"You're On My Mind! (Literally.)"
by Stuart Newsom

Before you even read this review, you, oh reader, need to do something. Go to Steam, or power up your 360 and go to XBLA, and buy Psychonauts NOW. Just do it. Read this while you download. Trust me; it’ll be the best 10 bucks you’ll ever spend. This game is easily one of the best, most thought out, well-written, best performed, and most complete games you’ll play.  

Psychonauts was created by gaming genius Tim Schafer, the man who helped bring us the first two Monkey Island games and Grim Fandango. That pedigree alone is enough to show an awesome game. Even better, the game actually lives up to that pedigree. The story follows Raz, a psychic who is running away from the circus to sneak into the Whispering Rock Summer Camp for Psychics. Though his parents have been contacted to bring Raz back, the leader, Coach Oleander, allows Raz to participate in the “Basic Braining” program to hone and refine his psychic abilities. Following that is a downright epic journey though the mind of everyone around you to solve a mystery of why people are suddenly becoming mindless drones who suddenly loves their TV.

When I say “through the minds of everyone around you”, I mean that literally. Main screen is a bit open world, but Raz gets to the actual levels by putting the doorway to someone’s mind (literally a tiny door) on their forehead and travels through their psyche to help eliminate their mental problems. This allows the level design to get really messed up and absolutely hysterically fun to play, because in a mind all bets are off. Things can be as linear and clean as a giant cube to as completely wacked out as spiraling roadways with everyone being an “undercover spy”, with their only cover being talking disjointedly about the thing they’re trying to be undercover about, and a level where you’re a giant Kaiju style monster terrorizing a city of talking fish.

The levels have a bit of the standard platformer collecting missions, because each level has figments of imagination to collect, tags to take to the emotional baggage (literally pieces of crying luggage) scattered about and mental cobwebs to clean up. Also, as Raz levels up with each new psychic badge he earns, his different psychic powers, like telekinesis, pyrokinesis, PSI Blast (take that Ness!), all grow on an even keel. It’s not really customizable enough to be like an RPG, but it’s enough to change his powers to how you played the game.

Though the powers are cool, many times you get them just to use them primarily in the puzzle solving in that level and many times the combat can be very clunky. The vast changes in level design can be a little off-putting to some people and it causes the difficulty curve to bounce all over the place, with a sharp spike in the last couple of levels. However, the difficulties feel all worth it when seeing the hysterical characters and actually getting to know them. 

Anyone who’s played a Tim Shafer game knows that character design and exposition is what he does best. Psychonauts is no different. Let me run down just a few of the different characters, no matter how large or small, you run into during the game:

- a Paula Abdul style party girl
- a telekinetic bear
- a boy who wears tin-foil on his head as to not make other people’s heads explode
- Fred Bonaparte
- an ex-dentist who now harvests brains with his metal claw

And all of these characters are not even main characters. It also helps that these characters have dialogue better than most films, and performances that would make many cartoons jealous. (As a point, for all those Invader Zim and Angry Beavers fans like myself, Raz is performed by Richard Steven Horvitz a.k.a Zim/Daggett/a billion other things)  

By now, your download should be pretty much done. So why are you still reading this? Fire it up. You’ll be glad you did. 

Overall Rating: 10 out of 10