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Spotlight: Psychonauts (Review)

I think I finally know what I want to do with my life. Not my career, but what I do for a mid-life crisis. I want to be Tim Schafer. On the Psychonauts credit sheet, Tim Schafer is listed as “Creative Director.” The creative genius behind such classic story-games as Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango, Tim Schafer and his crack team at Double Fine Productions this year released Psychonauts, a story-based platform game.

Story

Psychonauts is set at the Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp, in a world where some people have developed psychic abilities, including telekinesis and telepathy. People with these powers are outcasts, treated as though there’s something wrong with them, just for having powers that they never even asked for.

Our hero Razputin, or “Raz” for short, is a boy who decides he doesn’t want to live in this world anymore. So he runs away from home to train to be an international psychic secret agent, in other words, a psychonaut. Of course, the staff at Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp can’t train Raz without his parents’ permission. Therefore, they contact his parents to bring him home.

But it will take a few days for his parents to get there. And in the meantime, the camp councillors notice Raz’s astounding psychic talents. And Raz is all too anxious to prove himself by completing in those couple of days the entire course and becoming a psychonaut. Normally, we wouldn’t even think this to be possible. But as it turns out, Raz is special. Throughout his crash-course training, Raz learns more about the human psyche, and even about himself, than he probably counted on.

Gameplay

Psychonauts is a traditional 3-D platform game, available for Windows, the X-Box, and Playstation 2.

In most platform games, the story is not integral to the game. It has obviously been glommed onto the side like some huge wart, some fake back-story that’s supposed to increase our interest in the game. In Psychonauts, the story is part of the game, so much so that sometimes I forgot that I was playing a game. Talk about suspension of disbelief, eh?

Game structure is traditional for platform games, with several increasingly difficult levels followed by a “boss” level. But the story is so tightly integrated into the gameplay, I didn’t even notice this traditional structure until after I had played through it. I was simply playing through the story.