be seen to really understand it but I enjoyed it immensely and I think that most other people will as well. It's a wonderful and refreshing change from the usually World War 2 shooters. It's been a long while since I've enjoyed a video game as much as I enjoyed completing Psychonauts.

Ed: Fileplanet has a number of gameplay videos available for download. Click here to take a look... Or just go download the demo and try it for yourself.