Video game Review- Psychonauts

Note: played on my decent laptop with an Xbox controller

Psychonauts is a game that was released 9 years ago and at times, it shows. But at other times its a timeless game that I could play over and over and never get bored. If only it could choose between one or the other. Because, you see, this is a very difficult review for me to write. It's a game that I should love and often do but at other times I hate and want to never play again.

So, I'll start with some of the good stuff. The game is famed for being hilarious. And in that aspect it succeeds. The game has many brilliant laugh out loud moments, right from the get go and they rarely get old. It brings real personality to the story of Raz, a boy who escapes to a summer camp for psychonauts (children with psychic powers). In fact, the whole game is so beautifully full of personality. It's knowingly cheesy, surprisingly dark and has wonderful characters (Ford is a particular favourite of mine). And when it works, the platforming is wonderful. Movement would feel natural and grinding around the place was great fun and I'd always cherish those opportunities. And the game was so creative in many ways. From the stage design to the writing, most of this game was fresh. Even 9 years on the game feels new. And it doesn't look bad either. And while all of these things should add up to make a definitive game experience, it doesn't.

For a start, it has a difficulty spike like a seismograph in a particularly infrequent earthquake. It starts fine but then becomes impossible out of nowhere. The controls are also not great, occasionally in platforming sections and especially in combat. Which is not good news because the game is 1 part platforming and the other part combat. On a similar note, for a game that is so creative and refreshing, why have bland and uninspired boss fights? They were frustrating and pointless and only existed as filler for the game. And it suffers from something almost all comedy games suffer from: joke repetition. A one-liner may be funny the first time but when you've been stuck in the same area for 10 minutes because of bad controls and the one liner comes up for the hundredth time, you want to punch something. Hard. In the heart. 

All of these things together meant that in the middle of the matador level (10 hours in according to steam) I quit. I got to a point in the game where all of the things that made the game great became over powereerd by all the things that made it awful. I wasn't playing it because I loved it or even to see how it ended, I was playing it so that I wouldn't have to play it again. I've only really experienced something like this once before and that was in the final series of Dexter. If a game makes me want to stop playing, you're doing something wrong. Something very wrong indeed. I may one day come back to it, but at the time of writing this, I haven't finished it and have no plans whatsoever to do so.

Overall, this game was brilliant. I know I've framed it quite negatively but it was really great. It's just a shame about the gameplay. My advice would be to watch the cut-scenes online and then send some money to Double Fine for their good work on the cut-scenes. But don't buy this game unless you can handle poor controls, frustrating combat and a difficulty curve that can almost rival Super Meat Boy. As a comedy, it's perfect. As a game, it's heavily flawed. With that in mind, I give this game a 

(But were it just on the comedy, a 9 or maybe even a 10 would be there instead)