Imagination. For every wonderful idea you get out of it, there's an equally dreadful idea competing for attention. Wouldn't it be adorable if dogs brought you your slippers by wearing them? Leaving their bacteria covered teeth exposed and capable of biting you when you got too close to take your slippers. Your skin punctured, dog dribble seeping into the wound, you start to panic. You turn white. You don't want rabies. I just wanted my slippers.
Imagination. It can lead to some remarkable things, as proven by platforming spectacle Psychonauts, an exploration of the inner workings of us all. Memories, fears, hopes and dreams, secrets locked away, and a scattering of emotional baggage. We've got it all. And it's all very weird.
Fun Times
I never played Psychonauts upon its release. Never played it after release, either. I'm not alone. For all the acclaim this game gets, it didn't fly off the shelves. I'm playing the PC version here, but I'm not playing it completely blind. I've seen bits and pieces of Psychonauts.
You play as Razputin, a kid with powerful psychic abilities who breaks into a summer camp for kids with psychic abilities. Weird looking, out of proportion, cartoony kids, all here to feel less like freaks and more like heroes.
As strong as the camp councillors believe we are, we're here without the consent of our parents, so our time will be cut short. We're going to need to cram a lot of adventuring and training into just a few days.
That adventuring starts early the next day, as we get to explore a little of the campgrounds before 'Basic Braining' begins. You're able to roam these areas looking for collectables and interacting with the other kids, upgrading your psychic skills as a reward for hunting everything down. I'm not terribly fussed about all that, though. We've got an objective, so let's focus on it.
As we head to the treehouse classroom, we bump into a kid who doesn't want to take part in this 'death trap' of a class. What could he mean by that? Before we can learn of anything in great detail, however, we're introduced to the bullies, and they don't hold back.
Everyone here is voiced, and it really is a game full of cartoon characters. They sound like kids, they sound like stereotypes in places, but they sound great in general. It helps that the writing doesn't mess around either. It's weird and unexpected, but genuinely humorous, and doesn't telegraph the jokes.
Psychonauts has you explore a campground, certainly, but it is not a game about walking through the forest and making new friends. The heart of the action is inside the brains of all these characters, each, naturally, themed to their character.
Coach Oleander here is as much of a military man as you can imagine, and he's asking us to dive into his own mind to learn the basics of movement and combat, all framed in an active warzone formed by his memories, attitude, beliefs and more.
Through this mental obstacle course, we're introduced to the collectables Psychonauts has us hoover up. The colourful scribbles are all figments of imagination, themed to their environment. They're not hard to miss, but they're so easy to collect that you forget to take notice of what they actually are sometimes. Blimps floating by and tank traps plonked in the way are just that, but soldiers losing their grip on ledges are subtle hints to the inner-goings-on of Oleanders mind, his memories or fears, perhaps.
Frustrations
This whole level is rather long but takes you through seemingly everything you'll be getting up to through the game. Jumping, double jumping, shimmying along ledges, balancing on tightropes, swinging around poles, punching things. The controls are simple, the camera is responsive and controllable, there's a first-person view if you need it. It does third-person platforming rather well.
Until I got a little confused as to where I was going from here. Turns out you can - and need to - punch this wall. I guess the crack gave that away. I am almost embarrassed to say it took me more than a minute to work that out.
Speaking of embarrassment, dotted around the level are suitcases and handbags, all in need of being paired up with their name tags. They are emotional baggage. Everyone has some. And everyone playing Psychonauts will be watching this unskippable cutscene when they collect them.
It's not long, sure, but it's long enough to notice that it's long, and that's a problem. A teeny-tiny problem in the grand scheme of things, though, so let's plough on and see where this game takes us.
Further Fun Times
The nature of diving into someone's mind means levels that don't have to make sense. Does anything in your head make sense? No, hence the rolling tunnel of crazy logs, a navigation trial that has you walk on a level that slowly rotates around. Platforming takes on a whole new meaning when the platforms behave like this.
Awarded our first merit badge and invited to some advanced but completely unofficial (because we shouldn't really be here, remember?) training, I can't stop playing Psychonauts here. I've barely scratched the surface of this adventure.
Wow. You can't say that, can you? I'm definitely going to have to keep going now, just to find out how much more of his foot he can shove into his mouth. Or his mate's ears. Can I say that?
After exploring more of the camp, bumping into and chatting with the other kids (there are some funny characters, let me tell you), I finally find the location of the secret lab I'm heading to for some advanced training - an isolation chamber, somewhere to be so very alone. Somewhere with a secret entrance to a secret lab...
It's safe to say that I'm invested in Psychonauts. I don't really know why I haven't played it sooner. Perhaps I wasn't interested in going back to older games. Maybe I thought it was too weird, or too cartoony. Whatever the reason, I was probably wrong. I've missed something cool here. And like Shadow of the Colossus before it, I carried on playing for a little longer...
Licensed to shoot people with psychic bullets. Not bad for a kid who doesn't have permission to be here.
Final Word
At times it felt a little slow, as though the levels were getting longer for the sake of padding out the gameplay, but those levels were unlike anything a great many players had seen until something as weird and wacky as Psychonauts came along - and I know they get even better.
Psychonauts has a style, both in terms of its look and writing, but more so in that level design. The entire idea of diving into someone's psyche to fight their inner demons and deal with their emotional trauma is one thing, but to frame it all in a summer camp for goofy kids must be some stroke of genius.
It's compelling because of these ridiculous characters. You want to keep playing to see what other ideas the developers had regarding elements of the brain. I want to see how absurd the story gets because it's already pretty bonkers. What secrets lurk in the dark depths of these folk's brains? What mental gymnastics will we have to do to navigate them all?
Mental gymnastics. I bet that was mentioned. Oh, wait, Oleanders obstacle course had a trapeze section. They really did go into detail, didn't they?
Fun Facts
Main character Razputin was at one point an ostrich with multiple personalities, an idea that was nipped in the bud because players - on the whole - don't fantasize about being an insane ostrich.
Psychonauts, developed by Double Fine Productions, first released in 2005.
Version played: PC, 2006.