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Title: Psychonauts The Game Publisher Conspiracy. Mass market reports guide the "Shambling Corporate Presence" (Sam & Max 2x01) which, in turn, dictates to its hired designers what to produce. When a company has very talented designers and programmers on staff some great pieces are created. There is a lot of animosity against the hulking giant that is EA, but its staff have released quality games like Burnout (through Criterion Games). The staff have no choice what to produce and we've all suffered to see Barbie, Simpsons and Harry Potter games crowding the shelves of retail outlets. The Milkman Conspiracy. Not all creative minds are shackled to the woes of time card drudgery. Psychonauts is an excellent example of a game produced by giving the developers space to develop what they want. Tim Schafer, of Grim Fandango fame, hooked Majesco to publish Psychonauts back in 2005. As popularity of this sleeper-hit rose a partnership with Valve was also forged to distribute under Steam. Tim Schafer, adventure game producer extraordinaire, produced a platformer? That's like Paris Hilton attempting the SAT; there are things that don't go together. Would you put mayonnaise on a peanut butter sandwich? Oh, you did, and it was good? Well, smack my ass, if you guessed that Schafer + Platformer would work you were right. Psychonauts has everything that Schafer and his creative team got right years ago. Environment, characterization, gameplay and artistic design. The colors are wonderfully moody, something set designers have pled ignorance to from 1975 to 2000 when Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was released. It's almost as if the media at large all decided that there was no topping the psychedelic color experiments of the sixties and just stopped trying. Psychonauts features a bright colored disco race, a red and dark arena where you fight a butcher and the industrial silvers and blues of a secret agent-esque hide out reminiscent of Professor Xaviers' Cerebro chamber. Your main character, Razputin, runs away from the circus his family travels with after becoming interested in developing his psychic powers. Raz goes to a summer camp where future mental soldiers, or psychonauts, are trained. Once there the camp director calls Raz's dad to pick up Raz. You have one day to pass all of the rigorous psychic training and become a psychonaut! You will start wondering what is beneath the innocent summer camp environment when you notice that the NPCs each have something off about them. Doogen has blue skin, Lili doesn't have a nose, and other small things. You won't even learn the reason why Raz wears goggles until half way through the game when you square off against a Rainbow Scout den mother. Suspend your disbelief because this makes sense. No, really, trust me. Did you like the Nightmare Before Christmas? Well, it's the same concept. In this game world slightly deformed appearances add the character to the characters. Each NPC has an attractive personality and an awesome voice actor. The appearance of the NPC often reflects the personality of the character. Oleander has bags under his eyes from the stresses of battle, Cruller's eyes are set differently to illustrate his multiple personalities (seeing through different eyes...), Nein's hair and posture immediately bring to mind the stereotypical German scientist. I really came to enjoy each NPCs unique personalities and to see how my main character interacted with them.
The visuals are perfect for a game revolving around delving into minds where level designs are off-the-wall, literally, and appear fluid. You will walk through a cave opening into an airplane in flight. When tromping around an NPCs mind take time to really breath in the excellent level designs. I bet you won't smell burning when you play this, know why? Because, unlike Crysis, Psychonauts won't melt your graphics card. Yes, this game doesn't have bloom and anti-aliasing x ∞, but it loads fast and is pretty enough to not strain the eyes. On a side note; if you have a dual core CPU use the task manager to 'set affinity...' on the psychonauts.exe process to only one CPU or it will run too fast. The first time I played Psychonauts was on my XBOX, but the game was lost into obscurity once I discovered TimeSplitters. This time I played through it on my PC with the wrist destroyer man calls the keyboard. The camera and movement controls are easy to pick up. Moving and planning your jumps is easy. Although in-air movement is not realistic, I'm so glad that most games still let you move in the air. Raz can have only three of his psychic powers equipped at any time so in situations where you need to switch out a lot, like testing to see what hurts a boss, expect to bring up the powers menu many times. A few psychic powers are used so often that I would have liked a keyboard binding for specific ones, but I can understand that this wasn't done since the XBOX and PS2 controllers don't have as many buttons as the keyboard has keys. A lot has been written about the difficulty of the Daddy Boss level. Raz must prove to the mental image of his father that he hasn't neglected his acrobatics training since wanting to become a psychonaut. This is pure platformer hell. As the water level below rises you must use all of the acrobatics you've learned in the game to climb higher while dodging flaming, spiked clubs tossed by your dear dad. The most frustrating is a group of metal wire mesh that Raz can climb on set up to resemble a cylinder or barber pole. Jumping from one mesh to the next and actually grabbing it is as much luck as timing. Oh, you also have to have the camera pointing directly on Raz or he will jump away from the mesh instead of horizontally toward the next group. Other than the last platformer bit with the rising water this game really was easy. Even the lungfish level was only slightly challenging. I enjoyed this game most when I started playing it as an adventure: the point being to enjoy the journey. Nothing ever got tedious or too stressful, the enemy designs were always relevant to the mind I was spelunking, and the main character acted as I would have given the same situations. I'm sure you've played a game that constantly recycles old enemies by changing their color pallete and every wall has the same texture. In contrast, Psychonauts is a deep game that almost never kicked me out of my suspension of disbelief. The only reminders that I was playing a game were two instances where my character was caught on a sofa then a ladder and unable to move. Saving then loading easily got me out of those two, though. Psychonauts is really a winner. The only loser connected with this game is you if you don't go buy a copy right now. Double Fine really hit gold with their first release, unfortunately, their next game revolves around Jack Black and is produced by EA... We'll wait to see how that goes. For now I see the Shambling Corporate Presence lurking in Double Fine's shadow. Enjoy Psychonauts before their next release tarnishes their image like the Saturn did to SEGA and play nice...
-Matthew |
