Psychonauts
Playstation 2
Double Fine



I have never - never - laughed so much during a game. 'Psychonauts' is not just a fun adventure game with intriguing characters and a slowly unfolding story: it's also frequently laugh-out-loud funny, with excellent dialogue and a sly, often unexpectedly adult wit. It's a game with a chequered history, originally canned by publishers Microsoft but the Double Fine team decided to go it alone (under the supervision of Tim Schafer, the man behind 'Grim Fandango' and 'Day Of the Tentacle'), and the gaming world is the richer for their decision.

The Psychonauts, you see, are crimefighters with psychic powers who can enter people's minds and defeat their evil intentions and impulses. Like the Jedi, they enlist their potential Psychonauts early - unlike the Jedi, they do so via an annual summer camp. Into this environment comes the party-crashing Rasputin, aka Raz: a child with unusual powers. His father doesn't approve of his Psychonautical desires and is en route to bring him home, meaning he only has a limited time to learn the skills that could see him inducted into the brotherhood

Gameplay wise it's a good, if hardly revolutionary mission-based platform adventure game: you move Raz through an interactive series of worlds with the usual things to collect to unlock special features, as well as coins with which to buy new equipment. It might sound pretty standard, but given that the writers have gone to town on the psychological puns (one of the collectable features, for example, is to put luggage tags on "emotional baggage", and you can build up your skill level by clearing "mental cobwebs"). Raz gains new skills by entering his tutor's minds, and this is where the game design really shines: every mind is entirely different in look and layout, reflecting the personality of its owner. At times this can be frustrating, if you're also the sort of gamer that goes "Ooooh! Pretty!" at the background whilst unwittingly jumping into a pit of spinning blades, but each level bestows new skills and reveals more about the other characters and the plot engulfing the Psychonauts. And Raz is no open book: as the game progresses you get hints as to his own shady past and conflicted relationship with his father, keeping you engaged through the inevitable coin collecting and skill-level build ups.

However, I freely admit that the main thing that has kept me perservering with 'Psychonauts' is the humour. It's not like all game humour is obvious and cheap ('Destroy All Humans!' and the recent 'Ratchet: Gladiator' spring to mind as excellent examples of an already-good game enlivened by well-written dialogue and excellent voice acting), but its still rare enough to be noteworthy. 'Psychonauts' gets harder and darker as it progresses, and I had more than a few moments of throwing down the controller and storming out after dying for the billionth time (some of the bosses are frustratingly unkillable), but this is one of the finest games I've played in recent memory.

Andrew P. Street