Review: Psychonauts (PC)

In another case of my being the last one to the party, I just played Psychonauts for the first time recently, after hearing for years how it was the Best Thing Ever and how I was going to love it to death. Well, I didn't love it. But I didn't hate it, either. Actually, it's most accurate to say that I loved some parts of it but not all of it, maybe sort of like how I'd feel about a version of Basia Bulat with reindeer legs for arms.

Google Image Search failed me spectacularly on that one.

What the hell am I writing about? After I pasted that image I got up to put on a sweater and talk to a colleague and the only obvious prompt I had when I came back to my desk was Indian Gramaphone Live!: The Album staring me right the fuck in the face.

Oh, right. Psychonauts.

So, I had a really similar problem with this game as I had with Anachronox awhile back: namely, everything around the gameplay is just peachy-keen wonderful, but the game itself is so frustrating to play through that it casts a pall on the good stuff. As you may have heard from others, Psychonauts's story is fantastic. It's sense of place, world construction, voice acting, character building, plot, background music, and lots of other things (up to and including Mr. Pokeylope) are amazing. It's the rare game that truly succeeds in making you feel like you've stepped into another world, while simultaneously managing to work on a symbolic level. It's quite an achievement.

See, the levels you explore (mostly through platforming) are supposed to be the interiors of different people's psyches. And this is pulled off with the utmost cleverness. There's a lot of symbolism to be had, while the coming-of-age story at the heart of things is charming enough that if you don't want to think too hard about things like the Censors or the Emotional Baggage, then that's just fine. But there's a lot more here than we've come to expect from a video game. And that's great.

Emotional Baggage SCREAMS FOR YOUR WRINKLY CLOTHES

I'm a huge fan of emergent storytelling, and am currently in the midst of drafting a fancy blog post about it at the moment. It's difficult for me to understand, in most cases, the appeal of a game where there's a "story" and then "gameplay," each treated as two separate things. Usually at least one of them don't work. Serious Sam is really fucking fun to play, but who cares about the story? Sam doesn't even care about the story. On the other hand, the story of the Call of Duty series has become so central that gameplay arguably doesn't really exist in those games anymore, at least not in the way I traditionally understand it. But Psychonauts marries the two quite well. Or, it would, if the gameplay wasn't so boring and repetitive.

In most parts of the game, you just around and punch things. It's a 3D platformer in the vein of Super Mario 64. All this action takes place in the wonderfully realized world I was raving about earlier.

"This land is my land / this land is your land / this land is replete with / giant fish-women!"

But it just goes on and on and on. Sure, you can get new powers throughout the game, but these are typically used in a very Zelda-esque fashion: you use a power to unlock a new area or defeat a boss, but never use it again otherwise. The core gameplay almost never changes from jumping and punching, jumping and punching.

Until it does, and then it does something crazy that makes you want to tear everything's hair out. At points, this game started to remind me of Rebel Assault, which is a game that summons the dark warg-riders of the underworld through the mere mention of its title 50% of the time (I rolled my saving throw, so we're safe) because it is just...so...fucking...terrible. But why is it terrible? Because it's one of those "jack of all trades"-style games: every ten minutes you're doing something completely different, and none of the modes of gameplay have received enough attention and quality control to be compelling on its own, let alone as part of a smorgasbord of half-baked interfaces, steering controls, and the like.

Though the game's in-psyche conceit is brilliantly realized story-wise, it leads to a lot of confusing gameplay moments. For example, in one level you explore the mind of a failed descendant of Napoleon by facing off with Napoleon himself on a hex-style war game board (in the descendant's mind). You move from place to place on the board, while shrinking down to visit the inhabitants of different buildings, winning them over to your friend's cause, all before causing them to manifest into pieces on the board that you can move around to win the game. Sounds really clever and awesome, right? Well, it is.

Above: Awesome.

Until you actually try to play it, that is. Figuring out how to get to the gameplay board in the first place requires a sequence a bit like the more frustrating parts of Myst, with nothing in the way of hints. Once you've reached the board, getting from building to building is a similarly difficult problem to solve. Getting out of the shrunk-down, mini-city and back to the board proper is also completely nonintuitive and the game doesn't hold your hand at all. Instead, it expects you to move from what it essentially a platforming game to something much more complicated, assuming that just because the story is complex, the game must be to follow along with it. It's frustrating, because you spend as much time trying to figure out where to push each button and how as you do enjoying the many, many parts of the game that are well done.

In the end, I blasted through the final four or so hours in one go because I was so bored at the repetitive nature of the platforming (occasionally broken up by a totally nonintuitive spatial puzzle of some sort) that I just wanted to see the end of the game. And yeah, the end is totally perfect from a story perspective, and ties a lot of the earlier themes and symbolism together in a satisfying way. And the fact that I can even write that about a video game is awesome. But also, the last boss battle requires you to die a great many times before you realize the bizarrely unobvious combination of techniques that will allow you to win, so it's a final kick in the nuts while at the same time being a satisfying resolution of the story. Like if Lord of the Rings fired a potato gun into your crotch at the exact moment that Frodo destroyed the One Ring.

God DAMMIT.