Don't make the huge mistake of thinking Psychonauts as a children's game. While it could definitely be enjoyed by the age-challenged, this is a game geared toward those with enough brains and experience to recognize the game's sheer genius. The game looks a bit strange, sounds damn weird, and does take place at a children's day camp, but Psychonauts is more a psychic warrior and spy training grounds than a recess.

The attitude of this game is one that takes no prisoners. It is chocked so full of wit and sarcasm it could easily be mistaken for an overly-long movie script from the late nineties. The characters are all very well developed and each have a life of their own. The depth of each camper and instructor is surprising; as players progress through the game they learn a great deal about everyone at the top-secret camp.

The visuals make this game. No, it's not Half-Life 2 or Doom 3, but it isn't supposed to be. Instead, Double Fine opted a more artistic route, making every frame of the game sparkle with a style all its own. Take Tim Burton, Edgar Allen Poe, and Jerry Brockheimer's most notable trademarks and blend them together to create one of the wackiest and most beautiful creations the world has ever known. Psychonauts' visuals stand in a league of their own.

The compelling story of a boy sneaking into a top-secret camp for psychically gifted children and the mayhem that follows is one that includes a bit of everyone. Anyone with fond or not-so-fond camp memories, anyone who wished they could float, disappear or set things on fire with their mind, and everyone whose plans have ever involved a lake monster will find it hard not to fall in love with this game. All perfectly voice-acted, these characters truly have heart, and being that you must enter almost everyone's mind at some point in the story, they each have whole new dimensions of depth as the story progresses.

While in the minds of others, you must obtain a major objective (stopping a memory leak, for example) but along the way you collect figments of imagination, gather key information in the form of repressed memories, and destroy censors of free thought. Even better, each mind is as unique as its owner. The instructor of logical thinking (and mind blast!) has a mind shaped like a cube, while the free-floating levitation instructor has a mind straight out of the disco era. With this crazed premise and a huge number of areas and characters to include, Psychonauts brings new dimensions to platform games the world over.

The controls are easy to master and continue to be quick and logical, even after new abilities and commands are added later in the game. Movement is simply directed and always responsive, though occasionally the camera makes tight walking tricky. The psychic abilities are controlled at the quick tap or slight depress of a key, and most can be used anywhere.

With the return to sheer fun, and the wacky excitement that comes with it, Double Fine and Majesco have something amazing on their hands. The art, the sounds, the acting and the control are all spot-on. With ingenious gameplay and a script that will have players falling out of their chairs, Psychonauts lacks only a good way to play with friends.