The endless collectibles, for example, feel like a crutch to support lacklustre platforming, only the platforming is fine. It's strange that, for such a visionary game, Psychonauts often feels like it lacks confidence in its ideas. It's as if Double Fine doesn't feel comfortable unless there's something for the player to pick up. Figments, PSI cards, arrowheads, emotional baggage, mental cobwebs. Incidentally, Psychonauts loves collectibles. This means you can walk into a level like the Milkman Conspiracy and not be able to complete it, forcing you to spend an hour collecting PSI-cards or rooting out arrowheads with a dowsing rod before you're able to proceed. The game doesn't tell you what powers you need at what stage, it just assumes that you'll have unlocked them by the time you need them. Some are unlocked when you reach a certain "rank", while others must be purchased with a currency known as arrowheads. Your abilities and equipment, for example, aren't simply picked up as you progress through the game. While it is frequently colourful and clever, structurally it can be oblique and frustrating, hiding important information and arbitrarily hindering player progress. Sometimes though, Psychonauts does exactly the opposite. It always has a new trick up its sleeve, some daft aside or high fallutin' concept designed specifically to put a smile on your face. Sixteen years on, the extent of Psychonauts' inventiveness remains astonishing. What follows is an elaborate object-finding puzzle as Raz tries to beat the agents in locating the mysterious Milkman.
Entering the brain of a paranoid asylum security guard, Raz finds himself in a twisted, gravity-defying American suburb prowled by incompetent secret agents who literally don't know one end of a rifle from the other. This is followed immediately by Psychonauts' most famous sequence, the Milkman Conspiracy. But after the battle, Raz then enters its brain, transporting him to a Bikini Bottom-like piscine metropolis, with Raz playing the role of a destructive Kaiju referred to as "Goggalor", smashing entire houses with his fists and climbing skyscrapers like King Kong. An encounter with a giant, stupendously ugly lungfish is set-up like a typical boss fight. Psychonauts also really runs with its ideas.
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