Tim Schafer, creative director
Erik Robson, lead designer

developed by Double Fine Productions for Xbox and PC
ported to PlayStation 2 by Budcat Creations
published by Majesco Games

This was the first time in several years that I’ve bought and played a recently-released video game. I’ve recently had an upsurge in interest in video games in general and have played several games in short succession, including this one. They’ve all provoked a lot of different thoughts about the subject, and in the course of playing Psychonauts, I was frequently thinking about larger gaming issues. For various reasons, Psychonauts is a good starting point for lots of different discussions about video games in general. But for right now I’m just going to try to review the game itself, and save the broader discussion for another time.

One more general note, though. Most video game reviews tend to focus on somewhat technical aspects of the game design: whether the interface is intuitive, whether there are glitches like 3D objects passing through each other, whether the “load” and “save” functions are helpful or frustrating, etc. etc. I just mention it because I am intentionally going to try to keep the focus away from the technical, even if that means the review feels incomplete. In my view, technical problems like these are a symptom of the immaturity of the video-game form – really basic design questions still need to be resolved by games as a whole. Imagine movie reviews in 1915 being all about whether too many intertitles are distracting, or whether painted backdrops are too fake-looking – those questions are important, but they’re not where the art’s at. On the other hand, they’re the reason that most of today’s games will probably be forgotten as technically insufficient, just like the movies of 1915. BUT THIS IS ALL FOR ANOTHER TIME!

Okay: if one can simply accept the state of the form and of the industry, Psychonauts is an excellent piece of work. It is intelligent and ambitious without being ground-breaking, and can you blame them? If I were a game developer and I wanted to be good and stay in business, I would aspire to make something like Psychonauts. Like the people at Pixar, the people at Double Fine Productions deserve to be immensely proud of themselves. They stayed within the lines and filled them with great stuff.

Better said, they stayed within the technical lines. The game doesn’t make any steps toward resolving the general technical questions mentioned earlier, though it deals with them all thoughtfully. What it does is take all that standard “video game” stuff and use it do something with some actual character. Summer camp for psychic kids is a cute idea that’s right up there with boarding school for wizard kids. Atmosphere and plot are built right in. The plot progression is, in fact, just like a Harry Potter book: the first part is mostly concerned with the everyday challenges of psychic camp (earning psychic merit badges, a campwide scavenger hunt, dealing with counselors and fellow campers), while the second half is a fight against a truly threatening plot. Unlike J.K. Rowling, Psychonauts opts not to take itself very seriously even in this section, and in general the game tries to make each new character or concept as goofy as possible. In retrospect, that makes the game’s plot seem a bit like a mere assemblage of eccentricity, but in the course of playing the game, it’s probably a smart choice: every time the plot progresses, there’s a sense of new, unexpected worlds opening up. I found myself grinning, at one point, when something that had initially seemed like a jokey whim revealed itself to be the basis for several entire levels. I was surprised and delighted that the game had all along been holding this stuff up its sleeve, so to speak.

Still, I’m a bit sorry that the camp and the campers end up being a sideshow to the sillier, more frenzied main thrust of the game. Not to give anything too serious away, at about the halfway point, the game pretty much leaves the camp behind for crazier, cartoonier settings like a monster’s lair, an abandoned insane asylum, and a mad scientist’s laboratory. Part of the success of Toy Story was that it managed to keep the entire story believably within the world of toys and suburban kid-dom; the mad scientist’s laboratory there was the neighbor kid’s bedroom; the journey into the unknown was a drive to the local pizza place. Harry Potter manages to have all his adventures right at Hogwarts Academy. Psychonauts lets itself get a little too loose and squanders some of the charming camp atmosphere it establishes. Given the extremely flexible premise they establish, wherein different levels exist in the minds of different characters, you’d think they could find more coherent ways of providing variety.

On the other hand, a distinct difference between Psychonauts and either Toy Story or Harry Potter is that Psychonauts is a video game and requires, according to most reviews, at least 12 hours of play time. (For my part, I spent 19 hours, with a fair amount of sidetracking from the main story to collect unnecessary doodads. A special bonus is promised for those players who do a whole lot of extra busywork, and I, intending to achieve that special bonus, did a good chunk of it, though not nearly all. Having finished the game and surveyed the remaining busywork, I estimate another 5 or 6 hours at least for the “optimal ending,” for a total of ~25 hrs.) 12 hours, which is generally considered a very short game, is a long, long time to spend doing anything, and one of those general questions about video games is: “what is worth doing for this long?” I can’t blame the designers for wanting to get more than just the camp in there. I just think they could have come up with a way to do it that would have allowed players to take the story more seriously.

The “explore mental worlds” gimmick is smart, because it allows for extremely varied level design, but the real treat, for me, was that they actually take advantage of other aspects of the concept. A level that takes place in the mind of a cool, logical, well-composed character consists of running around a perfect cubic planetoid floating in a void. As he becomes less able to control his emotions, bits of stuff from his childhood pop out of holes in the cube while his internal “censors” (business-suited, bespectacled fellows with red stamps) run around shouting “no! no! no!” Eventually the “boss” emerges – an enormous, monstrous baby that bursts, Hulk-like, from its adult clothing. That the designers have dropped this Freudian stuff onto the video game format – that the inner child is a “boss” – seems almost like a parody of video games. But it also is a video game.*

In a later level, the “boss” announces his attacks as he makes them, in a simultaneous parody of dubbed Japanese fight scenes and of standard “level boss” tropes. “Haaard-to-avoiiid…AREA ATTACK!” he shouts as he executes a typical hard-to-avoid area attack. I laughed out loud. Again, a clever parody of the very thing it was.

There are also places where the cleverness isn’t conceptual commentary, it’s honest-to-goodness cleverness. In the first level (also available as the demo), there’s one point where, as you pass through a tunnel between two areas, gravity takes an unexpected 90-degree turn. Now, playing a game like this, in-game gravity isn’t just decorative; you’re intimately aware of it as you maneuver. Feeling it yanked out from under me, on a level-design lark, I thought, “wow, that was a new and delightful sensation they managed to offer me.” Little did I know that it was just a preview of some really wild world-distorting that goes on later in the game. The most remarkable example – which I found, to my surprise, was truly, almost disturbingly disorienting – didn’t even involve any abuses of gravity. But it went well beyond the usual weakblooded tributes to Escher. Strong, memorable stuff.

What do you do in Psychonauts? Run and jump, climb and swing, bop things, pick things up, and, of course, watch pre-rendered movies. You also gradually learn how to zap things, set things on fire, bounce around on a ball of energy, turn invisible, create a shield, etc. etc. There are a few items that you can “buy” with other items, a few items you can hold on to and use in various ways, and a few items and characters that will respond in new ways if you do the right thing to them. For this reason, the game has been described as having “adventure elements,” and I suppose it does. But so do lots of running and jumping games, to an only-slightly-lesser degree. I don’t tend to think that this game was fundamentally any type of “hybrid” – it was just a running and jumping game that was more creative and more successful than most at incorporating story elements.

The game looks really lovely, at least on the PC (and, I gather, Xbox) – though I actually played it on the PS2, where the graphics don’t get quite as much fancy smoothing and shading, and where, additionally, the loading times were much slower. The visual design of just about everything is lively and done with great care. One sequence, set in a mental world of black velvet paintings, was aesthetically one of the most involving areas I’ve ever experienced in a video game. For me it went well beyond black velvet, and in fact reminded me of my fascination, as a child, with this Picasso, (L’Atelier, 1955), which I always sort of wanted to be inside.

Psychonauts offers, if not exactly that, something similarly enveloping.

* Okay, well, I seem to be the only person who thought that boss was a baby/inner child. The game refers to it only as a “mega-censor” and on second consideration, I see that the wild babyish face might just have been a typical “monster man have small brain, big muscles!” touch. But I prefer my original take. The psychological image of a monstrous baby in a suit is a good one, and I really wanted to attribute it to this game.