Psychonauts is the Epitome of 2000s Era 3D Platformers

And that's not really a good thing.

Occasionally I look back on the industry as a whole and think to myself, what if I could finally, for the first time, play one of those games that people loved back in the day (mid 2000s or earlier when I could have played it but didn't) and review it now? Well, that's when I pull out my calendar, a random watch that isn't mine and I don't know how I got and turn the watch back as I flip through the calendar backwards quite aggressively, until I realize that's not how time travel works, and sit down to play a game that has a reputation in the industry as something influential or as a cult hit. Today, we are doing a Throwback Review!

The Introduction

It's April of 2005 and the Xbox 360 is set to come out in around 6 months while Halo 2 came out around 5 and a half months prior to when this game came out. This game is a quirky funny game with a great art style that took 16 years to get a true sequel to. It is a game that delves into trauma, mental health, and familial relationship problems and curses. I am of course talking about Psychonauts.

I didn't originally play Psychonauts when it came out, hell I didn't even know it existed until the Fig campaign for the sequel back at the end of 2015, which was 10 years after the original (and almost 10 years ago now). I knew it was a game many many people talked about and loved in the gaming community for its quirks and they were desperate to experience the world again. Well in 2021 when the sequel came out I played some of it completely unaware of basically anything from the first game. I really liked it but I didn't finish it unfortunately (but I will be soon hint).

Now, years later I bought Psychonauts on steam and decided that now, after playing and reviewing The Hundred Line, I needed a shorter game that was heartwarming while still remaining interesting. I definitely got that, but I also got moments of frustration, moments of just wishing I could be playing the sequel, and moments of seeing the quirky game that people original fell in love with and got over 24,000 people to help fund the sequel. It was a mixed experience.

The Premise

The Psychonauts are an organization that uses psychic powers to help people process their issues by going into their brain and finding ways to help the person self actualize. You play as Raz, a psychic kid who snuck into the Psychonaut summer camp because he's in love with the Psychonauts but his parents don't approve so wouldn't send him to said camp willingly. When he gets there he gets put through the training from the camp counselors to hone his psychic abilities until they realize that kids brains are disappearing and something is going on at the camp that is suspicious and Raz is asked to investigate, despite being a kid.

The Good

The story of Psychonauts is truly wonderful. I cannot remember a game that has such an interesting world and cast of characters that also doesn't happen to all be fueled by violence. The story revolves around you going through the heads of the adults at camp and that you meet on your journey in order to discover who betrayed the Psychonauts and why some of the fellow kids at the camp have had their brains kidnapped. This is a small story that is more of an introduction to the world and it does a fantastic job with that. You get little moments of finding out more about the Psychonauts as an organization, moments of seeing what it's like to be able to jump into people's brains to help them process their trauma and difficulties, and genuinely moments of wonderful characterization that just makes you feel for the characters you're learning about.

Listen, if you had a terrible workplace that treated you like it did the Milkman here, you too would want to lob a flaming milk bottle inside it!

It is also genuinely wonderful to experience a world and story that is all about healing and helping people. About letting people process all their traumas, about fighting enemies in other peoples heads in order to let them let go of issues they've had in the past. It brings up the idea of how we can help ourselves through our own trauma and issues. How it's important to rely on others sometimes because there will always be times when you can't handle things by yourself. It's got a wonderful message and is rather heartwarming.

The art style also allows the game to hold up relatively well for a 2000s era game since it's so stylized. It's so unique and weird so there's nothing quite like it. Every time you look around the world and see the characters and such it is always an enjoyable experience. It's easy on the eyes, it is unique, it's just fucking great. I'm not an artist so I can't go into too much detail here since I'm not super knowledgeable, but it's still damn great!

The level design is also, usually, rather well put together. Particularly there's the level in the Milkman's head that fucks with the rotation and gravity of the world and that was incredibly fun to play through. This can lead to you being in an area of the level where if you look up you can see where you just were. Or where you have to jump from one street to the next one which has the placement where there would be a wall, but when you jump to it the world adjusts and boom, you're walking flat like normal. This world also has mild animal crossing moments with walking forward and the world curling in front of you like you’re running along a sphere. It's a fascinating level that really shows how wonderful the level design of the game actually is and how the developers really know how to make a game that each level feels unique and has its own personality. While this sometimes might make it a bit confusing knowing what direction to go in (I had to use a guide eventually for several levels), it is overall rather well done and makes for a more memorable game.

The Bad

The way you unlock upgrades for the powers is very...outdated. You don't unlock them manually, you just...rank up. I finished the game at rank 37 but there are 99 ranks. I have no idea how to get that many more ranks and thus I definitely missed a bunch of upgrades. It's just kinda annoying. This was a moment where I couldn't wait to be playing the sequel where I could just upgrade the powers myself, like a normal game.

An annoying frustration that is fixed in the sequel is these damn subtitles. Here in the original they take up waaaaay too much screen space. This isn’t a fucking visual novel, get rid of Razs head and how massive the text is so that I can see what’s on the lower half of the screen!

Speaking of ranks actually, there's a moment in the game when, in order to proceed, you have to buy a web vacuum thing. In order to do that you have to be a certain rank to unlock it and have 800 arrowheads to afford it. I didn't have either the right rank or the right amount of arrowheads by the time I reached this point (although I was close rank wise). That meant I had to spend some of my arrowheads to buy an arrowhead dowsing rod to be able to detect deeper arrowheads that are worth more. Then I had to wander around the camp for an hour or so finding deep arrowhead pockets, tapping Y as quickly as possible to unearth them, and then keep going. It fucking sucked. I despise moments where the game locks progress behind something you have to unlock by just going around and grinding. Fortunately, this is very much something that happens far less in modern day gaming than it did back in the 2000s. But it still is a detriment to the experience of playing the game.

While the story is put together at the end very effectively (seen in The Ending section), the gameplay of the last level is...not good. The last level in the circus is the worst fucking gameplay section in the entire fucking game. I got so damn frustrated dealing with things that only existed there and had no right to exist in the way they did. Like how there was a very slow knife throwing enemy who you relied on throwing into a rotating circle (by aiming for and missing you since you're jumping around to make him hit the circle) in order to use that knife to swing up onto the next level when the rotation gets to the point. That wouldn't be that bad, except that it's only fucking done during a section when you are pressed for time because you are trying to protect little bitty coach from dying to weird ground meat monsters as he chases after his lovely pet rabbit. So they introduce this concept that is entirely based on how you have to wait in order to get the knife to both make contact with the circle and often come back around for you to grab which also isn't guaranteed with mid 2000s era platforming in a section where you are literally working to save a child from actively dying. Plus they then tell you to do that 4 times each time dealing with more annoying platforming, more enemies for each level, more stupid knife throwers, and smaller and smaller platforms to fight on. It's. Fucking. Awful.

This generally is indicative of my major problem with Psychonauts, the gameplay is the epitome of mid 2000s platformers. By that I mean, has some great ideas with some mixed execution that usually just ends up trash. For instance, something that most 3D platformers were having trouble with back then was general gameplay floaty-ness. Essentially, the jumping is kinda trash because it takes too damn long and there's too much of a hang in the air. This is so fucking annoying in platformers because jumping is one of the most frequent things you'll be doing. Psychonauts has this in droves, plus it has the problem that this was the first 3D game most of the devs had made so it naturally had camera issues. So having to deal with both floaty jumping and a camera that is fighting you a lot and it just leads to a lot of mild to intense frustration with the gameplay as a whole.

Coach and his rabbit.

Some of the powers even make this whole experience worse. For instance, levitation allows you to roll around on a ball of pure psychic energy, it basically replaces run while also allowing you to jump further. But you know what else comes with jumping further? Making the jumping more floaty. For instance, there's a race you have to do on this ball in the head of the counselor that gives it to you and there are moments where, during the race, you have to jump. Unfortunately, the gaps you have to jump aren't designed for jumping while on the floaty ball and going super fast so you will often end up with moments where you over jump the gap so fucking much that you end up in the middle of the next gap. This is also a race that you absolutely have to win so if you lose too much time you're fucked, have to finish the race, and then do it all over again. I did the race 3 times because of this and would have done at least one more if not for me just getting lucky with making a jump I didn't think I was gonna make.

The Ending - Detailed

**Start Spoilers**

Okay this game is 2 decades old now so I'm not going to go into massive detail about the ending because honestly you probably already know it. I'll just go over the basics and my thoughts.

The Coach is the betrayer of the Psychonauts, Raz goes into his brain and faces both of their dads, reconciles with his own real life dad by realizing that he does not in fact hate psychics and is just concerned about remaining safe. Then you beat the fight by having Raz's dad infuse massive psychic power into Raz and beat that massive double dad monster in a Kaiju-like battle.

Then, you're back in the real world, the Coach is better and no longer a piece of shit betrayer and is given a second chance, Raz is now an honorary Psychonaut (according to this game), and the adults get a call that the grand head of the Psychonauts has been kidnapped so they have to fly away in a jet to find him. And hey, Raz can come along too since he's the "kidnapping" expert now that he helped find the kids brains. Credits.

**End Spoilers**

The Ending - Reaction

Honestly, the ending wasn't too ambitious. It left the door open for a sequel that would come out after 16 years, a Fig crowdfunding campaign, and Double Fine being bought by Microsoft. It closed all of the little plots you had learned about over the course of the game and even the little kids had grown slightly as individuals since they were literally brains in a jar for a bit. It felt solid and overall, rather well put together.

The Conclusion

Okay, so, there's just so many damn problems with the original Psychonauts. It falls prey to so many of the problems with 2000s era videogames and 3D platformers and it's redeeming qualities are it's story/world/characters, it's art style, and it's level design. But the gameplay is clunky, the camera is rather trash, it has horrible execution of some rather interesting ideas, has horrible upgrade systems, and locks people out of progressing because they haven't grinded their PSI cards and arrowheads enough. It's a base that the sequel would really turn up to 11 but right now it's just that, a base.

Rating system info here.

If you want to play a clunky game, if you're okay with dealing with some of the annoying aspects of 2000s era videogames and 3D platformers, then it's a good one to play since it's got a great story. Experiencing the story was a great experience even if the game was filled with varying levels of frustration. All you gotta do is go in ready to be annoyed with the annoyances of the past. Then, afterwards, you should go and play the sequel cause it fixes all of the problems in this one, like all sequels should.

Meow,

Cat