Psychonauts

The following piece contains:
3 instances of defenestration imagery
2 particularly tortured metaphors
1 flirtation with punctuation free paragraphs
0 1 occurrence of the word "cataptromancy"

I was perusing my (surprisingly well thumbed) copy of "Encyclopaedia of Conversational Condescending Fuckwitisms" recently, and stumbled over the following entry for Psychonauts:

Topic: Psychonauts.
Recommended response to conversation about topic: "Ah yes, the 2005 platformer by DoubleFine Studios. Shame about that; commercial failure but critical success, don't you know?"
Cross.ref: overlooked gem; criminally undervalued; sickeningly unappreciated; too good for the hordes of drooling working-class philistines who persist in dogging my otherwise Utopian existence.

This is objectionable, and this is my objecting face. To call Psychonauts an unappreciated gem nowadays is to willfully ignore the point that every last bloody gamer worth their crunchy saline granules knows Psychonauts backwards. If unappreciated computer games were a row of Dickensian street orphans sprawled along the gutter, Psychonauts would be the one at the end with the saddest puppy-dog expression on its face, being gifted money by sympathetic members of the public as the others fought over scraps: then at the end of the day Psychonauts would stand up, fling away its fake crutches, dance a merry jig and go stay in a fancy hotel for the night throwing foie-gras out of the window at the real crippled orphans. It is an electric guitar playing Judas to the underappreciated games cause, because when a game tops every gamers list of unappreciated games, it is no longer unappreciated.

High five's all round! Good work everyone- Mission Accomplished, right George? Maybe it's just the rarefied critical and intellectual circles I move about in which have given me the impression that people appreciate Psychonauts when it is, in fact, still completely obscure. I'm not the type of retard who starts bellowing "sell out" every time a game garners a modicum of recognition (I'm a quite different type of retard to that...) but if you're going to sit around bemoaning the game's tragic past, don't be surprised if I jam my fingers in my ears and start screaming QFT to try and drown you out. And not the nice kind of QFT either: I mean the GTFO, STFU kind. Psychonauts is brilliant, but it's not the only brilliant, underappreciated game about.

Now, I know, I know, that it's not Psychonauts' fault. I know that critical appreciation's one thing and sales figures are quite another. If you're the impulsive type and feel inclined to experience Psychonauts immediately, it's on Steam for 19.95 of your puny American dollars. According to my "British National Party Currency Conversion Chart" that's a mere £1.99 of mighty British Sterling. If you're the impulsive type, go download it, and then come back here and read the rest of this as those billions of ones and zeros seep into your hard drive: I shall do my level chuffing best to vindicate your pecuniary outgushings.

So let's imagine you don't know what Psychonauts is about. You don't know it's set in a summer camp for psychically gifted children. You don't know that the game's main gimmick, a hub system based around flitting in and out of people's psyches like it's going out of style, facilitates a staggering, beautiful diversity of settings. People will tell you all sorts of stuff about Psychonauts. They'll spill the beans on some of the most surprising level design you'll ever encounter in a video game, and they'll do this because they want you to know how and niche and esoteric their interests are, and because they have a deep seated hatred toward you which they can only express through passive-aggressive spoiler flinging. But you should raise your eyebrows quizzically if they propose the following: that it's a brilliant platformer.

I've long been of the opinion that telling a great story through a platform game bears more than superficial likenesses to stirring a cup of tea with a JCB- it's clumsy, it's unwieldy, and like this metaphor, it's largely surplus to requirements. While I strive to be a proponent of the Yahtzee school of "it's worth the occasional rough patch for a work of such staggering imagination" game theorising, I have difficulty reconciling this lofty ideal with my own short temper and limited attention span. It's Grim Fandango all over again. I adore Schafer's tales, but I have a natural disinclination for the media he uses in telling them. Point and click adventure games?

"Use Eau d' Toilette on hole punch. Use hole punch on Gandhi's headstone."

Must I? If gaming's a journey, I'm having a First class ticket on the Number Nine. Y'all can walk if you like, take in the scenery: I'm just here for the free booze. The platforming elements, the minutiae of item collection and double jumping, go a long way to obscuring a brilliant yarn. Tim- and I mean this in the sweetest way possible- have you considered making movies?

Platformers of Psychonauts' ilk aren't a very trendy genre these days: Galaxy's recent contempt for gravity was the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation that the wheezing old nag needed to keep going a bit longer, but seemed to fall more on the side of exception than rule. Tumbling off platforms and hoarding finite lives seemed to go out of the "Hey, I just thought of a fabulous idea, chaps" fenêtre around the same day that health packs got surgically excised from First Person Shooters and replaced with recharging shields and carrying no more than two weapons. Psychonauts' best ideas, those that people discuss in reverent hushed tones over the dying embers of campfires in the Savannah, would have been brilliant ideas in any genre. Except maybe pinball simulators. Still, a platformer is what we got, and we can but deal with it as best we can. Suffice to say that if you trawl the mean streets asking people about
Psychonauts, precisement zero percent of those surveyed will reply:

"Oh yeah! Man, I loved that bit where you had to jump onto that narrow platform, but the camera kept moving at the wrong time and the jump button delay was just a bit too long so you kept on falling off to your death! And when you did make it, you slid straight off the ledge because it was slightly too steeply angled, so you had to do it all again! They sure don't make 'em like that anymore!" [presumably accompanied by a hearty thigh slapping gesture]

Just so you know, what they will say is this:

"Don't get me started, dude! That bit where that (SLIGHT SPOILER) lures you into that (MODERATE SPOILER) and you beat the (MILD OBSCENITY) out of it and jump in its mind and suddenly you're a (MY, WHAT A BIG SPOILER YOU HAVE THERE) and you look around and it's all (IBID.) and the...hey, come back! I want to tell you all the best bits of the game!"

Actually, while we're being honest, more likely by far than either of those is:

"Psychonauts? Can't say I've heard of that. Sounds like a child's game. Why are you touching yourself there?"

Unlike our heavily censored friend above I forgo spoilers here only in the most likely vain hope that someone out there who has yet to play the game and through an extremely improbable defiance of the all pervading "key plot information" distribution center that is the internet does not know everything about it already will pick it up or download it and be desperately surprised and moved by the whole experience and possibly be inspired to go into games journalism years from now and credit me as their inspiration and make me feel all warm and tingly and fundamentally validated inside.

Hey, Mr Cynical: it could happen.

Psychonauts tries. It's evident that the designers put in a lot of thought about the player experiencing something new, and if more games nowadays showed a third of the imagination that Psychonauts does then the games industry would be pissing all over the film industry in terms of audience engagement and emotional relevance, and probably sizing up the writing industry for an imminent urine dousing too. There's a point in the game where you gain a clairvoyance ability, to look through the eyes of other living creatures. Damn near every animate being in the game (and a few ostensibly inanimate ones too) can be mentally hijacked, and the way that each being views the player character in a different way, reflecting their own attitudes towards him, continues to amaze this otherwise world-weary reviewer.

The game flaunts the kind of ludicrous attention to detail that would be vetoed in the early development stages of any other game, because of the disparity between the time it would take to implement compared to the number of people that would ever actually see it. I'd imagine the project meeting in which these ideas are discussed would feature a sweaty man with a flipchart drawing a graph with two divergent lines, and then a bunch of people wearing ties and sitting round a table would mutter and shake their heads, and the idea would go spiraling out of that (very busy) window. But since Psychonauts abounds, positively revels, in these myriad details the whole thing takes on a giddy, reckless joy. Go ahead, try and break the game in some way with your psychic powers; but don't be surprised if the developers thought of it first and pre-empted a comic reaction. Punch any character in Psychonauts and they'll react, generally in a pretty amusing way: shoot your team-mate in the head with a sniper rifle in Mass Effect and you'll be lucky if they give you so much as a dirty look. It's indicative of Psychonauts' happy-go-lucky "feel free to try and sink the boat, if that floats your boat" mentality.

And what is it about psychic bears that makes them so damn disturbing? It should be simple: it's a bear- but its psychic. I mean, I've shotgunned things in half during my computer gaming career that'd make Bosch blush, but something about the way it floats silently above the ground, paws dangling and eyes bulging. You don't hear it coming, you just hear it growl when it's too late. Running into one of these in the woods when you've just started the game and are all but defenceless is a singularly alarming experience, unfortunately exacerbated by the downright ham-fisted targeting system and stubborn camera. All you can do is display a certain amount of tactical imprudence by running sideways into a tree while said Ursidae staves the back of your head in with a fuzzy psychic paw. Grr.

Schafer and his team spent a characteristic amount of time and imagination on Psychonauts and it seems a bit rude not to reciprocate by spending a decent amount of time in their character's imaginations. It's a confused beast of a game: one second it'll recklessly smash through the boundaries of the avant-garde, and the next it will apologise, dust off its "I Love Rules and Regulations" hat, and rigidly, blindly adhere to all the conventions of the genre whether they make sense or not. It ain't perfect, but bugger me if it's not trying. Gleefully, my extensive vocabulary gleaned from my Bourgeois book learning means I can sum up Psychonauts in one handy, bite size adjective:

"Oftensurprisinggenerallymessyfrequentlyhilariousbutstubbornlybloodyexasperating."

Catchy. So, the big "shouldyou": should you buy it?

No. Get this instead:

Fuck it, buy them both, it'll only cost you £20. Thank you, and good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.