Okay, I'm going to keep his short because one, if you have already played this game, you know how much with the awesome it is, (and if you didn't like this game, ignore this post and go about your merry way with the not having taste). Oh, and two, there have been many other far more talented and more entertaining writers out there that have done wonderful reviews of this game, so this is gonna be a short little rant for me. Enjoy.
Psychonauts is a platformer by Tim Schafer, best know for his work at LucasArts, working as designer on such works as Grim Fandango and The Secret of Monkey Island. After leaving LucasArts, he founded his own production company known as Double Fine. Under Double Fine he released Psychonauts and also recently brought out a game called Brütal Legend, which you may have heard of as the game with the epic awesome first half and the second half that makes you go, why did you do that?
Quick summery: Feel free to skip this paragraph, it's not going to cover any new ground. In Psychonauts, you play Raz, a young boy with amazing psychic abilities who runs away FROM the circus to go to a Psychonauts summer camp. There he is allowed to train, which is done by entering the minds of the teachers to master new abilities. Each mind is a little mini world based on the person's personality, ranging from tight, controlled minds to twisted, almost impossible to navigate minds. In their minds you can sort out their emotional baggage (quite literally), discover hidden memories and clean out some mental cobwebs while you're at it. Quickly it is discovered that there is a terrible plot afoot and Raz must go beyond just the teachers' minds to sort it all out.
This is one of those games I was told I had to play to take myself serious as a gaming. May have been a bit of an exaggeration but it is definitely a game worth playing and easily rests in my top five games (currently the other spots are occupied by Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Resident Evil 4, Portal and Doom 2. Not in order). So, what's so great about this game? The gameplay is rough at times, the learner curve it fairly static until the last few levels which I finally manage to beat just a few months ago, and then well, that's about it, those are my only complaints about this game. That's way it's so good because I, who am one of the most nit picky people you will ever know, am only able to come up with two things I do not like about it.
Not only are it's faults few, but they are incredible easy to forgive when you look at all of it's amazing attributes, number one being, it has a truly unique, entertaining and quite funny story, something increasingly rare in video games. The immense imagination, wit and, dare I say, intelligence in the game makes me feel like I'm really part of a story and I have a need to play further to get more of the story, rather than the usual video game stories in which I feel about as much connection between me and my character as I do me and a pawn in a game of chess. The characters are well defined, the situations are fantastically bizarre and the aesthetics of the game actually work with the story to make a complete, unified gaming experience.
That's really all I have to say about this, I feel bad because I just wrote this much about the Berserker from Gears of War yesterday and I don't have any attachment to GOW. But that really is it, it has some faults but it has the story to make up for it and then some. You may disagree that a good story is enough to make up for some gameplay issues (by no means unplayable), but you'd simply be wrong. Saying that to me is like saying a good story doesn't make up for poor special effects in a movie, which if that is the way you think then I can see now how Avatar was so successful.
Below are some other reviews of this game I recommend.
Here is a video lecture about video games and storytelling that mentions Psychonauts that I also recommend.
No comments:
Post a Comment