Psychonauts

A suburban street bends upward and keeps bending, until the houses on the far side of the road are hanging over your head like a ceiling, and the men in dark suits crouch behind traffic cones insisting they are gardeners. That is the inside of Boyd Cooper's skull, and it is the clearest single argument for what Double Fine were doing in 2005: build the level out of the character's neurosis and let the geometry do the characterisation.

The frame is a summer camp for psychic children, and Raz, a runaway from a circus family, works his way through it by entering the minds of the staff and campers. Each mind is a self-contained world with its own visual logic. A former lounge singer's brain is a perpetual dance party with one door she would rather you did not open. An old soldier relives a board-game version of Napoleonic Europe, complete with felt playing pieces. A painter's mind is a Mexican wrestling luchador-poster nightmare. The collectables are folded into the same conceit, so you sweep up figments of imagination, tear down mental cobwebs, and drag out pieces of emotional baggage that sob until reunited with their tags.

As a platformer it is competent rather than remarkable. Raz gets a floating levitation ball, telekinesis, pyrokinesis and a confusion power, and the traversal is serviceable third-person work of its generation, with a camera that occasionally argues. Where it stands apart is the writing. Tim Schafer's dialogue is genuinely funny in a way that games of the period usually were not, and the jokes are built on character rather than on references. The final stretch, the Meat Circus, remains a difficulty spike that a lot of players never got past, and it soured an otherwise generous game right at the moment it should have paid off.

The PS2 conversion is the compromised one. Load times run long, the frame rate sags when the screen gets busy, and the texture work is a step down from the Xbox build. None of that is fatal, but anyone who has played the game elsewhere will feel the machine straining under levels that were clearly designed with more headroom in mind.

It sold poorly, became a cult object, and eventually earned a sequel a decade and a half later on the strength of reputation alone. What holds up is not the jumping. It is the idea that a level can be a diagnosis.