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Psychonauts

Platform(s): PC, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 4, Xbox, Xbox One
Genre: Action/Adventure
Publisher: Majesco
Developer: Double Fine Productions

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Xbox/PC Preview - 'Psychonauts'

by Thomas Wilde on April 3, 2005 @ 12:59 a.m. PST

Psychonauts follows the story of a young psychic named Razputin in his quest to join an elite group of international psychic secret agents, the Psychonauts!

Genre : Action/Platformer
Publisher: Majesco
Developer: Double Fine
Release Date: March 19, 2005

Pre-order 'PSYCHONAUTS': Xbox | PC | PlayStation 2

Microsoft has made a lot of good decisions in the Xbox era, but ditching Psychonauts honestly wasn't one of them. Tim Schaefer and his crew at Double Fine have turned in one of the most imaginative platformers in this generation of software, and I'm not sure why Microsoft chose not to publish it. Fortunately, Majesco swept in and made the save.

At Whispering Rock summer camp, children are taught how to harness the powers of their minds. One day, the best of them will become the psychic adventurers known as Psychonauts; the rest will probably wind up as insane nutcases.

Rasputin (Raz to his friends) shows up at Whispering Rock in a bit of a hurry. He's not supposed to be there, and his parents will probably show up at any moment to take him back home. His mission, then, is to harness his psychic powers as fast as possible, so by the time his dad arrives, he's a full-fledged Psychonaut.

The training grounds at Whispering Rock are split about sixty-forty between insane dreamworlds, built from the subconscious minds of the students and teachers, and the campground itself. Raz can learn how to use his powers in a dreamworld, then utilize them in the real world to find the tools and items he needs to raise his rank. The more stuff you find – ESP cards, stuff for a scavenger hunt, special arrowheads that're used as currency in the camp lodge – the higher Raz's Rank can get and the more powers he can learn.

When you begin the game, Raz only knows two tricks: a special psychic punch, and a little telekinetic shove that he uses to double-jump. He's a nimble kid, capable of trapeze work, tightrope walking, flips, cartwheels, and falling an insane distance without getting hurt, but to unlock his psychic potential, he'll need to earn merit badges from the instructors.

Raz's powers include levitation, which lets him jump higher and float long distances; telekinesis, so you can throw people and things about; pyrokinesis; and a short-ranged psi-blast for self-defense. You'll need all these powers, as well as special equipment you can buy from the camp lodge, to unlock all the secrets at Whispering Rock and reach the 100th rank.

To get new powers, you'll enter his instructors' minds, where their powers and inner demons are manifested as strange labyrinths and bizarre monsters. While you're there, Raz will have to deal with a constantly changing landscape; collect luggage tags so he can sort out his current host's painfully literal emotional baggage; confront "censors," the angry little thoughts that you don't like having, which manifest as dangerous enemies while he's in a mindscape; and chase down figments, little bits of psychic power which can be collected to increase his rank.

The mindscapes are where Psychonauts really takes the gloves off. There's more imagination on display in one of Psychonauts' dreamscapes than there is in the entirety of a lot of other games. One professor's mind turns out to be a twenty-four-seven disco party, with challenges straight out of a particularly hallucinogenic stage in Sonic Adventure; another's is a childlike parody of trench warfare, complete with barbed wire and ghostly gatling guns.

At first blush, Psychonauts seems like the best kid's show ever, with a truly bizarre cast of misfits, lunatics, losers, and the camp bully set up as the villain. Characters are walking caricatures of this person or that archetype, with Raz and his little spindle arms representing relative normalcy.

At the same time, Psychonauts has a dark edge to its comedy; it's like Edward Gorey or Invader Zim, where it's aimed at kids but works on an adult level. One kid, Dogan, is a walking parody of both conspiracy nuts and the old movie Scanners; at another point, two kids happily discuss just how messily they might kill the camp bully's little toady. Raz can barbecue squirrels pretty much at will once he learns pyrokinesis, and has a knack for finding exactly the wrong solution to a problem. ("I've learned that shooting stuff is both fun and useful.")

Psychonauts is a great platformer on its own, using its bizarre settings and the Xbox hardware to create some truly surreal imagery and levels. It's got lots of stuff to collect, of course, but it never feels like a chore and it never does the same thing twice. It's the first 3D platformer I can truly say I liked.



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