# Psychonauts Review



## Winters_Sorrow (Mar 2, 2006)

Psychonauts is an innovative new platformer by the creators of Grim Fandango & Day of the Tentacle.
Anyone who's ever played those two games will recognise the warped humour and surreal characters that Tim Schafer excels in.

Psychonauts follows the adventures of Rasputin (or Raz), a small psychic boy who runs away from the circus to join the Psychonauts training camp.

One of the new key elements of this game is Rasputin's ability to enter the minds of people he encounters to obtain clues, additional mental powers and defeat monsters.

Among the mental powers Raz obtains are:
Telekinesis; Invisibility, Psi Blast, Pryokinesis, Levitation, Clairvoyance, Mental Shield and Confusion.

The dialogue is very smart and witty, the character design is good and the design of some of the sets (especially the mental sets) are absolutely jaw-dropping.

My favourite set & story has to be the guard of the insane asylum and his "milkman" complex. The mental set takes place in a surburban environment so twisted and warped you literally leap from one street to another at right angles, like some M.C. Escher painting.

I really enjoyed this game as it had some good puzzles and the story/dialogue was entertaining enough to forgive it's flaws, which I will now go into.

This game does have flaws unfortunately, but they are mostly the flaws of the Platform genre as a whole, so try not to hold it against Psychonauts personally. 

The Story
The plot, whilst very entertaining and enjoyable, was incredibly linear with little or no sidetracks or optional missions to go onto - Jak & Daxter still rules the roost on side missions for me.

Replayability
I have recently finished this (as I am not a terribly good gamer, that may speak of it being too easy as well, but I'll let individuals be the judge of that).
When I did finish it, I was disappointed to learn that it has virtually no replay features whatsoever, I haven't unlocked anything new, and there's no incentive or new features to encourage me to play it anew.

Jump, Swing & Repeat
This is a flaw of Platform games in particular but is present in Psychonauts as well. The last few levels, especially, ensure that to progress you must master all the jumping, floating (levitation) and swinging skills that you will have used at various stages in the game. It is very intolerate of error, and you must time your swings/jumps/floats perfectly or suffer immediate death.
This is a real annoyance that usually puts me off Platform games (I remember getting very wound up in Jak & Daxter as well, so even that game had it).

Overall, the freshness of the dialogue, character design and set design are enough to ensure that this is still a great game to play, but the flaws of it's linear play, no replay value, no multi-player (or even 2 player) functionality, and "immediate death" in the later stages means this only warrants a 7/10 from me.


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