Psychonauts review

Thanks to his circus background, Raz is quite the jumping, swinging, climbing, shimmying and tightrope-walking acrobat. But his real firepower comes from his mental abilities. While you begin the game with only a basic attack (a mentally projected, giant-translucent-handed bitch slap), you quickly unlock meatier skills such as pyrokinesis, invisibility, levitation, mental blast, and more. Some enemies can only be harmed by certain combinations of powers, and several puzzles and boss battles actually require the player to use their own brains to proceed.

This brings us back to those awesome level designs. It's not just that the settings are unique; it's the depth to which they've been incorporated into the story and the action. You see, each character has a Freudian hang-up that you must help them conquer in order to complete the level. It's mental therapy through platforming.

Here's an example: one mission takes place in the mind of a black-velvet painter suffering from artists' block because his true love has been stolen by a cocky matador. The level is literally a black velvet painting of an entire Spanish town. Every street, every building, and even the sky glows like neon paint under an ultraviolet light, as does the huge, pink bull that rampages through the narrow streets. It's beautiful and surreal on the surface, and it plays masterfully, but there's more to it. Eventually, after buying paintings from various talking dogs, fighting off four different masked wrestlers, and helping the painter complete a giant card house in his mind, you'll piece together the identity of the bull, and the deeper, hidden meaning to everything in the level.