To people considering buying it, given so much praise here and in the article, I would like to just ask you to take note of the following quote:
> "Of course, there’s no accounting for taste. If you loathe cartoons, perhaps you might not like this game. If you prefer more serious plots or more rigorously cerebral puzzles, perhaps you won’t love it. [...] It remains at the end of the day a slapstick cartoon comedy"
Personally, this caveat did apply so much to me. I bought and played the game, all way to the end, trying to give it a chance, but in my case, I found it plain boring. If you like slapstick, that's probably your gold nugget indeed, based on the glowing reviews. Me, I don't; I need at least some substance (?). I loved Loom, I enjoyed The Monkey Island (esp. the 1st one in the series), as well as the Indiana Jones games. I found amusement in their lightheartedness and casual humour. I liked Grim Fandango too. But DoTT fits the same place in my mind with Psychonauts: I plainly don't get why so many people are so stoked about them. To me, they're both just super boring.
I think it's probably to do with the fact that many of us here played it when it was first out and were either kids or much younger than we were now. My memory of that game is amazing, but I highly doubt I'd pick it up off the shelf today as my tastes have changed.
After trying The Witness recently, I came to the realisation that I only really enjoy puzzle/adventure games when playing with friends. Probably because I was playing all these old games with friends standing around a PC when I grew up.
"But DoTT fits the same place in my mind with Psychonauts: I plainly don't get why so many people are so stoked about them."
I really, really like almost anything that involves manifesting the inside of the mind, as long as it's halfway decently done. (That is, it doesn't have to be excellent, just not terrible.)
But even as one who rather liked the game, I will say Psychonauts has a particularly horrible pacing problem where it takes too long to get to the first level, and the first level is (IMHO) the worst one in the game that most fails to take advantage of the premise, and then it takes too long to get to the second level, which is the second worst one in the game in terms of taking advantage of the premise. Also both those levels are themselves too long; I'm pretty sure they're padded out to try to make all the major levels similar in length, but "learn how to use the jumping controls" simply doesn't warrant the same amount of time as "resolve a paranoid schizophrenic's conspiracy issues". Things don't really start feeling unique until the third level, but it's a lot to swallow to get that far. I've tried to replay it a couple of times and bounced off of this; if I ever try again I'm going to try to go online and steal someone's save file just before the third level.
As much as I liked it, I've had a really hard time recommending it to anyone for this reason.
> "Of course, there’s no accounting for taste. If you loathe cartoons, perhaps you might not like this game. If you prefer more serious plots or more rigorously cerebral puzzles, perhaps you won’t love it. [...] It remains at the end of the day a slapstick cartoon comedy"
Personally, this caveat did apply so much to me. I bought and played the game, all way to the end, trying to give it a chance, but in my case, I found it plain boring. If you like slapstick, that's probably your gold nugget indeed, based on the glowing reviews. Me, I don't; I need at least some substance (?). I loved Loom, I enjoyed The Monkey Island (esp. the 1st one in the series), as well as the Indiana Jones games. I found amusement in their lightheartedness and casual humour. I liked Grim Fandango too. But DoTT fits the same place in my mind with Psychonauts: I plainly don't get why so many people are so stoked about them. To me, they're both just super boring.