This is a sample review for Psychonauts, continuing my game reviews series. I happen to plan on submitting this one as part of an application, and I wanted people to let me know if it was any good. It hasn’t had full editing yet, so pardon any spelling erors ( ).
Sample Review: Psychonauts (PC edition; also available on PS2 and Xbox)
“Congratulations, Mr. Schafer - it’s a boy!”
In the right circles, you might have heard of Tim Schafer. Although he hasn’t been quite as active these last few years, Tim’s career at Lucasarts was a driving force behind Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, and Day of the Tentacle. For those too young to remember, that pedigree makes him the finest adventure-game designer bar none.
Psychonauts is the first game to come from Tim Schafer’s latest gig, Double Fine productions. As the whimsical two-headed acrobat mascot shows, his crew shares his warped sense of humor. Happily, every last drop of that comes across in Psychonauts.
Psychonauts presents the story of Rasputin (Raz, for short), who runs away from the circus to join Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp. It seems Raz has three days to master his psychic powers, before his father comes and drags him back home. To deal with the situation, Raz will do… quite a bit, actually. From battling super-powered bears to jumping inside the heads of his teachers, Rasputin leans new psychic tricks and abilities.
The game divides itself into two kinds of areas: the (not-so-)ordinary world and psychic landscapes. Raz first travels the world, then enters minds to learn more information or develop his skills. In the very first zone, Raz hops inside the mind of the old soldier Coach Oleander, complete with plantlife made of ammo belts! Here the game’s twisted humor becomes apparent, as Coach Oleander demonstrates it’s very bad idea to irritate a man whose head is a war zone.
You won’t be alone in your explorations in mental landscapes or the real world, either. Other students show up regularly and the individual who owns the mind in question often pops by with advice.
Of course, this is an adventure game, so it’s not too long before dark and sinister forces (even worse than psychic bears) shows up to cause trouble. Somebody’s stealing brains from the kids at Whispering Rock, and it’s up to Raz to deal with the situation.
Mostly, Psychonauts runs well despite the use of unusually large and intricate structures. It still bogs down in the most complex areas. Players with older video cards should pass this one up (or upgrade their hardware) – you’ll need 256 MB to play comfortably. Even so, the game looks passable with low video settings. Stylized characters help with this, as players can forgive a lack of detail on caricatured faces.
One area where Psychonauts pleases the player is sound. Each character has full speech – none of that “text” stuff here, no sirree! The voice actors did a fine job, with every character uniquely suited to his or her voice and style of speech. The voice acting isn’t inspired art, but avoids any trace of corniness. The music, as quirkily done as everything else, brings out the (twisted) summer camp theme of the game. On the downside, the sound effects don’t excite much, though they certainly fit well for whatever you do.
This review was conducted with a Compaq Presario with and Athlon XP 3200 running at 2.2 Ghz, 512 MB RAM, and a Radeon 9600 SE (128 MB). The OS was Windows XP Home Edition.