Psychonauts

What do you get if you put a brilliant story onto a game that is otherwise formulaic? You get Psychonauts (Double Fine Productions; 2005, Xbox, PS2 and PC). You also get a game that is praised by critics but has poor sales.

The core concept of the story is that you can project yourself into people's minds and face puzzles and enemies that represent their emotional problems. Doing so will generally let you get past an obstacle in the overall story, which is about a summer camp for psychics where a villain is stealing the children's brains.

Your character (Razputin) interacts with the game world in two main ways: platform-game jumping, swinging from bars, etc.; and the use of various psychic powers you earn at different points. Only some of these powers are really useful throughout the game; others only have use in specific puzzles.

The story is original, but the same cannot be said of the gameplay. The game takes the expected platform/puzzle game elements and uses the story to justify them, the blanket justification being that since the game takes place inside people's minds, things can work however the game requires them to.

You have a health bar and a number of lives, because platform games have to have to give you a limited number of lives, but here the lives are called 'astral projection layers' and the storyline excuse is that when you lose all these you are expelled from the person's mind. When you lose a life you respawn a little further back from when you died. When you lose all your lives you get a cutscene of being expelled, have to go back in, and then start a little way further back from where you would start if you had merely lost a life. So, basically, the penalty for failure is a bit harsher every fifth or so time you fail (you can get powerups to increase your 'maximum projection depth', i.e. maximum number of lives). I'm not sure how this is meant to make the game more fun, but you've got to have a limited number of lives, right?

(Incidentally, you still die and respawn and lose lives in exactly the same way even when in the 'surface world' outside of anyone's minds, which doesn't make sense with the explanation of what lives are. I was half expecting this to be justified at the end by revealing that you were in someone's mind all along, but no.)

You've also got to have things to collect, because platform games have to have things to collect, right? And psychonauts gives you tons of things to collect, all of which have storyline justifications, and none of which are really relevant to the story as a whole. YOu can run around picking up:
* 'Figments' of the person's imagination. (Since I'm inside their mind, isn't everything here a figment of their imagination?) Get enough of these and you get a small increase in power. They also help with navigation, since if habitually pick up figments, you know that any place still thick with them is somewhere you haven't been yet.

* Psychic arrowheads. These are the game's currency, letting you buy stuff at the camp store. In one annoying segment of the game, I had to put the main storyline on hold while I ran around the overworld trying to find arrowheads in order to buy the thing I needed to get past the next plotline obstacle - an obstacle which, incidentally, had no effect on the story and only seemed to exist in order to make me save up to buy the thing from the camp store. Bizarrely, you can find these both in the overworld and inside people's minds, and the latter ones, while presumably just imaginary, are still just as good at the camp store. Oh, and the camp store still functions as normal even when literally everyone else in the camp has been kidnapped and had their brains sucked out. Because you've gotta have collectable currency and stuff to buy with it.
* Psychic cobwebs. To collect these, you need to use a piece of equipment (buyable from the camp store), which means that collecting them takes five button-presses rather than just one.
* Emotional baggage tags, which can be united with the corresponding 'emotional baggage' somewhere in the same environment. Emotional baggage is literally a crying suitcase or something, a visual pun which is amusing the first time you see it but becomes old by the end of the game, especially when the mood of the climactic scenes are spoiled by the same old hatboxes blubbing away in the corner.
* Psychic challenge cards. These can be combined with psy-cores (buyable at the camp store, for arrowheads), to create psy challenge markers, which give you the same power boost that collecting a whole lot of figments would.
* Scavenger hunt items: random things dotted throughout the overworld. For hundred-percent-completionists only, as far as I can see.
* Brains in jars, in the overworld in the second half of the game. These were the only collectables with a genuine storyline reason, since they're the stolen brains of your fellow campers, and each one belongs to a distinct character you met earlier in the game. You get a small boost to max health for each one.

Phew!

The story is told pretty much entirely through cutscenes. Most of these are pretty short and inoffensive - if you're going to have cutscenes, you might as well make them short and ubiquitous, so that they seem like part of the texture of the game rather than an interruption. Mostly they appear when the player succeeds at a puzzle, and therefore act as rewards for the gameplay. A few of them trigger unexpectedly, sometimes only seconds after the last cutscene finished, which is a bit annoying. A few of them are over-long (I'm including the start and end cutscenes here).

Psychonauts is a good game, but not a great game. It tries to integrate story and gameplay in the easiest way possible, by writing in story excuses to make traditional gameplay elements make sense. That technique only works in a comic fantasy game like this one, in which you can just say 'things work this way because that's just how psychic stuff works'. It's not innovative; it's merely a very fine example of non-innovative game writing.