The Return of Funny

By Tom McDonald
It’s been said that if you wait long enough, everything comes around again. While clever, dialog-driven platform/puzzle adventures with quirky characters never really go away, they seem to have gone on an extended vacation as of late, only to return after most people have forgotten how much fun they are. This makes them feel spring clean and daisy fresh.

And in fact, that’s what Psychonauts is: a daisy on the scarred battlefield that represents the excess of combat games currently hogging shelf space at the local PC game retailer.

We’re awash in combat games these days, but there used to be another dominant tone in gaming, of which Tim Schafer’s clever dialog was a key part. The early Lucas Arts adventures were the gold standard of PC gaming: clever, light, fun, and quotable. They brought a joy to gaming that has since been replaced with grim determination and gritty violence.

There’s nothing wrong with blood, bullets, and muscle, but it’s been too long since a game has made me laugh, which might explain why a children’s game (Lego Star Wars) appealed to me so much last month, and why this month Psychonauts is getting such a vigorous workout. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that, sin of sins, I’m finding the game more fun to play on Xbox than on the PC.

The keyboard-mouse control combo is a little clunky, and unless you have a PC gamepad, you might find it hard to adapt to. Plus, my couch is more comfortable than my desk. In the contest between my butt and my loyalty to the PC, my butt will always win.)

Psychonauts is dazzlingly clever, with levels that take place inside the frequently twisted mindscapes of some truly warped characters. It has an almost bottomless well of clever dialog and funny situations, all of it driven by strong jumping/puzzle-solving elements. And while the gameplay is very, very good, that’s not why you come to a game like this. If you do, then you’ll pass through too quickly, and

Psychonauts is a game that rewards lingering, exploring, and wandering with the kind of laughs found too rarely these days.