Psychonauts

When it comes to quality platform games, the PC is often sorely neglected. The Playstation has its Ratchets and Clanks, Nintendo has its Marios and Luigis, but there are few colourful coin collecting characters outside of the console format.

This is one of the reasons why Psychonauts comes as such a breath of fresh air.

The other reason is that the development of Psychonauts was overseen by one of PC gaming's legends, Tim Schaffer.

And since Schaffer was one of the creative forces behind some of the most original adventure titles ever to grace the desktop - namely The Day of the Tentacle and Grim Fandango - it's no wonder that Psychonauts is a little, well, different.

The action kicks off when our diminutive hero, Razputin, gatecrashes a summer camp for psychic kids and joins the rag-tag bunch of 'gifted' children in a bid to hone his own extrasensory abilities.

The early stages offer a lot of freedom, leaving you to wander about, talk to people and explore. There's also a fairly extended set of introductory tasks intended to acclimatise you to the gameplay.

But soon a fiendish plot is revealed at which point it suddenly becomes Raz's responsibility to save the day.

This he does by entering a series of characters' minds and traversing their perilous subconscious planes in order to find out exactly who is behind the mystery and defeat them.

When you break it down, the task of journeying through different characters' mental landscapes is really only a device for creating a series of different platforming levels.

But it's a very imaginative device nonetheless and makes for some weird and wonderful environments.

A military-obsessed character's psyche is decked out with guns and ammo, for example, while a hippy chick's mind is like a rainbow-coloured psychedelic trip.

Not only is every world you visit very different from the last visually, but each environment also provides a totally unique experience with its own tasks, puzzles and challenges.

Naturally, there's a lot of the sort of jumping around and bashing things that you'd normally associate with a platform game, but Psychonauts even manages to inject these humdrum elements with new life.

Being a platform game, Psychonauts provides a series of boss levels that need to be beaten before you can proceed.

Ultimately, it's these sections that are the game's only real weakness, feeling as they do mechanical and perfunctory in comparison with the rest of the action.

Graphically, Psychonauts looks amazing. Its bold cartoon style doesn't mean that the developers have cut any corners in terms of textures and shading and, with a powerful graphics card, it's hard to tell the pre-rendered video cut scenes from the in-game animation. Sound effects and music are both strong too.

It's all backed up by some excellent voice acting and - something you don't often come across in a video game - a cracking script.

Psychonauts can be played using a keyboard and mouse, but we thoroughly recommend getting hold of a gamepad if you haven't already got one and button-mashing your way through as the game's creators intended.

Psychonauts isn't very long, isn't particularly challenging and won't appeal to anybody who has already decided that platform gaming isn't for them.

It also comes from a genre that wouldn't normally appeal to many adult gamers. Nevertheless, this is a game full of the kind of wit, originality and detail that's regrettably lacking in many of today's titles. And, as such, we heartily recommend it to your inner (psychic) child.

System requirements:
1GHz processor
256MB of Ram
3.75GB hard disk
64MB Geforce 3 or Radeon 8500
Windows 98SE/2000/XP