To anyone who thought psychology was a strange subject, now computer games are replicating it. Psychonauts is Tim Schafer through and through - remember Grim Fandango, Full Throttle or Day of the Tentacle? Well, that excellence is back for a summer camp, literally.

The game takes place around a not-very-top-secret summer camp, the Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp to be precise, built on top of the world's largest deposit of PSItanium, which was part of an asteroid that hit earth. Settlers quickly took over the area, Native Americans calling it Shaky Claim, but when people started going crazy, a mental asylum was built. After most of the people went crazy, the government paid them to leave and flooded the impact crater, creating Lake Oblongata.

This is when the camp was founded by the legendary Ford Cruller, the once psychic master whose mind was fragmented after a legendary battle in which he just barely won. As you'll later find out from him, PSItanium makes psychics more psychic but makes unstable people more unstable, "giving this place an interesting history, hmm?"

The actual puzzle/quest levels take place in other people's minds on the astral plane, which must be noted it is not the whole New Age religion stuff but more like the Marvel Comics mental realm for psychics. It is impossible to die in the plane but when you do lose all of your mental health you drop one level of your projection strength; you average around five levels and can find boosters if you find yourself getting clobbered.

You play as Razputin or 'Raz', who has just run away from the circus to escape his psychic-hating father in an attempt to become a psychic special agent, known as a psychonaut. There's a curse on the family that every member will die in water, Raz's fear of which can physically manifest itself as a hand that grabs at him whenever he goes over neck deep in water. The little love interest of this story is Lili, who is more interested in botany than psychic abilities, until Raz arrives at least. This isn't some romantic entanglement tacked on for the female audience like in movies; it actually becomes an integral part of the plot. The comedic scenes between Lili and Raz are great; using telepathy as the motivator in a joke scene is hilarious and original. Then there's Dogen, who appears to be a mentally challenged child that can communicate with the animals - but he isn't the next Doctor Dolittle, as in the first five minutes of playing the game you can see him blowing up some squirrels. I do have to say, it would be a great film if he was the next Doctor Dolittle…

The teachers at the summer camp are possibly some of the strangest characters in the game, because they're actually supposed to be the normal ones. The first one you encounter is Coach Morceau "Morry" Oleander, the pint-sized drill sergeant who sees it as his job to turn you into war machines. And he's really short! His mind is the first one you get to rummage around in and it's a purposefully engineered battlefield designed to push you to the limit. It has a World War II feel to it, but I somehow doubt our boys on the front line were jumping on tarps to get up to the bunkers.

What has to be made mention of with the Coach is that it really pays to look at the less obvious details entrenched in the game. The words he uses, especially what you can hear him say after you get through his brain, which really foreshadows what happens in the rest of the story. There are lots of questions that his mind brings up, like why does he have rabbits on the battlefield. Also, you should inspect the flower you see Lili looking at, which could be one of the biggest plot hints in the game that anyone who can do dot-to-dot should be able to figure out.

The next mind you get to explore is Sasha Nein, the world famous super agent. He extensively studies the human psyche through science and his mind is so completely ordered that it is a cube. With Sasha you get your first psychic ability, the PSI blast, where you concentrate all your anger into a physical blast of energy. His mind is a training ground for this power, until it gets screwed up. The mind produces sensors to find information that shouldn't be there and erase it, which it just so happens you are. These aren't really much of a problem, until the ground starts rumbling and Sasha says one of his funniest lines in his stern, casual voice "Run, Razputin, very fast." This is when the ground opens up and the biggest sensor ever emerges, taking up a side of Sasha's brain and forcing you to run around the cube in an attempt to escape.

Your next teacher is Milla Vodello, international secret agent, levitation master and party girl. Her mind is a levitation roller disco and is always happy as long as everything keeps bouncing to the beat. Her mind is possibly the only one you go in where something isn't messed up or gets messed up, except she's obsessed with herself being on TV. Then again, who today doesn't think they should be on it? This is also the place where you will hear the most upbeat music. With Milla you get to learn levitation, possibly one of the most enjoyable skills in the game but sadly one of the least utilised. You can mentally project your thoughts, which when double jumping gives you something to jump against, but with levitation you can maintain the projection to stand on it and use it like a super charged skateboard. Not only that, but it also works to slow your character's fall and help you get around using air fans. Sadly this skill doesn't come into play until much later in the game, the last level in fact, so why it's introduced so early really beats me.

The one mind in the camp that you don't get to explore is that of Ford Crullers, but then it brings up the question of which mind, because it won't take long for you to start thinking he's a psychic schizophrenic, as he's the Janitor, Ranger, Chef, Shopkeeper and the camp's very own Admiral - an apparent step down from him being the leader of the Psychonauts. With all that said, there's more to him than meets the eye, as he plays one of the biggest parts in the game and is one of the funniest characters too…

Once trained up with the skills of a Psychonaut, everything goes awry - really awry, as Dogen loses his brain and people start going missing. This is when you have to investigate the mysterious goings on and you being to explore the weird and wonderful world of people's brains. You get to run around in a security guard's brain, whose mind is twisted and contorted. This is your first adventure in a non-psychics mind - Boyd the security guard who is so extremely paranoid that everything in his head revolves around him - literally! Everything physically revolves around his house; the streets are twisted and contorted, making amazing use of the unique gravity system in the game, where the gravity is relative to the surface you're standing on. If you jump across a gap straight at a vertical gap of road, you reorient yourself to its gravity.

The landscape in Boyd's mind is like M.C. Escher under florescent lights. Everything is bright and in your face, while moving about the place through all the different orientations gets your mind thinking something weird is going on because of the perspective changes. Now if the landscape wasn't weird enough, the people in it are worse, as there are secret government agents everywhere. They hide in trashcans and have hidden cameras in everything from plastic flamingos to mail boxes, or they take up one of their many disguises. They stand in the middle of the road with leather coats, Stetson hats and shades, with only a single prop to disguise them; a traffic sign for road crew workers, a rolling pin for a housewife and a telephone handset for the line engineers!

To unravel the mysterious goings on, you not only have to get through Boyd's mind, but you go through a fish's too, as Goggalor, where you play as a Godzilla size creature and this is possibly the best one left with little description, as the more I tell you, the more questions need to be answered that will spoil the story! The mystery from this leads you on a chase in the real world, as well as in various minds.

Some of the other minds you get a chance to venture into include that of ex-actress Gloria Van Glouten, who is a sufferer of bipolar disorder and she has a tendency to switch between moods suddenly, reflected in her mind by an endless theatre of self-sabotage, and Fred Bonaparte, who kept losing at the board game Waterloo so much that the genetic memory of Napoleon took over his mind, meaning that he has Dissociative Identity Disorder. When you venture into his mind, you can see Fred playing the game against Napoleon!

By this time you have accumulated a number of psychic skills, such as the PSI blast you learnt with Sasha, where you fire a bolt of anger. You pick clairvoyance up in the security guard's mind, as you untangle his psychoses into proper mental thinking, plus you also get extra psychic skills as you level up and get trained in using them by Ford.

By this time you have accumulated a number of psychic skills, from the PSI blast you learnt with Sasha through to clairvoyance, which you pick up in Boyd's mind, as you untangle his psychoses into proper mental thinking, allowing you to see through other perspectives by the usage of an attached object. For example; it is possible to equip a crow's feather to see through the eyes of local crows. You also get extra psychic skills as you level up and get trained in using them by Ford. These cover the usual psychic abilities like pyrokinesis, the ability to set objects alight with your thoughts, and telekinesis, the ability to move objects with your mind. Invisibility is a great skill for use in combat, as all enemies lose sight of you, so you can unleash a sneak attack.

There are only so many abilities in the game, but once you've managed to amass them all, you can continue levelling up to enhance them. The higher levels you get, the stronger abilities become; your invisibility lasts longer, your PSI blasts fire more bolts of anger and you can levitate faster while managing to avoid the incredibly annoying ball pops, which more often than not send you hurtling off the edge of a cliff.

Puzzles in the game don't feature heavily in the usual sense; you won't find yourself pushing around blocks or pressing button combinations. The puzzles are inside someone's head and built into the game, so they are always unique; in Boyd, the puzzle is finding the items needed to disguise yourself, in Fred the puzzles are finding items needed to get soldiers out of their houses to fight, like finding a weapon, building a bridge or finding food. You simply never find it repetitive doing puzzles, as they all require a varying amount of platforming but usually feature heavily as their own puzzles in people's minds like the Coach and Milla's levitation challenge.

Platform action outside is restricted to finding items, which is fun to do, as you can find yourself climbing trees, speaker towers and walking cables between buildings to get to cards. Ultimately the hardest place to get to is the locations of PSI markers, which take time to find and having clairvoyance can help in some of these situations, but it's still fun to do. Once it hits nighttime though, this gets problematic because there are pyrokinetic wolves (I think they're wolves, they look like wolves, but they're psychic!) everywhere, rather than just the occasional telekinetic bear! The platform action can be fiendish at times, such as one of the circus levels, where you have to use all of your skills and a lot of luck too; platform gaming becomes a lot trickier when you have to jump through fiery hoops and land on tight ropes, while dodging flaming projectiles.

Combat is easy, mostly throwing PSI blasts about or telekinetic punching, which is a power you have at the start and is simple to use. The game is more about out-thinking your opponent than out-fighting him; you can go invisible and take him out with a surprise punch or, you can set him on fire, but this has the problem that he can also set you on fire if he touches you, so this is one of the worst moves if you're taking hits from the big sensors.

The majority of levels you can find are gained by playing the game and collecting figments of people's imaginations, but if you want the strongest powers you have to go exploring. You can get a four level upgrade by completing a scavenger hunt for one of Ford's many personalities and the camp is littered with PSI cards and markers that can level you up, but once you've made it halfway into the game, searching for these becomes a next to impossible task, as it's nighttime and also by this time it'll feel like a chore.

The sound is great and the music is even better. In Milla's mind it is lively Seventies style dance music that reflects her, in the security guard's mind it sounds like something from the X-Files. Of course, in Coach Oleander's mind it's war music and in your own mind it is perverted circus big top music, as you only ever visit it in your nightmares. The voiceovers are great, with Raz being done by Richard Steven Horvitz best known for portraying Zim (in the show Invader Zim).

The graphics are fantastic and use a similar stylised look to PC classic Grim Fandango. Raz is the mysterious character and physically appears that way, as most of the time only his face is visible from under all the clothing he wears. Bobby Zlich, the camp bully, has a gigantic head, or he appears to - but that's all hair; he actually has a rather small head with his hair being the symbolic protrusion of his narcissistic ego. Everyone in the camp is physically designed to represent their personality and each character really looks the part. The full motion videos in the game are great; there isn't a sudden jump between the graphics in-game and the videos, but there is a visible difference that allows you to just sit back and watch what is going on in the video. You will quickly realise that this is a good thing, as the video scenes will have you in stitches; they're well written, like all the in-game dialogue, but more importantly well choreographed for the actions (which makes them funnier!)

Psychonauts is a fantastic and original trek through the human psyche where you dance, fight Napoleon to give him another waterloo, or even battle through the psyche of a fish! The uniquely quirky presentation, brilliantly conceived storyline, excellent cut scenes and tremendously varied gameplay all combine for a totally refreshing and fun game experience. If there's one thing wrong with Psychonauts, it's that it's nowhere near as long as Schafer's Grim Fandango. However, the depths visited within the game leaves great hope for an amazing sequel.

Reviewed by Nik Gregory for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).