Psychonauts Review

To name the few

• Inability to progress without an optional item in game.
  
  
• Hard lock of your in game progress if you do not do optional activities.
  
  
• Terrible camera both for not showing what you want to see and always being tilted downwards.
  
  
• Imprecise platforming which either locks you up or fails to grasp what you want. Sometimes you can even glitch into items forcing you to restart game from last save.
  
  
• Imprecise save system which only sometimes correctly saves your position, most of the times it doesn’t.
  
  
• Emotional luggage is poorly done. It is too frequent in some parts. It ruins in-game cinematic scenes as their audio is polluted with their crying.
  
  
• Some scenes in general are unfinished. Models being completely dark, lacking lighting.
  
  
• Some models are walking into objects, being stuck, etc.
  
  
• Screaming little children which you need to save on a timer without an obvious route, precise platforming and enemies which try to mess you up. Game becomes just frustrating at some parts as its mechanics cannot support difficult gameplay sections.

It is kinda primitive. You have a lot of abilities, but they are treated as puzzle items to solve particular environmental puzzle. There isn’t any more than one solution and strictly one solution. Developers seemingly even went out of their way to prevent players solving problems in their own way. For example, levitation. You could theoretically make complex jumps and push this ability to the limit and get where you need to be. You could, however you wont. Physical objects either fail to function as a proper jump off point or they are not even there. Other puzzles like taking brain from crows does not work with anything else, but invisibility. Do you want to sneak on them from top and smash it with aerial attack? Impossible. Do you want to use telekinesis to smash jar open with another item? Impossible. You get a jist. Game has only one solution to a puzzle and ironically enough, from a studio which has so much creativity, it certainly does not allow any creativity to exist from a player in game.

There are some problematic levels. Like with Milkman conspiracy. You need to get flowers, but gate does not open. You go back, they were opened and you just wasted half an hour not knowing what to do. In game hints sometimes even misleads you. It said that I should rush through a sniper and use my shield to block a shot. I did that and was arrested. I thought that I have to run through a zone. I had timed my run perfectly to escape pursuers and to block shot with second timing and then have enough time to jump away. However, game hard fails you the moment you are too far in the zone and block a shot… Or in another case where you figured out how to go behind the bush and burn it and sneak in for a final item. Nope. Game instantly fails you. Game lacks any sort of creative problem solving gameplay on its own and sometimes game becomes frustrating due to that.


Some jokes do fall flat like swapping voice actor for an actress. Kinda ‘lol so random’ kinda of joke which serves very little purpose. Plot also doesn’t make sense sometimes like with The Phantom. The critic was observing a show while at the same time sabotaging it. Motivations of a villain doesn’t make sense neither. Most of camp events can be easily missed and game does not allow you to explore camp before without a warning locking it up in a night time. Most of the abilities you need to reach optional places are also locked up. Exploration is kinda meaningless.


They are just atrocious and game loses all its charm in those levels. It is like a really tedious boss fight which lasts for several hours. Each boss has a gimmick which is not explained, you can spend half an hour struggling to get past a stage, because no one told you the gimmick. Game does a terrible job at explaining itself even when the combat is nearly useless in this game. Each boss requires a gimmick to beat.

Story is horrible, events are being put one after another without introduction and being asked to do stuff. After beating final boss, you get to enter into its mind, because why not. Then you beat boss childhood trauma only for boss to say “whatever” and throw you out. In a scene which is unrefined and your model being in two places at once.

That boss also is dead easy when you know how to exploit it and it is extremely tedious. It rarely gets his arm stuck in the ground. When it does you have a brief window of opportunity to run up his arm and smack him in a head. However, you can fall off easily and window to do so is very short. To put insult to injury, you can’t hit his head if he enters into animation. It is just one big frustrating and tedious boss fight. Then follows acrobatics. I was cursing out loud and howling in frustration at how bad that part is. Unskippable, long cinematic every time you fail. Precise platforming in a game where does not exist precision. You can’t see half of the time where you want to jump. Another half of the time camera gets inverted and you have to awkwardly try to navigate yourself with very little field of vision. At the end game so bad that I’m even considering reverting recommended status to – not recommended.


While this game is undoubtedly fun, it does suffer from countless little things which take away from an experience. The less said about the final levels the better. They could single handedly make this game not worth recommending. A properly made remake could improve tremendously on a concept. As it stands on its own, it is fun experience. A lot of good jokes. A lot of interesting levels, some better, some worse. However, at the end it is a game which everybody should play in order to know how good games look like.