Psychonauts is a disappointment.
The concept of psychonauts is intriguing: you are a psychic cadet who can enter the minds of other people to fight their inner demons. When the brains of your fellow cadets start to go missing, you have the explore the real world and the psychic world to solve the mystery. Unfortunately, these great ideas go to waste. This is mainly due to the fact that psychonauts cannot decide on the target demographic for this game. Cartoonish animation and childish humour would seem to be targeting the SpongeBob set, while the notion of battling neuroses contains in jokes and references that suggest the intended audience as completed Psychology 101. We are left with a game that is annoying for teens and adults, and incomrephensible for children.
Gameplay is decent. However, some tedious, repetitive tasks do make their way into the game. Graphically, Psychonauts is variable. Graphics during gameplay are decent if not particularly impressive. Cut-scenes are embarrassingly poor. Characters will twitch around manically, and animations cut in and out.
All of these faults keep Psychonauts from being a good game. However, the aspect that makes this game one of the most disapointing I have ever played is the repetitive and annoying voice acting. If you die more than a few times at any given spot (particularly during the boss fights at the end of the game), you may want to drive your head through the nearest wall in an attempt to remove the fingernails-down-a-chalkboard awfulness that are the boss' repetitive taunts. There is no replay value to Psychonauts. Once finished, you could play again and try to collect every single item in the game (although this would probably indicate some obsessive tendencies on your part). How then do we explain the excellent reviews for Psychonauts? Why was this listed as one of the "Best Games No-one Played" of 2005? Perhaps because this game is absolutely perfectly suited to an incredibly small demographic: fans of "high concept" games, who are also psychologically sophisticated adults in touch enough with their inner children to enjoy fart jokes, while simultaneously not discerning enough to recognize a poor quality game. In this instance, the mob was correct to reject Psychonauts. Don't play this game.