Review #497: Psychonauts

 No need for a psychiatrist now.

Let it get inside your subconscious...

 Psychonauts is the brainchild of Tim Schaffer, a platform/adventure hybrid set in a world where weird almost-human-like-beings possess psychic abilities and what not. It's a beautiful game to look at, with a fantastic art-direction reminiscent of Tim Burton, a sense of humor that's as ridiculous as it is funny as well as top-notch gameplay, Psychonauts is quite the marvel.

 The entire game takes place inside Oleander's camp for psychic children, a place where children are trained to use their abilities and eventually become Psychonauts. Enter Razputin 'Raz' Aquato, a kid who sneaks into the camp in order to learn to use his abilities. All's fine and dandy, until it turns out that someone is trying to farm the brains from the children and turn them into powerful psychic weapons. Now it's up to Raz and his friends to stop the conspiracy and, maybe, save his friends. The game has a phenomenal sense of humor and attention to detail, there're ton of different, optional dialogues to find or come across and they are quite a treat. There're so many different optional, hidden interactions that you won't find them all on your first playthrough.

Raz has style. He also has psychic powers.

 You'll be exploring two different realms: Reality AKA Oleander's camp, and you'll also be travelling inside the minds of many other characters. There's a lot of stuff to collect, every mind('level') has figments of imagination to collect, emotional baggage(And their tags!) to collect and memory cobwebs to collect, and they all help to boost Raz's Psychonaut rank. Meanwhile, you can find cards and challenge orbs, as well as a completing scavenger hunt sidequest, inside the camp, which also helps to bolster your rank. Yes, there's quite a lot to find and collect in the game.

 And you should, because increasing your rank in increments of fives unlocks new abilities for Raz. As a matter of fact, Pyromancy and Invisibility are mandatory to complete latter levels, although I never had to stop and grind for rank, I will admit that I was so engrossed in the game that I was trying to collect as much as I could, so I was never wanting in rank. Another thing, there's a shop and in said shop you can buy the cobweb remover... thing is, the item is mandatory to progress through latter levels as well. My advice? Purchase the arrowhead(currency) dowser ASAP and buy the cobweb remover ASAP, since about halfway through the game the camp gets filled with powerful pyro-wolves that make searching for arrowheads a pain in the butt. Luckily I had the cobweb remover before that happened, but I'm guessing that someone that didn't care about it would be in for a rude awakening come late into the game and needing 800 arrowheads to purchase it.

The milkman conspiracy level is one of the best, and funniest, by far.

 As for the gameplay, it's a fantastic mix of exploration, action, platforming and puzzles. There's a lot of stuff Raz can do, besides the mandatory three-hit combo attack and the ground pound, he can also double jump and equip up to three different psychic powers at a time, although you can swap them at any time by going into the menu. There're a lot of different powers with different uses, a simple psychic beam to attack, a pyromancy power to set enemies, or wood, ablaze, telekinesis to throw around objects and solve a few puzzles, levitation, which lets you dash over a psychic orb or glide with it and a few others. They all have their uses, and characters, friendly NPCs and baddies, have many different reactions to your powers!

 The different minds you visit, each has their own themes and gimmicks, and they are all very entertaining for different reasons. One of my favorites is the 'Milkman Conspiracy', which has you collecting items to fool investigators into thinking that you are one of their own, which is an excellent combination of comedy and puzzles. Another one I really enjoyed was the 'Napoleon War', a stage in which you move around a board, altering your size to either solve puzzles and get more pieces or to move the pieces themselves. I don't wanna give too much away, but there's a lot of variety and ingenious level designs to go through. I've heard and read that the final stage is supposed to be 'very hard', so much so that the Steam version was patched, but.... I found it to be relatively easy. I was rank 90 at the time, so I had an 11-lives threshold, had maxed my HP bar and unlocked Regenerating health, but even then I didn't find the platforming sections too challenging. I had to retry a few times, yes, but it never felt too hard.

Her name is Linda, and she's not happy to see you.

 Lastly, its performance on the PS2... It's kinda bad. The framerate can dip, it can get very ugly, but not to an unplayable degree. The game never crashed on me, although I had to restart the game because all audio stopped playing and the game wouldn't let me proceed, so I saved my game(It was a soft lock) and the loaded the file and... still nada, but quitting to the main menu fixed it. Apparently there're two levels that are prone to crashing, I visited both of them twice, a second time around to collect the cobwebs I missed, and it never crashed. I did come across a nasty sound bug in which the music got stuck, but nothing a quick reload didn't fix. All in all, the PS2 is probably the worst way to play the game, but it's still not too bad.

 Psychonauts is brilliant. The amount of detail and creativity that went into developing the game is nothing short of incredible and you're bound to find at least a couple of levels that you'll love. While the PS2 version is probably the last one you'd want to play, its few technical shortcomings don't take away from the brilliance of the game, so there's no excuse to miss out on Psychonauts.
 9.0 out of 10