Psychonauts review

So this is an awkward one.

Psychonauts is a very hard game to pin down. I actually played this back a lot closer to when it came out but never finished it. Theres a legendarily hard level near the end of the game with hours of gameplay I just couldn’t get past. Up until that point in the first playthrough I was into it. I remember really enjoying the story and being sad that I was stuck and not being so smart phone addicted (or even owning a smartphone for almost a decade after that) that it didn’t occur to me to look up how to beat it online.

The thing is, when psychonauts came out the graphics made it look like you had just dropped yourself in the middle of a pixar movie. The writing was genuinely some of the best the game industry had to offer at that point. The acting was superb, i genuinely had to look up who played the main character, raz, while writing this because i spent most of the game assuming it was billy west (turns out it was the guy who voiced alpha 5 from the power rangers, which is also awesome). I remember talking back in my darkness review that the game has parts that are ridiculous and funny because back then games weren’t workshopped so hard and companies weren’t so worried about having a consistent tone or having background characters acting weird in a way that broke immersion, psychonauts is the kind of game that does the opposite. Everything is a very consistent tone, every moment serves the larger theme. There’s no dramatic moments where characters are pouring their hearts out to each other while npcs t pose and walk into walls in the background. There’s no tense conversations with mob bosses over drinks in a seedy 1920’s speakeasy before cyborg ninjas attack. It feels like something that could be adapted to movie screens with minimal tweaking and be the next big kids summer blockbuster.

Now however a lot of psychonaut’s strengths are no longer special, frankly. A good story is still appreciated, but considering that in 2007 most “good” stories in games were blatant rip offs of 80’s movies or overserious jrpgs that barely make any fucking sense when you think about it, Psychonauts may have had gorgeous and really memorable design, but in 2007 most companies outside of nintendo were still dead set on making games as realistic looking as possible and as bad ass and cool looking as possible. Psychonauts was genuinely incredible writing for the time. It was so good yahtzee did a sort of low stakes corporal punishment by telling people to squeeze a pencil in between their fingers if you didn’t buy it in his review. Now that most triple A games have a star studded voice cast and storytelling has taken up so much of the run time of video games that I don’t like video games anymore it's hard for me to be charmed by the storytelling aspect. It’s not that it's a bad story, some of it is a little tropey. It comes off like if tim burton’s best movie got mixed with ed, edd, and eddy’s best episode. But the problem is I don’t care because the gameplay is not very good.

I’m starting to realize that the xbox 360 era was an extinction level event for computer gaming as a concept. At least for anyone who wasn’t blizzard. For those of you just joining in for the first time, I’m using “computer gaming” and “console gaming” as two separate concepts because until this time they mostly were. Computers and consoles were fundamentally different audiences, with different strengths. For example, a story heavy, text heavy game on an nes cartridge was going to suffer due to memory constraints so they were geared more towards action, and a computer game from the same time more than likely wouldn’t have even supported scrolling and would have geared itself more towards story and puzzle solving. Tim schaffer, the main designer behind Psychonauts, was famous for developing great point and click adventure games. And in the running theme of the early part of this series, the transition of people making point and click adventure games to console type games was tragically inept at understanding what a console game’s strengths should be while shoehorning in a bunch of shit that I always hated about pc gaming to begin with.

Psychonauts starts out very strong. It's a cute story about a kid named Rasputin (Raz for short) who runs *away* from the circus to get a real respectable job. He sneaks into a summer camp for psychics who are a sort of government task force in this story, and is recognized as a genius by the staff. The levels are all based around jumping into people’s psyche telepathically. The first of these are one of the instructors, who acts like a drill sergeant. This is a promising first level. The concept is fun, you platform around a battlefield and crushed up rubble. The platforming in the level is some of the best in the game. Afterwards though, the game turns on a dime to shit town.

As mentioned before, tim schafer was famous for his point and click adventures. The last of which with lucasarts was a 3d point and click called grim fandango. Now, I didn’t like grim fandango. Not because it was a particularly bad game. It's just in my day job I’m also a failing salesman, and it hit too close to home on what was supposed to be my off time. Psychonauts essentially turns into grim fandango outside of the levels. You’ll get the normal adventure game thing of getting a hint from a random person somewhere in the overworld, then spend an hour searching around for clues and trying to figure out what the hell they want. In an adventure game that’s fair enough, because essentially that’s what we're here for. But in a platforming game what it means is the action screeches to a halt after every level so you can play scavenger hunt. There were levels like the famous/notorious “milkman” level, where the clue is to get into an insane asylum is to talk to the guard and when he tells you to “go find the milkman” you’re actually supposed to ignore everything he said and jump into *his* mind. And look, that’s partially on me, I had gotten into the previous level beforehand the same way. But during that point in the story the camp was being invaded by a bunch of evil psychics who were making everyone act weird. So I took apparently the entirely wrong hint and assumed this was my first lead on finding the people doing it and promptly walked in circles all night. Or when you’re asked to look for arrowheads, the game’s currency, on the ground to buy your next upgrade and you spend the next twenty minutes walking back and forth over the world map to follow beeping noises on a metal detector mechanic. Or when you walk back and forth trying to open a door only to find that the game didn’t tell you you needed to press a certain button in your inventory that you haven’t used up until now. It's mostly busy work and doesn’t really add to the game. The main story beats are inside the levels, where all the creativity is really on display. So this just adds a walking break to the story more than adds to it.

The level design falls over after this as well. I’m not sure if this is something common in old pc games, but this also happened in fable. That the middle half of the game just kind of forgets what genre it is. The next bunch except for maybe the last two, so about 80% of the game, has next to no verticality. You basically walk back and forth across the level. If you want an idea, think of something like ratchet and clank with lousy combat. Just walking and bashing enemies while trying to, once again, open a door or figure out a puzzle. So the only friction is some annoying, mostly token combat through almost all of this. This despite that Raz is a character who grew up in the circus and is a trapeze artist. Not only does platforming not really come into play, but platforming actively will waste your time. Any time I was trying to figure out a puzzle and thought something like “well maybe if I jump up here I can find something”, I would spend a long time getting up a wall or the side of a building only to find an empty room and my objective on the other side of the level.

That doesn’t mean the levels aren’t really fun ideas. One is in the mind palace of a giant mutant fish. In her subconscious you’re a godzilla like creature who helps run an armed resistance in a city populated by fish people. One is a guy who is a descendant of Napoleon and thinks he is his great great grand uncle (just so we’re clear multiple personality disorder doesn’t work that way). When you jump into his mind you are greated by him and the real napoleon, and you shrink down and jump on a battle map (a map of the battlefield with small figurines representing armies, I believe this used to be done in real life as well) and help him win the war against napoleon. The most famous level is one I mentioned previously, called the milkman conspiracy, where you jump into the mind of a paranoid man and the whole map is a typical 1950’s white picket fence type suburb but every person in the level is an FBI agent involved in some big conspiratorial coverup. Now, those are really fun ideas, but it wasn’t enough because in each of those levels it was mostly more walking around solving inventory puzzles. The milk man one being particularly annoying because all you do to find one of the items you need is to just go around the level opening boxes until you can find what you need. Now. Is it fair for me to not like this game because it turned out to be not what I wanted? Well, yes. Because when the game finally remembers to be a platformer again it's the best parts of the game by far.

The last level, which I’ll do my best not to spoil other than to tell you the premise, is a mashup of the big bad and the Raz’s subconscious. You go back to a circus for this level. Suddenly the game pairs the madcap fun story with tons of interesting platforming. There’s timed jumping puzzles, there’s timed parts where you need to save characters, you walk across tightropes, you battle with enemies who actually have some threat finally. And the game winds up being a load of fun. To be honest with you, I had mostly completed what I was going to say in this review before I had gotten to this point and essentially had to throw out all of it because despite how dull the middle period of the game is, I can’t hate a game that ends that strong. So once again my review for a game is to somehow skip 90% of it and play the last 20 minutes for the full experience.

So as for recommending psychonauts or not. That’s going to have a big asterisk next to it. The game’s story is very fun. Its not spectacular to have a good story, but tim shafer is uniquely creative in a way that makes it worth seeking out any of his work. However, games these days can have good stories and good gameplay, and because good stories and good graphics are the norm now, it really throws the basic and somewhat dull gameplay into focus. At the time psychonauts seemed like a giant step forward, but it may have been somewhat of an inevitability as games got higher budgets and stronger hardware to the point that keeping up with the industry means practically killing your team and spending the gdp of an up and coming nation to produce the games. So you’re never going to see what we saw back then, but its a weird and funny world to explore. If you’re coming into it for the first time, you’ll definitely have a barrel of laughs over the story. So its also impossible for me to tell people specifically to avoid it. I would give it a C+ or B-. add a much higher rating if you’re specifically either into point and click adventures or you’re someone who doesn’t care that much about gameplay as long as the story is fun. But if you’re like me wondering if you should go back to this great game you remember from a long time ago, I would specifically say skip it and watch some of the cutscenes on youtube, because it doesn’t hold up and will kill those memories.