About halfway through Psychonauts, you're faced with this dilemma: How to kill the giant lungfish with the vacuum breath? Some trial and error determines that smashing open boxes of tacks while it inhales does the trick. Still not dead? Try closing an open clamshell on its lip and pounding away for a stretch. More signs of life? Slap a psycho-portal onto its cranium, climb inside, and enter the world of Lungfishopolis, a sprawling cityscape in which you're swatting down planes and stepping on tanks like King Kong. Such surreal encounters are commonplace in this wildly inventive game, which bounces from one brain to the next in a grand psychic quest, each percolating with its own bizarre obsessions, such as the disturbed whisperings of a conspiracy theorist or a party queen's floating discotheque. The cheerfully bright, crooked spaces look a little like Pee-wee's Playhouse on powerful hallucinogens, and Psychonauts keeps upping the dosage as it goes along.
A wittier take on Nickelodeon-style genre standards like the Jak And Daxter and Ratchet & Clank series, Psychonauts takes place at the Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp, a recruitment facility where special kids hone their psychic abilities. You play star student "Raz," (short for Razputin) a spirited cadet called into action when an evildoer steals the brains of all your classmates and teachers, save for a wizened old-timer who appears whenever you lure him with a piece of bacon. Using an accumulation of special mental powers—including telekinesis, clairvoyance, and levitation, among others—you try to find and rescue the stolen brains and liberate minds clogged by emotional baggage, cobwebs, and numerous extrasensory bugaboos. Beautifully paced in their train-as-you-go chronology, the missions get progressively harder until the big showdown at an asylum, where all your mental faculties are tested inside the heads of madmen.