Game Writers SIG/Initiatives/Game Reviews/Psychonauts

International Game Developers Association

[edit] Psychonauts

I haven't played this game, this is just here as a place holder to get someone else writing.

Ha! I'll bite. I loved the writing in this game. Tim Schafer (who was largely responsible for it) has an amazing facility with wit, irony, and satire that has me laughing out loud even on the third time I have heard sections of game - wonderful voice acting too. I highly recommend this as an example of how great writing can inform and pervade the entire design. The logic of the premise - a sort of summer camp/training area for psychically gifted kids - is attacked like Beethoven attacks a musical sequence, playing with every variation and twisting and combining themes. Much of the game takes place inside the imaginations of various people - and creatures. You get homages to Picasso, the 60's, Godzilla movies (where you get to play Godzilla), WW2 cliches, on and on. One great example is the motivation of the main character - you find out in opening cut scenes that his parents are circus performers, but it's not until fairly well into the opening that I realized our hero has essentially run away from the circus to go to summer camp. Lots of great inversions like that. Another brilliant level involves entering the mind of paranoid schizophrenic, with hysterically funny results. And there's the climax - I won't give away the details, but our hero's traumas as a kid growing up in the circus are combined with the traumas of a character whose father was a butcher, and the level becomes a circus - that's made of meat. Funny and horrifying at the same time. The game also features one of my favorite character names of all times, a turtle named "Mr. Pokeylope".

Disclaimer - I worked some with Tim at LucasArts, and even helped a bit to hire him (best resume ever) - but I stand in awe of the abilities he has refined since those early days.

- Noah Falstein