Even More Psychonauts Screens 30 Sep, 2002, 06:45 / 19 comments
Hot on the heels of the last batch of shots, we've got seven new pictures from the upcoming Psychonauts. As usual, for those of you who don't know, Psychonauts is the new game from Tim Schafer (creator of Full Throttle and Grim Fandango) and gang at their new game studio, Double Fine Productions. Read our preview of Psychonauts here.
These shots are primarily from an excellent story about Psychonauts and life at Double Fine that ran in a recent issue of XBox Nation magazine, now reprinted here digitally. If you get the chance you should definitely pick up the current XBN, as their article reads like a good version of our Double Fine story.
Anyway, click and enjoy. (Unless you're trying to stay spoiler-free, of course. If so, don't click, and start squinting now so you can't see the thumbnails.) These are some nice ones.
And, if you think back to "classic" platformers like Mario 3, they're pretty linear in design. I think Psychonauts is at least attempting to draw from more than the Mario 64 school of design on the levels.
But who knows. I can't deny that seeing Raz always walking along one solitary path in the majority of the screenshots puzzles me a bit.
However, once you start mixing in adventure elements the pace will inevitably slow down and you'll end up with what's essentially a series of adventure "one screen puzzles" ? la the Snake Scene in CMI. Can you imagine a game made up entirely of stop-start situations? The whole lateral-thinking connection-of-different areas of an adventure game is essentially lost, and if you get stuck in one spot you can't go anywhere else and take another approach. I, at least, would quickly get bored and reach for the Walkthrough.
As far as I'm concerned, that's valid for both adventure games and post-Mario 64 platformers.
I didn't get the impression that it was linear from what I saw at E3. Plus, there seem to be a variety of ways to solve puzzles. For example, if you come to a pit that has a bunch of thorny bushes at the bottom, you can either use your "thought bubble" to float to the other side... OR you can pick up something like a stick, set it on fire, drop it in the pit, and burn all the thorny bushes so they won't hurt you. Pretty neat, if you ask me.
But that's not to say that a linear game is always a horrible thing. Personally, I dig a linear game every now and then. Massive non-linear games tend to intimidate and/or bore me.