Review: Psychonauts

A criminally overlooked gem from 2005, Psychonauts is an action platformer based on a brilliantly unique concept: you play as Raz, a young psychic who accomplishes real-world objectives by diving into different characters' minds and exploring their often-troubled psyches as you attempt to stop a shadowy plot.

I got this game a couple of years ago through one of the first Humble Indie Bundles, along with Amnesia, Braid, Limbo, Bastion, and some other stuff I never played (just those four were plenty). Amnesia wouldn't on my laptop so I had an excellent excuse to not play it (I did, but later and with friends. Horror games are a lot of fun played in a group setting, actually). I had already played Bastion and Braid and loved them, and Limbo was also awesome. But since everyone and their dog has written about those games, I thought it would be fun to write about the game I had never heard of upon starting it up but found myself being completely sucked into almost immediately. So here I am (and here you are, I suppose).

The game's a platformer (like Banjo-Kazooie or Spyro) so most of the game is you running around the world exploring and navigating the different levels. Sounds pretty normal, but there's the twist: each different level takes place in a different character's mind, so each environment is completely distinct. And I really mean "distinct" here, not just each level using the same assets in different colors. An example: one level takes place in the mind of a paranoid-schizophrenic. His mindscape is like a dark, twisted version of a 50's suburb, with crazy spiraling streets, guys in trenchcoats all over the place, and a shadowy conspiracy that only he knows about. Another character (who happens to be one of the instructors at the camp) is a dancing fashionista who's inner psyche is a giant party.

Not only do the levels vary tremendously in terms of their appearances, they also all feature distinct mechanics that really lend a sense of identity to each one - in one level, you have to stop a bull running amok through a Mexican town by defeating different luchadors and collecting different paintings (this is the world of a depressed Hispanic painter)  and in another you assume the role of the director of a play (this is the world of a crazy actress with delusions of grandeur). All of these little worlds are totally unique and have their own secrets and collectibles hidden inside, and they all serve to flesh out the the characters beautifully. These characters - and the environments in general - are all rendered in a unique, cartoony style. This style makes it instantly recognizable in the same way games like Limbo and Braid are easy to identify because of their art.

The way in which you interact with these compelling, vibrant areas is brilliantly executed as well: Raz has access to a number of psychic powers that he obtains gradually as you level up (a tried-and-true device excellently adapted: you gain experience not by defeating enemies or completing quests, but by collecting figments of characters' imagination that are scattered throughout their mental landscapes) that all facilitate interesting gameplay, ranging from levitation and pyrokinesis to clairvoyance and invisibility. Just like with the dialogue, your ever-expanding bag of tricks has wide-ranging applications in a number of situations, including ones you may have encountered in previous worlds. This kind of design really encourages backtracking for all the right reasons: to find out more about the characters and their motivations and personalities via brilliantly drawn slideshows contained in "memory vaults", to access hidden areas, or just to get more resources.

Besides the environments and mechanics, the writing is another aspect of this game that elevates it - it's consistently excellent at both making you laugh and care about the characters. Every one of Raz's fellow campers has a unique line to say about nearly every item you can get, and even ones you technically shouldn't be able to have, making for a wonderfully rich cast of people with unique personalities and motivations. The jokes are clever and sharp and the plot is interesting and deep without being too twisty for it's own good, and the voice acting is uniformly excellent, especially Steven Horvitz as Raz.

All of these disparate parts all add up to make a game with a singular vision, which is something I love. Games like Spec Ops, Braid, and Bastion are all collections of different assets acting together for a single purpose and to get across one "main point", which is something that you don't see outside of indie games nowadays. Psychonauts doesn't share the ludo-narrative or meta focus that those games do - rather, it's just a damn good game entirely focused on being a damn good game.

The art is great, the writing is great, and the gameplay is great. What's not to love? it's available on Steam and XBL Marketplace for way cheap. You owe it to yourself and, more importantly, to the industry to support projects like this.

Far Cry 3 was intentionally designed to be gamey and un-immersive

This game again. Yeah, it sucks, but I started playing it again and needed to get my thoughts on more of the design side of the game out there. For your edification and pleasure!

Gamey-ness?

Gamey-ness is kind of a weird term. I don't think its a real word with a defined meaning - its more of a "gut instinct" kind of thing: a word describing a feeling. To me, a game's "gamey-ness" is basically how much it reminds me that I'm playing a game while I'm playing it. So something like Far Cry 2, which does everything possible to immerse you, is very ungamey. Penumbra and Amnesia are very ungamey. Far Cry 3, though, is very much gamey, and I don't think it was an accident.

Design Choices - HUD 

Probably the biggest impact on a game's overall ethos is it's HUD, since you'll be staring at it for 99% of your time with the game. Far Cry 3's HUD is a strange juxtaposition of convenience and immersion against annoyance and intrusion -- for example, your weapon's ammo counter fades out after a few seconds, so the right side of the screen is largely uncluttered, which is great. But your mini-map, a much bigger intrusion on your immersion, is constantly there to remind you of things to do and places to go -- not very immersive. It doesn't help that many of the icons used for game objects seem strangely sparse against the otherwise constant bright greens and blues of the jungle: white diamonds, almost silly-looking inanimate cars and boats, and jewel-like relics. What makes this element of the HUD truly aggravating, however, is how unnecessary it is since you have a real map one button away. What's more, the developers took the time to import Far Cry 2's GPS diamond tracker into the game which you use for a nice side mission, so it isn't as if they didn't have the code ready. No, the mini-map's constant presence was deliberately implemented to reduce your immersion and make the game feel more like, well, a game.

Going hand-in-hand with the mini-map is the game's crazy amount of pop-ups. You can turn most of them off, thank god, but even then they're pretty annoying after you've been playing for a few hours -- they're incessant, unavoidable, and they do a great job of reminding you that you're playing a video game every 6 minutes. And that isn't mentioning the button prompts for climbing, driving, interacting, and takedowns! Only the latter one of those is even useful, and yet they're omnipresent. When I think of immersion, I definitely think of big button prompts paired to loud tribal "whoosh" sound effects to announce their presence.

Music

And that brings me to the map screen and pause menu -- but before that, I have to talk briefly about this game's music. I haven't read or seen anything on this subject which has confused me, mostly because of how goddamn weird the music is in this game! Think about it: it's a game where you run around a jungle and kill pirates and rare animals -- don't you'd think the music would be more Predator and less Eraserhead? Seriously, go play the game for a few minutes, just run around in the world with the music on. It's a hypnotic trance soundtrack to your glorious ultra-violence, and it doesn't fit at all. It's like the definition of cognitive dissonance -- it's weird and kind of creepy, so I turned it off a long time ago and never turn it back on because it makes me want to stop playing.

And you know what else? That's what they were going for. The music is weird and spooky because the game is weird and spooky. If Far Cry 2 went too far on the realism scale, this game tips the scale right back. If the other aspects of the game feel dream-like, the music definitely makes it feel more like a nightmare.

Menus

Ok, so now I can talk about the menu (map screen and pause menu specifically). So we've established that some of the design elements here work towards creating immersion and some towards removing it, and the map and pause screens are no exception -- rather, they're some of the biggest offenders immersion-wise (and the frequent source of complaints). Rather than opt for something interesting like Far Cry 2's in-game map or even stylistically cool and appropriate like MGS 3's, Far Cry 3 instead forces you to hit a button to get to your map. Not exactly a huge deal normally, but accompanying every single opening and closing of your map, you're treated to a cheesy "whoosh" sound effect and your music is abruptly cut off and replaced with the menus' unique soundtrack: more ambient music, but this time much more low-key and quiet.

This cannot have been an accident. The map screen is blatantly unrealistic and crazy -- Dennis even tells you that climbing the radio towers will "unlock" parts of your map. Umm... the physical, tangible, distinctly made out of paper map that Jason picked up in the beginning of the game? Yeah, that makes sense. By forcing players to get softly-but-decisively removed from the experience every time they looked at the map, the developers also killed two birds with one stone by allowing fast travel and waypoints to be used, de-incentive-izing exploration and turning the environments into a series of set-pieces rather than a large land mass.
 
The pause screen is similarly oddly designed. Again, that annoying whoosh plays upon entry and exit, but this menu is also were you do your crafting -- a pretty huge selling point of the game. It's actually pretty strange when you think about how un-immersive this system is, and it makes you wonder why they designed it like that... you can probably guess what I think the reasoning behind that is. While implementing a crafting system was undoubtedly a serious undertaking, I have a hard time believing that this was the most immersive and appropriate option the developers could come up with during 3 years of development.

People (NPCs)

Here's another strange area of the design: character models. This game has, like an insanely low number of them. I think there are 2, maybe 3 varieties of each enemy type tops, and the boss enemies in the Wanted Dead quests all only have 1 or 2 different types either. It doesn't stop there though, because for some reason nearly all of the civilians look identical with just a few different clothing options between them -- and the Rakyat aren't much better. I routinely notice trucks of 3 identical Rakyat dudes driving around, and the same goes for sets of identical enemies at outposts, etc. So what gives? Far Cry 2 only had 2 "classes" of enemy (snipers and everyone else) but they looked pretty much the same gear-wise, but they all had a pretty big variety of pretty nondescript clothing. This made them both unremarkable to look at, and hard to remember appearance-wise, so it was much rarer to notice "twins" running around (come to think of it, I don't remember that ever happening).  It's not like they had less resources to work with here, and I can't imagine that they were rushed or anything (3 year development cycle), so it seems strange to have yet another element employed to break immersion when it could've been used to strengthen it.

Since Far Cry 2 had so few civilians, it may just have been because the developers were unsure of how to implement them fully, though.

Plants, Animals, Hunting and Looting

The dynamic animal system in Far Cry 3 has been praised, and for good reason -- it's a lot of fun and really helps the islands come alive. That said, the hunting "system" is actually very shallow in comparison like something like Red Dead Redemption of even Assassin's Creed 4. Instead of tracking the animals or using their body parts to craft a bunch of different items, you basically just go to the marked area on your map, wait for them to spawn, and kill and skin them, with each type of animal only producing one item - it's skin - which only contributes to specific items. If it sounds simple, that's because it is -- maybe a little too simple. Like nearly else everything that you can "interact" with in this game like craftable plants, loot chests, lootable bodies, and certain objectives, they pulse with a bright gold shimmer that's distinctly unrealistic.

It isn't that intrusive, but that's kind of the point: all of these elements I've been talking about haven't been big dealbreakers -- more like tiny "what were they thinking" kind of things. And as I'm sure the developers intended, they definitely add up.

Conclusion

I'm getting tired, so I think I'll give it a rest here. There's more I could mention like the story, characters and dialogue, but that stuffs been talked about already so I dunno. If I feel compelled I'll add to this but I think it's pretty good as is.