Psychonauts Picks Up a Publisher

We get to check out Psychonauts, the quirky and ambitious adventure games recently plucked from publishing limbo from Majesco.

Way back&very way back, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, we saw an intriguing platform-style game that had taken psychological concepts like dreams, repressed memories, and harmful thought censors, and used them to weave one of the most compelling titles wed seen. Developed by newcomer Double Fine Productions, the game, called Psychonauts, was picked up by Microsoft and had us salivating to get our greasy little hands on it.

Time went on, though, development dragged, people forgot, and Microsoft dropped it. The development team at Double Fine Studios, however, kept working diligently on the game and recently, Majesco announced that it had grabbed publishing rights to the game. We couldnt be more stoked.

The story in Psychonauts goes something like this: youre Raz, a young boy with nascent psychic powers sent to a sort of psionic summer camp in the woods where you and a bunch of other telepathic tots learn to access and control your mental abilities. Suddenly, the kids are being kidnapped by a giant lungfish that uses a TV set as bait, and being kept captive where their powerful brains are extracted to power heavy artillery death machines.

To save your fellow spoonbenders youve got to embark on a psychic journey inside the minds of various crackpots and creatures, traipse Freudian meat circuses and fight hybrid father figure boss monsters while freeing up emotional baggage, unlocking repressed memories, and collecting figments of imagination to earn psychic merit badges that unlock new powers. Clever is the first word that comes to mind, but maybe brilliant says it better.

A beautiful blend of fine art aesthetic and manic hand-drawn doodling permeates the whole project, and since every level takes place inside a characters subconscious, each one is realized in a completely different visual style. At the beginning of the game Raz goes inside of the brain of a hawkish psychic coach to go through boot camp-type training inside chaotic warzones and POW camps.

When he leaps inside the skull of a delusional painter named Edgar, he finds himself inside running amok on a three-dimensional black velvet painting being chased by guards of the subconscious dressed in matador hats, lucha libre-style masked wrestlers, and a gargantuan pink day-glo bull. And thats just the tip of the iceberg, as there will be thirteen uniquely designed levels in all.

Whats most impressive is how cognitive processes, most of which can be found in a Psychology textbook are extrapolated, sometimes anthropomorphized, into gameplay elements, challenges and characters. Powerful unconscious mental barriers that prevent us from thinking about harmful thoughts, referred to Freud as censors, take the form of enemy agents who try and stamp Raz out of peoples psyches.

Figments of imagination will give you clues to the psychic make-up of characters as well. One characters mental level is rife with images of beef and meat cleavers, which is pretty bizarre until you find out that said characters father was a butcher.

The attention to story and detail is paralleled by the amount of care thats going into keeping players riveted from start to finish. The platforming looks great, the challenges are varied, and the puzzles are tough, but not in a way that will needlessly frustrate players. After cutting his teeth on the graphic adventures, Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle, for LucasArts, Double Fine Productions CEO, Tim Schafer knows that danger of dead-end puzzles that, when left unsolved, stop the game in its tracks--players tend to turn the game off when stuck in order to try and figure it out. But the game is structured in a way that even if youre stumped by a puzzle theres plenty to fight, find, figure out, or collect while you stew it over in your head.

Although we only saw a few levels in action, we cant be more excited to play this intriguing romp through mental space. Check back for future updates.

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