Slow Rewrites & Comedy Videogames

The rewrite on the novel has yet to take place in any meaningful way, except for the occasional boot up and random check on a page to fix a typo here and there. Mostly I’m just sitting on it while a bunch of people (Mostly in Canada) go through and start the painful process of telling me, “This character is dead weight, jettison him” or “Do you really need this chapter?” Once those critiques start coming in and I’m finished crying in the corner sucking my thumb and wondering why I ever thought I was writer, I’ll get back to it in a big way and then do the line edit.

However I finished Haunting Ground, which was a short, creepy burst of Capcom stalk-the-nubile-blonde fun, and jumped into Psychonauts.

This is one of the funniest games I’ve played in years.

The plot centers around a psychic summer camp for kids who are being trained to be the eponymous Psychonauts, a force of psychics that travel into people’s heads to combat their neuroses, psychoses and other mental problems. Into this camp stumbles Raz, a kid who desperately wants to be a Psychonaut, and only has a day and night to prove it before his parents come to pick him up since he ran away from the circus to join the psychics.

It is brilliant.

The writing is smart and incredibly funny. The levels consist of jumping into different people’s heads with hilarious and truly inspired art design. For example, one of the minds you explore is a mad, tortured artist who more or less lost it when his wife was seduced by a famous bull fighter. Since then the only thing he can paint is matadors. When you jump into his head, everything is black velvet with bright neon colors, and you run into elements of his psyche that are trapped by the bull, most of them are dogs that yearn for the days when they could sit at a table and play poker, but that was before the bull came.

Another mind is that of a conspiracy nut. His mental environment looks like a topsy, turvy suburban neighborhood where everything from the mail boxes to pink flamingos on lawns snaps a picture of you when you turn away from it, and all the road workers, telephone line repairmen and sewer workers are guys in trench coats that blend in by saying things like “I am a sewer worker. Despite the fact that I am often covered in excrement, it is a necessary job and I deserve your respect.” Or the “house wife” with a rolling pin that says “Even though I am not paid for it, I consider home making my occupation.” They say these things in flat dead pan.

The game itself has some problems, most notably the traditional problematic camera that so many 3D platformer games suffer from (Man, you’d think after nearly 10 years of 3D games, they’d have this licked…) but the actual game design, the writing, the humor and art work are all clearly so wickedly inspired with genuine enthusiasm that it’s hard not to love this game. It is FUN. It is out for all major platforms. If you’re looking for a game that’ll make you actually laugh out loud, this is IT.