Psychonauts

After playing Tim Schafer's critically acclaimed psychic powers-infused platformer Psychonauts, I looked up a few reviews to see what other people thought, and one specifically stuck out- http://zpxlng.livejournal.com/57438.html (ignore the livejournal link, it's got scans of a magazine article) This guy, Patrick Alexander, calls the game the "greatest of all time." Do I agree with him? No. But can I understand his reasoning? Certainly. Pat concedes that the game is flawed in many ways, but he claims that these failures are only due to the game trying so many things that had never even been thought up before, let alone attempted in the world of video games. And in a way, I agree. Allow me to explain. Psychonauts tells the story of Razputin, a ten year old who runs away from the circus to Camp Whispering Rock, a place for young psychics to get together and learn to hone their powers with the possibility of one day become a psychonaut (a sort of psychic secret agent). Raz is deadset on becoming a psychonaut, but before he can complete his training, Campers and counselors start disappearing, showing up days later with their brains removed. In order to save the day, Raz has to enter into different people's minds and help them fight off their demons to get what he wants. It's in these mind-levels that those brand new game ideas show up. One of the first levels has you play on a giant cube, and one strategy I use to climb up walls on one side involved launching myself off another, playing with gravity to get where I wanted. Sound familiar? It felt like Super Mario Galaxy except done two and a half years earlier. Another level has you unraveling the mysterious "milkman conspiracy," putting on poor disguises and tricking other poorly-disguised secret agents into letting you roam around a topsy-turvy suburban neighborhood. Perhaps the most memorable level of all features Raz helping Fred, an orderly at a mental institution, play a board game against Napoleon Bonaparte himself. Raz is given the ability to change his size- Large Raz can talk strategy with Fred, Medium Raz can use telekinesis to move pieces around the game board, and small Raz can talk to the game pieces and motivate them to fight for Fred. There's plenty of other levels that introduce completely new game mechanics, and I'm sure some more I missed in my playthrough. So sure, the graphics might be a little off, and the game glitched on me a few times (probably because downloaded it off of XBLA), but Psychonauts deserves tons of credit for trying boatloads of new things, and in my opinion pulling them off pretty well.