Short yet sweet
Story: Psychonauts brings you into a world full of psychics where psychic crime and terrorism is a very real possibility. To combat these crazed people with the ability to blow up whatever they want, the esteemed psychonauts were formed. Basically an FBI for psychics. The story throws you into the world as Rasputin, known as Raz, a psychic acrobat who desperately wants to escape his psychic-hating father and become a psychonaut. He figures this is the only way to impress his dad and win his attention. To accomplish this mighty feat, he decides to run off to psychic summer camp where he can learn to embrace his psychic powers. Unfortunately for him, the camp won't let him stay and has decided to call his nice, ol' dad to come get him. However, before he leaves back to the circus, someone starts stealing all the other kids brains! Now Raz has to use his brain-delving abilities to find out who is behind this and stop them! As weird as it sounds, the story is actually pretty exciting and is easily the funniest game ever. I actually burst out laughing several times playing this game. It definitely has the most memorable, love-confession scenes EVER.
Gameplay: It's a platforming game with psychic powers, whats not to love? As a junior psychic-in-training, Raz has to collect "merit badges" in order to obtain new powers. He also has to increase his psychic ranking to power up the skills he has and gain a few merit badges. There are plenty of collectibles spread out throughout the psychonauts world. Before I get ahead of myself, The real world in the game is actually quite small. You go throughout the camps 5 areas (full of all kinds of said collectibles) and a few more areas that i'm not going to spoil here. But what really makes the world so expansive is the ability to go inside all the characters minds. When you enter someones subconscious, it manifests into some form of world, describing the person you are entering. For example, one character you have to go diving into is an actress so her world is a theatre stage full of zany directors, actors and one really nasty critic. On to the collectibles. the typical, get 100 and win a prize, object is called the figment. These are all shapes, sizes and colors but they are all 2-D and are extremely obvious against the beautiful, colorful world. once you get 100 of these suckers, you increase a rank! second are the emotional baggage containers. You have to find baggage tags that correspond to each kind of bag to send them on their way, and unlock cool artwork for your troubles! Finally, mental cobwebs, once you buy the cobweb duster (with all your fancy arrowheads which act as money in the game), you can collect these and exchange them for... psi cards! you need 9 psi cards and a psi core to increase a rank and then get more psychic powers!
Psychic powers are definitely not new to video games but they work perfectly in a platformer game! Some powers you use to fight the enemies such as pyrokenesis (the ability to burn things) or invisibility, some you need to solve puzzles such as Telekenesis (ability to move things) or Levitation (works like a cool ball that you roll around on and jump higher. probably the most fun thing in this entire game! =D). All the bosses you have to find out what kind of power will work the best and some of these puzzles are actually quite challenging.
Graphics: Wow... just wow. The awesomely, amazingly, spectacular graphics are, in the words of the gamestop editors, "jump-out-and-massage-your-eyeballs" great. It has a cartoony look and feel to it (but don't be decieved, this is NOT a game for little kids) which is a nice change to some of the hard, serious graphics seen in other games. The character designs are absolutely bizzare but not in a bad way. They all are some kind of extreme, the bully kid is EXTREMELY stupid looking and the traitorous kid is extremely sneaky and stealthy looking (except for his GIGANTIC nose lol). Just check out the screenshots and see for yourself!
Sound: The voices are all done by some pretty big name people. A lot of them have been on TV series and movies as well as other video games. My personal favorite is the voice of Timmy Turner from the show Fairly Oddparents on nickelodeon who plays a (really funny) part in this game. All the voice-overs fit their characters perfectly and I can't think of anything wrong with any of them. Value: This is the only downfall of psychonauts. It's REALLY REALLY short. I finished it in 10 hours. Of course, as a platformer game, there is plenty of replay value. But I'm guessing it won't add more than about 5 hours to your gameplay time. The time you spend though, however short it may be, is amazing.
Due to the short gametime of psychonauts, I would only recommend it as a rental. However, it is far beyond rental quality in terms of gameplay so if you like playing the same game a whole bunch of times, BUY THIS GAME!