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Why Everyone Hates It: By popular opinion, Psychonauts is yet another mediocre Rare style collect-a-thon platform, by a developer whose complete lack of experience designing platformers really shows, further burdened by being a multiplatform game released at a time this still usually indicated a game was cheap shovelware.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: There's a subtle lack of smoothness to the platforming which feels a little off but never causes any real problems, and, yes, there are a huge number of annoying collectables to be gathered up, to the torment of completionists. On the upside, the game is very kind about pointing out what was missed where and allowing for backtracking. Plus, the only real incentive for hunting everything down is a humorous little bonus cutscene.
Why I Like It Anyway: In the 1990's, LucasArts released a fair number of graphic adventure games which many felt were the best the genre had to offer, being free of the sadism others brought to the table, and packed with consistently hilarious dialog. Eventually the creators of all these games were let go, with half of them going on to form Telltale Games and resume making graphic adventures, while the others formed Double Fine Productions and decided to experiment with other genres. This gives us Psychonauts, a platformer from the people who made The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and Grim Fandango. The same offbeat humor, great voice acting, and Tim Burton-like asymmetrical art direction carries over quite well, and is arguably enough to justify the experience regardless of gameplay.
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Early on of course, the humor really is tasked with carrying things. Psychonauts' level design is rather hit and miss, with the less inspired areas clumped towards the beginning. It almost seems as if each portion of the game were designed in chronological order, with the team getting an increasingly better handle on what they were doing as they went along. The campground for training psychic children that acts as the hub for first half of the game in particular is less than thrilling, being a series of overly large rooms with some items hiding in treetops which require some periodically frustrating jumps. Again though, the dullness of the gameplay here is offset by the variety of other campers running around, each with a very distinct and memorable personality. One kid for instance has an obsessive crush on a boy and just won't shut up about it. Another has a tinfoil helmet he has to wear after an incident where he accidentally caused someone's head to explode. Those two happen to have a conversation at one point that's very much worth the time to stop and listen to. Then of course, it being a camp for people with psychic powers, the wilderness is full of telekinetic bears and pyrokinetic mountain lions to watch out for.
The bulk of the game though, as the title may suggest, involves physically leaping into the heads of some of the disturbed people around you to solve their problems. As the game moves along, these mental worlds become more and more interesting places to visit. First comes some standard platforming, later gravity begins to become subjective, not unlike Super Mario Galaxy, and a power that summons a giant sphere to ride makes curved and banked bits of the landscape rather fun to navigate. Eventually though the specific themes of various characters' mental illness shift the emphasis onto set pieces with unique mechanics and puzzles to solve.
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One of the most generally beloved minds belongs to an excessively paranoid milk man. A 1950's suburbia motif with cameras, radar dishes, and most importantly trenchcoat wearing spies, wearing the accoutrements of various other professions, requiring a series of different disguises to get past. Another revolves around adjusting various velvet paintings to reconfigure the streets for a sprawling spanish city with a blacklight poster aesthetic. Perhaps the most interesting involves helping someone to win a board game by constantly shifting in scale, moving pieces around the hex grid covered board and shrinking further down to raise the morale of the units those pieces represent.
What really needs to be stressed however is how consistently humorous the whole game is. Much like the adventure games the developers previously made, at any given point in the game, it's possible to stop and hunt down various NPCs to chat up, getting new responses from them based on whatever's currently going on. The main character is particularly funny in these exchanges, having the same voice actor and general tone of voice as the titular character from Invader Zim, coupled with a rather extreme amount of self-confidence. The familiar voice work naturally becomes that much funnier when learning new psychic powers. He is, for instance, rather distressingly eager to learn how to set things on fire with his mind.
Double Fine's followup to Psychonauts, Brütal Legend, is something of an odd beast, but rather worth playing. Wanting to try something new, it was originally intended to be an odd hybridization of realtime strategy and action, set in a world inspired by particularly epic heavy metal albums from the early 70's. After a huge string of problems with multiple publishers who considered a console based RTS to be unmarketable, they were forced to create a more traditional action/adventure game instead, which plays out like a strange hybridization of a Grand Theft Auto clone with a Zelda-like action/adventure... which then shifts back into its original strategy form for major battles. It's an extremely unorthodox blending of genres, but it actually works surprisingly well in practice.
