Truly great gaming experience.
In Psychonauts a talented kid called Razputin runs away from his father and goes to a summer camp. The camp is not an ordinary one, because it is especially for psychic children. Razputin’s goal is to become a psychonaut. In time kids are starting to lose their brains and the teachers act weird. This is the reason why the main portion of the game happens inside people’s minds and every section of the game is totally different from one another. For example a scientist’s brains are very different from brains of a genetically mutated lung fish. As you can pretty much guess the story is really weird and takes some time to really get into it. For me it took almost two hours worth of solid gameplay.
From a gameplay perspective Psychonauts is a lot like Nintendo’s Mario, Zelda and older Metroids. Razputin collects items and earns new psychic abilities in the course of the game like levitation, pyrokinesis and telekinesis. He also collects arrowheads which are used as money like coins in Mario or rupees in Zelda. Environment is full of fun hidden extras and easter eggs (just like in Zelda), so just walking around and exploring the gameworld can be a really rewarding experience.
Graphics and artistic design are of good quality and especially unique: you won’t find this kind of game anywhere else. Most of the game’s characters have their own personalities and the great audio just enhances this. Deaf people are also remembered, because the dialog can also be seen in clear subtitles.
Psychonauts is by no means a difficult game, but just like in Zelda the challenge in gameplay is not the main focus of the game. The main focus is to explore the environment and collect all kinds of stuff on the way, which will help you to get into some new area to explore some more.
If you like games like Mario, Zelda, Metroid and Prince of Persia, then this is the game for you. Just remember to give yourself at least couple of hours worth of gameplay to get into the story.