Gaming Target - Xbox: Psychonauts

Written by Gavin Wright on February 18, 2003

First Impressions: Just in case you're wondering Ц no, they're not launching Ms. Cleo into space. But that would make a great idea for the sequel.

Tim Schafer is one of the most widely-respected figures in the PC gaming industry. During his ten-year stint at LucasArts, Schafer was the driving force behind the classic adventure games Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. He left in 2000 to form his very own development house, a small upstart studio by the name of Double Fine Productions. Double Fine's first offering is Psychonauts, a story-driven adventurer that's been snatched up by Microsoft to be brought exclusively to the Xbox. For the first time ever, Psychonauts brings Schafer's knack for creating memorable characters, smart dialog, and intuitive gameplay over to an eager and ready console audience.

Psychonauts is a third-person action/adventure game of a slightly different sort. The game stars Raz, a young boy with aspirations to join the elite psychic police force known as the Psychonauts. Possessing an abnormally high mental capacity and unmistakable signs of clairvoyance, Raz has been selected from many to attend a training camp for up-and-coming Psychonauts. It's here in which he discovers that someone has been kidnapping the other campers and stealing their unusually large craniums for use in some sort of evil scheme. Using his inherent psychic powers, Raz must foil the villainous plot, and hopefully earn the title of Psychonaut along the way.

As the game progresses, Raz will gain control over a wide range of psychic abilities. These powers include telekinesis, levitation, invisibility, fire starting, and cerebral projection, the latter of which we'll get into in detail a bit later. The means that are used to gain these new abilities have not yet been revealed, but it looks like they're somehow connected with earning merit badges in the different schools of the paranormal.

At first sight, Psychonauts is immediately recognizable as a platformer. And despite all the characteristics that would point in the contrary, it still is a platforming game at heart. All the standard conventions are there Ц jumping, climbing, bouncing, swimming and whatnot. Raz has this unique device known as a Сthought bubble' that can usually be seen floating around over his head. Its primary function is to display Raz's thoughts and emotions to the player, though it also doubles as the spell selection menu. But what's even more interesting is that Raz can physically grab onto this thought bubble and use it to hover in the air, or bounce off it to reach an otherwise-unattainable ledge or object. Schafer has always been known for clever, intuitive gameplay, and we should expect nothing less from Psychonauts.

There are a total of 16 levels in the game, but the twist is that each of these levels actually take place within the confines of a different mentally-disturbed individual. Using one of his aforementioned psychic powers, Raz has the ability to project himself into the minds of these creatures, whose troubled psyches are portrayed as twisted mindscapes inhabited by the thoughts and fears that unceasingly haunt them. You must find and confront these subconscious conflicts, which exist in the peoples' minds as various characters and obstacles, in order to rid them of their delusions. In one level Raz travels into the mind of a man that's convinced he's the brother of Napoleon, so you find yourself in the middle of the Battle of Waterloo as played out inside his head. In the demo level shown at last year's E3, Raz enters his girlfriend's head to discover the cause of her reoccurring nightmares involving dead animals. Inside he sees huge pieces of rabbit meat scattered throughout, which can be traced back to her father's previous occupation as a butcher. By entering these minds and exposing the suppressed thoughts held within, you take on something of a Freudian psychoanalytic role, although you need only take in as much or as little of this aspect of the game as you like.