Best of the Decade: Psychonauts
Tue, January 11, 2011 at 11:46 PM 
Psychonauts
Platforms: Xbox, Xbox 360, Playstation 2, Windows
Release Date: April 19, 2005 (Xbox version)
Publisher: Majesco Entertainment
Developer: Double Fine Productions
I’m still plagued with Gamer Guilt because of this game. I’ve supported many an underdog of a title in my time. I’m proud of my early purchase of Beyond Good & Evil, even before the price entered its deadly spiral downward after only a few weeks on shelves. I’m proud to have purchased Amplitude, giving me a small part in supporting the brilliant minds at Harmonix that eventually gave us Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
Psychonauts, sadly, is the one that slipped away.
I rented Psychonauts, though at this point I can only vaguely remember when. I seem to recall it avoiding my radar for some months when finally I tried it on a whim. I devoured it during that rental period and fell in love, but I never properly gave my money to the game. To this day, the only copy I have is a beaten up used Xbox disc I’m lucky to have even found. I know my single purchase wouldn’t have made a difference, especially months after it had been released, but I can’t help it. I feel bad because this masterpiece deserved better, from both myself and the rest of the gaming community. Becoming a cult classic is small comfort when your game is a retail failure.
The nature of gaming doesn’t mesh well with comedy. The two forces seem to be diametrically opposed. On the one hand you have humor, which relies on precise, guided timing. On the other hand you have gaming, which is controlled by the player and in which anything could happen at any time according to the whims of the human holding the controller. Perhaps you can see the fundamental problem. Outside of stuffing funny dialog into cutscenes here and there, which are conveniently outside the player’s control, few games even attempt to be humorous. It’s exceedingly difficult and results in failure more often than success.
Take the recent game DeathSpank, for example. It tries to parody the hack-and-slash adventure game while relying on the tired tropes it’s lampooning in its dialog. Listening to the chatter between missions is funny, but mashing the attack button thousands of times and completing monotonous fetch quests is not. In other words, like many games that have attempted humor, DeathSpank wraps a layer of lighthearted icing around a fundamentally mediocre action game cake.
There are a select few games that get the combo right. These elite few manage to work the gameplay and the environment into the humor. Conker’s Bad Fur Day is one, taking players through a hilarious romp around a cartoony platformer world gone horribly wrong. Portal is another, with GLaDOS’ snarky dialog making you laugh even as you incinerate your dear friend the Companion Cube. Psychonauts belongs in the pantheon of titles that manage to get it right.