Psychonauts First Impressions

I buy a lot of charity bundles. I figure that if I don’t play video games all too often, I might as well amass a digital collection and donate to good causes. This gives me an incentive to try out video games I might otherwise not pay attention too, which is a shame given some of the titles I own. On one summer night I downloaded through my Humble Bundle library an action platformer from a developer I greatly admire and played through the first level or so. It might be too late to be relevant since I already started soon, but it’s still August, so I am finding time to talk about Psychonauts, Double Fine’s first retail video game release.

The first thing you should know about Psychonauts is that it is weird. The opening cinematic is about a bunch of kids being lectured about learning how to use their psychic powers for good in a summer camp. The boring speech is interrupted by the protagonist Raz, literally a runaway circus freak, though compared to the other residents of the camp he looks pretty good. The visual style is strange on its own, but the writing drives the point even further. Before jumping into the first level, I was interacting with the other kids and learning about them and their quirks. Each of the students is entertaining their own right, whether it be Dogen fighting the urge to kill squirrels with his mind or the bully Bobby Zilch who Raz gets to upstage early on. I particularly paid attention to the foreshadowing of the overarching plot and thought it was particularly clever, although I don’t want to spoil anything.

The gameplay as a collect-a-thon platformer is neat because it gives you interesting items to hunt down. Levels take place inside the minds of other characters; for instance the first level is a projection of a warzone inside the camp drill sergeant Coach Oleander’s head. Scattered around the levels are figments, sprites drawn to fit the theme of the level and help you find your way, and collectibles that require return trips like tags for mental baggage and mental cobwebs. All of the collectibles make progress toward rank, and for the first part of the game you earn new powers based on how much you collected. Raz is pretty agile on his own without these extra powers, as the levels let him run, jump, and climb as the acrobat he was trained to be. A mental projection of his hand can be thrown out to break objects, defeat enemies, and just smack around people in general to get special responses. For variety’s sake you can also do some rail grinding. Though there is a life system limiting the amount of times you can retry stages, checkpoints that let you teleport between areas prevent you from losing any significant progress. I lost a life or two after falling down a bottomless pit, but it wasn’t too difficult to reach the end of the level and open up the rest of the camp.

Psychonauts is on its own plane of existence when it comes to platformers. The art style, the humorous tone, and the level design are all reasons to give this game a shot and see why Double Fine is known for its quality titles. The world created by this game may be revisited in the future, but for now I should actually play this game to completion so I can tell you an accurate opinion of the challenges posed by collecting everything there is in the mindscapes of the crazy residents of the camp.