E-Mail This Article to a Friend An instant (cult) classic Tim Schafer's latest is Naut your average platformer BY CHRIS DAHLEN
	Psychonauts Published by Majesco Games. Developed by Double Fine Productions. For XBox and PC (PlayStation 2 release date TBA). Rated T for Teen

Technology comes and goes, but great content lives forever. Just look at the last game by Tim Schafer: when we last heard from Schafer, he designed LucasArts’ classic Grim Fandango, which came out in 1998 and has not aged a day. Schafer matched the game’s rich story and weird yet engrossing premise – an Aztec land of the dead, by way of Sam Spade noir – with gameplay that worked seamlessly with the story, and it remains firmly in the canon of all-time great adventure games.

Now Schafer’s finally back, and the fans who’ve been waiting for his new game will find that he hasn’t bent on his principles: though it’s a well-designed, fast-paced platformer, Psychonauts puts content above action. All of the love and sweat that went into this game ended up in the story, art, and music, rather than the fine-tuning of another first-person shooter or racing game. Born to be a cult classic, it spent over four years in development, bounced from one publisher to another, and launched in the shadow of Jade Empire and Doom 3. But now that it’s here, it lives up to almost all the buzz as an entertaining and bizarre experience.

Psychonauts opens in a summer camp that crosses Meatballs-nostalgia and Beetlejuice-era Tim Burton wackiness. It’s a homey setting, right down to the outhouses, but this is also the training ground of the Psychonauts – super-secret psychic agents who fight crimes inside people’s heads. The game is split between the real world and several unique environments that exist solely in the mind. While you’ll recognize it as a basic platformer – run here, catch this trapeze, pick up that bonus point – everything’s dressed in concepts from Psychology 101. You get points for picking up figments of the imagination; you can sort people’s "emotional baggage" by matching tags to luggage; and all of your psychic powers, slowly accumulated as you advance through the game, come from the classics, like telekinesis, levitation, clairvoyance, and plain old brain blasts.

Each of the elaborately designed levels works as both a pop culture homage and a neurosis: just as you’ll face paranoia, delusion, multiple personality disorder, and (in the hyper-psychedelic party level) hallucinogenics, you’ll also wind up in a Warner Brothers-style Rube Goldberg device, a monster movie, the French countryside, and even – in its sharpest moment of satire - a tribute to the Kennedy assassination. Where many platformers slam you with constant action, Psychonauts actually urges you to linger. You’ll find yourself canvassing the game again and again to uncover new details, or to eavesdrop on new conversations between your campmates – like the cheerleaders with suicidal tendencies, the bully who looks like a stick of blue broccoli, or egg-shaped, slow-witted Dogen, who wears a tin foil hat to keep him from blowing up the world. And the optional scavenger hunt encourages you to explore every nook and cranny of the camp, where you’ll come across odd things in the woods that were put there solely because someone just gave enough of a damn to invent them.

The premise actually has some ragged edges. It’s not totally clear from the start what a Psychonaut is or what enemy he fights; with a premise this strange, you’d expect the details to be airtight. And even though the levels look and feel dramatically different, the gameplay doesn’t – after a while, picking up bonus points becomes as routine as any "grab that, collect this" activity, and your superpowers turn out to be more problem-specific and less versatile than you might want. The boss fights actually feel clumsy and limited – most bosses have one weak spot that you just need to find and exploit - although figuring out that weakness while you’re getting pummeled makes for fun real-time puzzle solving.

But in spite of a few flaws, Schafer and his team stuck to their guns where it counted: this is a game that they want you to replay and remember, rather than just beat and discard. Psychonauts will stick with you for its script, the "entertain the youngsters and reward the adults" humor, and the richly-realized world that it creates; it may be too weird or slow for some console gamers, but how often does a muscle-bound technology like the XBox get a genuine cult classic?

Score: 8.5 (out of 10)