Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t quite know what to say, yet.
I’ve come to Tim Schafer’s premier platformer, Psychonauts, with nothing but the best intentions and expectations. I know of his reputation as an adventure game designer from the LucasArts days, and I know the old adage of not judging a book by its cover. Heck, as a writer myself I tend to take it as far as you shouldn’t judge a book by the first few pages you’re likely to leaf through in Barnes & Noble, since that alone isn’t going to show you everything a piece of literature has to offer. In our Cable TV world it’s very easy to decide whether or not to watch all of a film based on the strength of its first few minutes, but nobody decides to purchase a movie ticket or DVD on that same criteria (not that you’d be able to, anyway, except if you were renting or merely ducking into a theater to play peekaboo with the projector). Therefore, I realize that I cannot render an immediate judgment of this game until I’ve sat with it for at least another hour or two more, but after this first triplet of quarter-hours, all I can say with definitiveness is this:
I didn’t have fun.
