Psychonauts
Jun. 21st, 2012 10:22 amPsychonauts is developed by DoubleFine Productions, which contains some ex-Lucasarts people, and recently made one of the most successful ever KickStarter projects.
The premise is the most awesome ever. You run away from the circus to go to a summer camp training kids to become psychic agents! The psychic ability is very well envisioned: it gives you some real world powers (psi punch, psi blast, levitation, invisibility, etc), but the main effect is being able to enter someone's mind. The mindscapes are very well designed, and really feel like the insides of different people's heads: an organised person, a paranoid person, a non-human person, etc, etc.
The dialog is smile-worthy without usually being laugh-out-loud funny, but I much prefer that to something trying too hard.
The gameplay is running, jumping, collecting stuff, with a bit of fighting, the 3d equivalent of a platform game. It's fairly well done, I was very happy to play through it (I'm about half way through).
Unfortunately some things do feel rather formulaic. Collecting mental figments is fun, because it's easy to get most of them, and if you're completionist, you can come back and make sure you get all of them. But there's too much different stuff you have to collect, most of which comes to the same thing, gaining levels, or going and trading it in for something else, which gains you levels, or buying something which lets you find more stuff which gains you levels. And a few things are somewhat obsoleted by stuff you collect later, which makes it very frustrating to see it, know you want to pick it up, but that it's not worth the time.
I think this is all genre convention for this sort of gameplay, but for me it somewhat ruins the immersion of the world. We're in the middle of a crisis of people having their brains stolen, the camp leaders have run off to deal with some other missions -- yet there's still someone hanging out in the camp store trading stuff you collect for stuff you need. Why hasn't he noticed the crisis? People's brains are very individual, but they randomly have three sorts of collectible hidden throughout. The slideshows you find about the person are very touching, but randomly having to switch to a different inventory item to collect different sorts of collectibles feels more like make-work and less like fixing someone's psychy by running around, which previously was handled surprisingly well!
Similarly, it falls into the trap of "make it too hard to get around, and then add a badly-justified teleport object to bypass all of the movement entirely." Seriously, you don't need an in-world justification for which keys to press to walk around, nor should you need one for short-cutting all the "run to the other side of the map".
The ideal is something like "you have a usual walking speed, but there's a special key which can whiz you straight to an area's exit if you can see it". That way (i) it's fairly transparent and you don't have to wait around and (ii) you get a sense of the distance you're traversing.
The premise is the most awesome ever. You run away from the circus to go to a summer camp training kids to become psychic agents! The psychic ability is very well envisioned: it gives you some real world powers (psi punch, psi blast, levitation, invisibility, etc), but the main effect is being able to enter someone's mind. The mindscapes are very well designed, and really feel like the insides of different people's heads: an organised person, a paranoid person, a non-human person, etc, etc.
The dialog is smile-worthy without usually being laugh-out-loud funny, but I much prefer that to something trying too hard.
The gameplay is running, jumping, collecting stuff, with a bit of fighting, the 3d equivalent of a platform game. It's fairly well done, I was very happy to play through it (I'm about half way through).
Unfortunately some things do feel rather formulaic. Collecting mental figments is fun, because it's easy to get most of them, and if you're completionist, you can come back and make sure you get all of them. But there's too much different stuff you have to collect, most of which comes to the same thing, gaining levels, or going and trading it in for something else, which gains you levels, or buying something which lets you find more stuff which gains you levels. And a few things are somewhat obsoleted by stuff you collect later, which makes it very frustrating to see it, know you want to pick it up, but that it's not worth the time.
I think this is all genre convention for this sort of gameplay, but for me it somewhat ruins the immersion of the world. We're in the middle of a crisis of people having their brains stolen, the camp leaders have run off to deal with some other missions -- yet there's still someone hanging out in the camp store trading stuff you collect for stuff you need. Why hasn't he noticed the crisis? People's brains are very individual, but they randomly have three sorts of collectible hidden throughout. The slideshows you find about the person are very touching, but randomly having to switch to a different inventory item to collect different sorts of collectibles feels more like make-work and less like fixing someone's psychy by running around, which previously was handled surprisingly well!
Similarly, it falls into the trap of "make it too hard to get around, and then add a badly-justified teleport object to bypass all of the movement entirely." Seriously, you don't need an in-world justification for which keys to press to walk around, nor should you need one for short-cutting all the "run to the other side of the map".
The ideal is something like "you have a usual walking speed, but there's a special key which can whiz you straight to an area's exit if you can see it". That way (i) it's fairly transparent and you don't have to wait around and (ii) you get a sense of the distance you're traversing.