R.S. Hunter's Blog, page 6

Some Minor Reorganizing

Hey everyone. This is a quick blog to highlight some of the changes I’ve made to my website. Nothing major really, just some minor reorganizing.

Fiction & Non-Fiction

I’ve split up my writing into Fiction and Non-Fiction categories. The Fiction section has links and info to all my novels, collections, and published short stories. If you’re interested in steampunk, fantasy, science fiction, or even a little bit of horror, go on and check them out.

The Non-Fiction section has a list of all my videogame reviews, feature articles, and editorials. Many of them are on Gamer Limit or the community section of Destructoid. I also have a couple of features that were published at places like Gameranx and other places.

Projects

A simple list of my current WIPs. Check back here frequently for word count updates. More substantial progress reports will be posted to the blog.

The World of Tethys

I think I’ve written about this before, but this section of my site has concept art, maps, and sketches associated with the Tethys Chronicles and the first novel in the series, The Exile’s Violin. Some of the sketches even predate the book’s first rough draft!

That’s all the updates for now! Hopefully in the coming weeks I’ll have more info to share with you all about Terraviathan, the second book in the Tethys Chronicles.

The Free Book Experiment

Statistics! Everyone loves statistics! Or maybe it’s just the RPG and baseball fan in me. Let’s move on to the actual numbers.

Back on May 10th, I chose 3 free promo days for my novel with my publisher. I decided I wanted to make The Exile’s Violin free starting on the 20th because it was my birthday. Knowing that I couldn’t just make the book free and expect the downloads to pour in, I scoured the web and read several great posts that talked about how to capitalize your Kindle free days. Many of these posts also had lists of places for authors to promote their books. Their advice seemed easy enough to follow, so I did what I could and submitted my book to places that promote free Kindle books.

Submissions

Total number of places submitted: 16

Average lead time required: 4.7 days

Number of sites that took free submissions: 14 out of 16

Number of sites I paid for submission: 2 ($5 for one and $10 for the other)

BookBub: BookBub didn’t accept my book (no idea why), but it would have cost me $90 to be part of their Fantasy Listing. From what I’ve heard, BookBub is worth the price. This is all anecdotal of course.

Alright, those are all the places I submitted my book to. Next up is social media. I love Twitter and am on it all the time, so I knew I’d use that. I also decided to share my book on Facebook once during this period. I’m not on Facebook that often, and my Author Page has limited reach.

Buuut, being stupid, I decided not to make a bit.ly account to keep track of how many clicks my links got. I just did their thing for free. I could see during that same day how many people followed my link to my book, but that was it. Let’s just say that I tweeted about my book at least 2 times a day during the promo period, with different messages each time, to my approximately 870 followers.

Your mileage with Twitter and other social media platforms may vary. The important thing is to not spam people and to make it look like you’re trying to have a conversation. Post a link with no accompanying text or context won’t entice people to follow it. The same goes for tweets that look like this: “Download my free ebook! *link to said ebook*.“ Those will get you nowhere.

All the above setup before the promo took me maybe a couple of hours spread out over the course of two/three days. In the big scheme of things it was relatively painless and only slightly repetitive to submit my book to various sites. Most of the time spent came from reading their guidelines and figuring out which ones required a “donation” before they’d even look at your listing.

However it was all worth it when you look at the results.

Results

Total number of downloads: 4,311

Highest Position on the Free Kindle Books Chart: 84

Highest Position on the Free Science Fiction & Fantasy Chart: 5 (I think)

Highest Position on the Free Epic Fantasy Chart: 2

Highest Amazon Author Rank: 70,851 (May 21, 2013)

Biggest Jump in Author Rank: 111,286

Side note: I’m kicking myself that I didn’t take screenshots of my book’s rank at its highest. Amazon’s Author Central doesn’t track those kinds of stats. (If it does I haven’t figured out how to access them yet)

I don’t have any other free promo periods to compare my numbers with. I especially don’t have any data from a similar promo period with no publicity and sharing done in advance, so take these results with a grain of salt. However, I like to think that based on the chart positions and the number of downloads, when compared to how little time it took me, doing the legwork in advance paid off.

I’d also like to add that the Author Rank on May 21st is not the highest I’ve been in the past month. On May 24th, I hit 19,183. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what Author Rank is or what it means, but it feels good to see a chart with an upward trend.

Breaking the top 100 for Free Kindle Books was a really big milestone for me. The same goes for getting into the top ten on the more focused SF and Epic Fantasy lists. I don’t know if I’d categorize The Exile’s Violin as epic fantasy, but I’m not complaining. Considering I’m a no-name author with only one novel out there, this feels like a big deal.

What’s Next?

I’m not quite sure what comes next. I’m going to go back to ignoring my books position on the Paid Kindle Store chart (83,783 when I wrote this post). I’m also going to ignore my Author Rank again too. I will watch Amazon and see if my number of reviews goes up based on this promo. Let’s say 1% of those 4,300 people who downloaded my book actually read it. And then pulling numbers out of my ass, let’s say 10% of that 1% write an Amazon review. That’s four new reviews! It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it would go a long way toward The Exile’s Violin breaking twenty reviews. (Another personal milestone I want to reach)

I’m also going to pay extra attention to my sales this quarter. I want to see if I experience any residual bump from the free promo. I’ve heard other authors (all anecdotal evidence) say that they saw an increase in sales after they ran a promo.

I’ll also keep writing, and I hope to have Terraviathan out before the end of the year. Again from anecdotal evidence, I’ve also heard that running a free promo for the second book in a series can lead to an increase in sales of the first book. Or was it the other way around? Either way, having more books out there is better.

The next time I do a free promo I’m going to try and submit my book to even more sites. I plan on utilizing Facebook more too. Also I hope BookBub picks up my book next time. They passed on it this time. Even though they can get pricey, I’ve heard that using them is money well spent.

I hope this helps any of you who are planning to run your own free days on Amazon!

Mr. Flip’s Carnival – Help Out a Good Cause!

A couple days ago, I saw Karina Cooper tweet about calling on all members of the steampunk community for help with a cause near and dear to her. While I’ve never been to any conventions or made my own costume, The Exile’s Violin is steampunk, so I checked out her post.

That’s where I was made aware of the Fantastical Mr. Flip’s Carnival of Wonders and Curiosities. It’s a “festival to celebrate all the ‘local’—which is to say, from Vancouver, BC to Portland, OR—steampunk-flavored vendors, creators, authors, and musicians that are here in our own backyard” in honor of Flip, a ten-year-old member of the steampunk community who tragically passed away last year.

So where do you (and I) come in? In order to put on Mr. Flip’s Carnival again this year, the organizers need donations. They’re going to start an Indiegogo campaign and that’s why they’re calling on all steampunk authors, producers, jewelry makers, gadgeteers, crafters, costume-makers, etc. to donate whatever they can (“personalized haikus, and move upward to art pieces, commissioned art requests, books, CDs of steampunk and steampunk-flavored musicians, and so on”) to be perks for the fundraising campaign.

It’s a great cause, so I encourage you to donate whatever you can! And if you’re not an author or cool thing-maker, then look for the upcoming Indiegogo campaign and send even just a couple of dollars its way. Every little bit helps!

Why Don’t You Just Write Genre X?

This post is inspired by a short conversation I had with Robert Jackson Bennett on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. It went a little something like this:

@robertjbennett My mom asked me if I ever wanted to write something like Nicholas Sparks and give up that science fiction stuff.

— R.S. Hunter (@rshunter88) April 25, 2013

This led to his response: “jesus christ.” And then a link to a hilarious image like the one you see above. “White People Almost Kissing” the brand-new novel by Nicholas Sparks. And now for the whole story about my conversation with my mom and some commentary.

I went out to dinner with my mom the other day. In between our main course and the spring roll appetizers–I also decided during this dinner that I don’t care for spring rolls–and with the best intentions she asked me: “Why don’t you try to write a romance? Something like Nicholas Sparks. He’s such a good writer.”

She meant well. She sees me struggling to pay bills and make a living as a writer and thinks that if I just wrote something in a mega-popular genre like romance that the money, movie deals, and all the other trappings of fame would just roll in. I’d probably have to turn away studio after studio that wanted to turn one of my books into a trans-media property. Because romance is popular. Because science fiction and fantasy aren’t as popular. Because she “doesn’t really like sci-fi but she liked my book.”

Here’s the problem with that line of thinking–chasing what you think the mass market wants–you’ll always be chasing after something that’s constantly changing. Maybe you’re one of those authors who’s able to flit from genre to genre with ease. I’m not. My bread and butter is genre fiction: speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and maybe even a tiny bit of horror.

I try to move around within genre fiction–a sci-fi short story here, a horror story there, two steampunk novels, a sword & sorcery novel in the works, and several abandoned space opera novels. But it’s all within what I like to write.

That’s the important part–liking what you write. Because I feel strongly about my stories, my characters, my genres, it comes through in my writing. Would The Exile’s Violin and its sequel have worked as, say, a paranormal romance? I have no idea, but I can guarantee the book because I don’t write paranormal romances.

So you can imagine how awful the results would be if I tried to right a contemporary romance novel for purely commercial reasons. Or maybe it wouldn’t have been awful per se. I like to think I have a tiny bit of skill that when combined with proper revisions, working with beta readers, etc. could produce something half readable. A better term for the resulting paranormal romance manuscript: soulless.

That’s what happens you write something to chase commercial acceptance. Or at least, that’s what would happen if I tried it. Maybe some authors are able to make that work. I’m not one of them.

I have to write what I want to write. Otherwise, why bother writing it at all? So the next time somebody says, “Genre X is much more popular than genre Y. Why don’t you just write genre X?” I’ll reply, “Because I like writing genre Y.” ‘Nuff said.

Bioshock Infinite as Dune Fan Fiction

Facetious jokes aside, I have a lot to say about Bioshock Infinite. This post is going to be relative unstructured and is something of a response to two other fantastic posts: “Notes on Bioshock Infinite” by Brendan Keogh and this actionbutton.net review of the game by Tim Rogers.

I agree with the majority of both those fine posts–Tim’s granular criticism of the game’s mechanics and Brendan’s bullet points about the game’s themes. So let’s dive in–wait, wrong game. Bioshock Infinite is the Bioshock in the sky.

Never before have I played a game that so badly wished it was a book. Bioshock Infinite tries to tell a big story with big themes. It’s like something you’d see in your favorite genre novel written by an author with literary fiction aspirations. There’s tears in space-time, giant mechanical birds, but also racism, classism, and bits that explore the nature of violence and redemption. r there would be if Bioshock Infinite was either a) a book or b) didn’t abandon these themes by the wayside halfway through.

I don’t know if it was just a failure of execution or if those at Irrational were hamstrung by their choice of genre: the first person shooter. There’s only so much story you can tell while staring down gun sights. Infinite isn’t an essay on a blog. It’s a commercial product with grand aspirations, but at the end of the day it needs to sell copies, to return its investment, or as Rogers aptly puts it, “Most likely, the only worthy conclusion here is that when you’ve spent One Hundred Million Dollars building the densest game environment in history, if shooting games are the only ones making billions of dollars, you probably want shooting in your game.” Those factors probably limited the story Infinite desperately believes it is trying to tell. To quote Keogh, “Infinite doesn’t aim for the moon; it cuts props out of cardboard and stages a moonlanding in the basement.”

As pretty much every piece mentions, Infinite is a visually lush, dense game. The first hour or so of the game that follows Booker’s arrival in Columbia are some of the game’s best. It’s also when it’s most committed to building a setting around those big themes the game wants to be about.

Seriously, Columbia is gorgeous. There are things to see, hear, and interact with. If only the entire game had stayed this way. Instead it becomes basically just another shooter. At one point, you go through multiple tears with Elizabeth and emerge in some sort of alternate Columbia. It’s all very Fringe-esque; some things are different but others are the same! And according to the game, you’re fighting different enemies, but they all look the same. They’re men and women with guns. They shoot at you much the same as the Columbia Police before them. Except these enemies wear red instead of blue. Again, very Fringe-esque.

It’s all the same and it makes no difference whether you’re shooting at red enemies or blue enemies. This mirrors the way the game drops the racism angle from the beginning of the game. Near the beginning, an interracial couple is trotted out in front of the player and a gathered NPC crowd. The couple is being punished for the crime of existing–of being an interracial couple in a city built on Manifest Destiny, American Imperialism, and racism. The player is handed a baseball and given a choice: throw the ball at the couple to the delight of the crowd, or risk drawing the crowd’s ire and attention upon yourself by throwing the ball at the announcer on stage.

In his piece on taking Infinite seriously, Daniel Golding calls this choice “thunderously stupid.” According to Bill Gardner, the game’s design director, “We are trying to pose these questions and let the player decide how they feel.” Golding takes issue with this: “On the ‘question’ of violent public humiliation of an interracial couple,BioShock Infinite wants to let the player ‘decide how they feel’.”

I have to agree. Not only are binary moral choices simplistic and overused in games, this one falls into the “save the kitten/burn the orphanage” paradigm. And of course there’s no room for nuance. Obviously I (the player) did not want to throw the ball at the interracial couple. Even if I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, as a note in the game warns you just before this scene, it could’ve been entirely possible that my character could have attempted to throw at the couple and deliberately miss. Why was something like that not an option? Without prior knowledge of how the scene plays out no matter your choice, the option of missing would have allowed me to get through the scene unscathed–both morally and within the game’s fiction.

This choice didn’t make me “decide how I felt.” Instead it made me feel manipulated, especially because the end result is the same; the crowd turns on you when you’re discovered as the “False Prophet.” I would be able to look past this if the game had remembered to bring these things up later. I thought my choice would have at least affected the narrative in some fashion near the end of the game. Considering how much emphasis Infinite places on little clues, hints, and foreshadowing, that would have been a safe assumption.

Nope. The game “stopped being ‘about’ racism and just started being racist.” And adds Golding, “BioShock Infinite uses racism for no other reason than to make itself seem clever. Worse, it uses racism and real events in an incredibly superficial way.” Racism and a whole host of other -isms become parts of the setting like the Disneyland-esque streets of Columbia or the posters on the building walls.

But let’s move away from that. Let’s talk about the narrative. For a while things make sense. Then they don’t make sense. By the time I got to the end of the game and Elizabeth explains how “there’s always a man and always a city” everything made sense again. This was a game character literally explaining to me how this game was connected to the previous Bioshocks. This lined up perfectly with what Ken Levine said in an interview with Matt Peckham:

But BioShock Infinite was always to me a BioShock game. We just decided that BioShock didn’t mean Rapture exclusively, that it means the look…the sort of hyper-stylized look of the world, the saturation of color, the feeling, the sense of humor, the combat mechanics and the kinds of themes we take on. We deal with the time period and we take the politics, the art, the music, the culture, the science, the advertising, the technology and then we give it a twist — a little bit of science fiction, whether its plasmids or buildings that float and tears that open in space — and we sort of put that all on a pod. I think that makes BioShock Infinite very much a BioShock game. I think as people play it, they’re going to learn more and more how it’s a BioShock game.

As soon as Elizabeth gave me that speech, my mind instantly flashed back to that interview. In that moment, she was less of a character and more of a mouthpiece for Levine, trying to tell me exactly how Infinite fit in the larger Bioshock universe.

It was a weird, jarring moment at the very least. Plus, it didn’t help that all of a sudden I was somehow behind the scenes for the multiverse, seeing thousands of lighthouses that apparently lead to other worlds. And then Elizabeth says how she can see everything. At that moment all I wanted to do was tweet: “So…Elizabeth’s a female Kwisatz Haderach right? Bioshock Infinite is Dune fan fiction.” But I didn’t want any of it to be considered “spoilers.”

Is this really what all of the buildup in the beginning amounted to? A mediocre mishmash of Dune, Fringe, and Doctor Who that completely ignores all of its substance for the (debatably) momentarily gratifying twist? “Christopher Nolan puzzle plot about time travel” according to Golding. Rogers might be right with his analysis of the story… Though I really hope he isn’t: “Oh my god if these alternate dimensions are a layer-caked ‘commentary’ on the repetitive nature of side-quests in videogames I will eat every T-shirt in my dresser–”

And finally, when Booker makes his comment about an “underwater city”… You just spent how many hours in a floating city and going through tears in spacetime, and now he laughs at a city underwater? All it did was remind me again that I was in the middle of a “Bioshock Game.”

I had lots of other little issues with the game, and Rogers brings up many of them in his review: protagonist with no feet, needs no hands to grab things, eating food out of the garbage, etc. I was also sick of the game reminding me what gear was every single time I found a new piece or to “remember to use my Vigors in battle!” Perhaps I wasn’t using my Vigors because I found the guns to be the best option for dealing with the repetitive fights?

A small aside if you’ll indulge me (hell, I’ve already written over 1,500 words so you’ve already indulged me): what happened to the Songbird? Easily the most interesting thing about the game, it feels like Infinite designed the character for an earlier version of the game, found out it didn’t fit with a later build, but decided to keep it anyway. Considering how heavily the Songbird was featured in the marketing, it’s bizarre how unimportant he is in the game.

Don’t even get me started on the Handymen. Those are in the game not to flesh out the narrative like Big Daddies but just because somebody decided “Hey this is a Bioshock game so it needs a big mechanical enemy thing!”

Bioshock was regarded as one of the smartest games. Hell, it even spawned a whole new term used to talk about games and story. Bioshock Infinite doesn’t fall into the same category for me. It doesn’t come close. Again I turn to Keogh who put it so succinctly, “Bioshock convinced a lot of people that games could be smart not because it was the smartest game ever made, but because it was the smartest game a lot of us had ever played. Bioshock Infinite‘s biggest problem is that it is not 2007 anymore.” No, it certainly isn’t.

Some of My Favorite Writing Music

I love listening to music while I write. That’s just how I work best. If it’s too quiet my mind tends to wander. Some writers I know say they don’t like music with words when they’re putting pen to paper (or fingers to keys, I suppose is more likely). I vary back and forth. Some scenes come easier when I’m listening to music with lyrics, while other times I just want some nice instrumental stuff.

So what do I listen to? I’ll give you a small sampling of some of my favorite writing music. I’ll also share what projects each song goes with–for the ones I can remember that is!

Fight Scenes in The Exile’s Violin and Terraviathan

Heavy metal is my favorite type of music to listen to while writing action-heavy scenes. At the moment some of my favorite bands include As I Lay Dying, Parkway Drive, Mastodon, In Flames, and All That Remains. In case you’re not familiar with them…they’re of the–how do you say–screaming variety. Metalcore, death metal, all those subgenre labels. I love it most of it, especially the bands that use some melody in their choruses.

According to iTunes, some of the songs I’ve listened to the most while working on fight scenes and the like in my steampunk novels include:

Pretty much anything by Strung Out. They’re my favorite band and the inspiration behind my only (so far) tattoo. These guys write some amazing music that flirts back and forth between metal-tinged punk and straight up SoCal skate punk. They’ve been around since 1989, and if you’ve got that kind of longevity, you know you gotta be doing something right.

“Sleepwalker”, “Dark Days”, and “Boneyards” by Parkway Drive. I like the environmental message in “Dark Days” especially. That’s part of the music video up there in gif form. I also “sing” along to those three songs a lot during my commute. I’d like to think that I can keep up with Winston McCall pretty well.

“A Greater Foundation”, “Forsaken”, and “Parallels” by As I Lay Dying. Even though their a Christian band–a religion I don’t subscribe to–most of their songs aren’t overtly religious. Plus they rock. Really damn hard. Those three songs are from three different albums spanning from 2007 to last year. As I Lay Dying has always been in my musical writing rotation since about 2003.

A few other songs and bands: “Oblivion” by Mastodon, anything by Coheed & Cambria, any of Thrice’s hard rock/post-hardcore songs.

Mood Music & Non-Screaming Bands

But what about the times when I don’t want lyrics? When I’m either editing and revising or world-building it’s really hard for me to focus while listening to the kind of relentless aural assault my favorite metal bands bring to the table. What then? Break out your Flock of Seagulls haircut, your Gameboy, and your dial-up modem from 1994! We’re going to listen 80s pop, chiptunes, and dubstep!

The Cars, A-ha, Simple Minds, New Order, OMD, Eddie Money, Genesis, Eurythmics, Tears for Fears, and more. The synth-ier, the poppier, the cheesier the better. Wham, Kenny Loggins, pretty much every one hit wonder you can think of. I listen to it all. I love it. There’s something about catchy 80s pop that really keeps me going when I don’t feel like writing.

And then I have a set of songs that I listen to whenever I want to set a mood. If I’m writing science fiction–especially anything cyberpunk or space opera related–I’ll flip on the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack, the soundtracks from the Mass Effect series, or something from the From Alpha to Omega album by Destructoid community member Alphadeus. All that music really gets me into a sci-fi state of mind.

Occasionally, I’ll log into Pandora and turn on my “Dubstep Station”. I think the music is kinda hilarious-bad, but at the same time I like it. I can’t name any of the artists to save my life, and half the time it sounds like a Transformer and a dial-up modem are getting it on in a blender, but for some reason, I find it really easy to write to dubstep.

The same goes for chiptunes and videogame soundtracks. I have a playlist set up in iTunes that has almost 2000 tracks of just electronica, chiptunes (music made with the sounds and musical effects from 8-bit and 16-bit videogames), and videogame soundtracks. Some of my favorite songs include: anything from any of the Zeldas, a metal cover of the Skyrim theme song, an album of big band renditions of F-Zero, and the Double Dragon Neon soundtrack.

Seriously. That song right there is ridiculously catchy. It’s videogame music and faux-80s pop all in one! How can I resist?

There you have it dear readers! Probably more than you ever wanted to know about what music I listen to while writing. What about you? How many of you authors listen to music while you’re writing or editing? Or do you need to have it silent while you’re working. Let me know! I find hearing about peoples’ creative processes fascinating!

Interview Featured on Frankie Blooding’s Site

Hey everyone. Just a quick heads up that an interview with yours truly is up on Frankie Blooding’s website. I talk a little bit about my writing process, how I write crazy outlines, and why I sometimes still consider myself “not a real writer”.

So if you want to read about those things, go check it out!

Veronica Mars First Watch – “Pilot”

With the Veronica Mars Movie Kickstarter being a thing that exists and many of the people I follow on the internet flipping out about it, I decided that now would be a good time to give the series a try. I saw a few episodes in college when my girlfriend’s roommate was re-watching the series on DVD. The show seemed cool enough but not anything that made me think, “Wow, I need to watch this.”

 But like I said up above, with the movie becoming a reality, and people I follow like Rowan Kaiser saying things about how Veronica Mars is really smart when it talks about social class, I decided the time is right for me to watch this 3-season series all the way through. I doubt I’ll write about every single episode, just the ones that really grab me. With that, let’s dive into “Pilot.”

Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching a ton of Buffy the Vampire Slayer over the past couple of months, but man I keep expecting Kristen Bell to morph into Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Another thing I noticed while watching this episode: the writers manage to cram in a lot of info and backstory into a fairly small chunk of time. On the same day that I watched this episode, I also watched the pilot episode of The Americans. That episode ran 1 hour and 8 minutes. Veronica Mars’s pilot only ran for about 39 minutes. Damn!

I really enjoyed the interaction between Veronica and her dad. Plus the mystery about who killed Lilly Kane is compelling. However, most of the episode felt like setup for the rest of the season. A lot of it was told through flashbacks and voice over narration. I’m not sure if that’s going to be a series staple or if it’s just a feature of the pilot episode.

Either way, I think this episode sets up the series arc nicely. Plus the character of Logan is really compelling in a terrible, spoiled rich kid kind of way. I think his interactions with Veronica could be a highlight of the series. Not quite sure if he’s going to be a “villain” the whole time.

The Exile’s Violin Giveaway on Goodreads

Since I have some extra copies of The Exile’s Violin at home taking up space on my kitchen table, I decided to autograph them and give them away on Goodreads! The contest will run from now until May 20th, which happens to be my birthday. If you win it’ll be like I’m giving you a birthday present!

All you have to do is head over to the The Exile’s Violin‘s page on Goodreads and click the enter to win button under the “Win a Copy of This Book” section. You fill out your address and you’re done! It’s that simple. If you win, you’ll be notified when the contest ends, and I’ll mail your new book to you.

Psychonauts Impressions

I’ve been on a mission to fill in the gaps of my gaming knowledge. Critical darling and cult favorite PS2/XBox/PC action-adventure game Psychonauts is currently on my plate. I didn’t play it when it first came out in 2005 because I wasn’t as immersed in videogame culture and had no idea what the game was about. It looked weird.

Not gonna lie. Psychonauts is weird. But it’s one of the most delightful varieties of weird I’ve ever played. Too bad the game’s mechanics–controls, combat, and camera–cause frustration to throw a moist (not full wet) blanket over my enthusiasm and enjoyment.

For those who’ve heard nothing about the game, Psychonauts, is a quirky (not really a fan of that word, but it fits here) action-adventure game about a summer camp…for psychics. Strap yourselves in. That’s just the beginning.

Your character–Raz (short for Razputin)–has run away from the circus to attend Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp in order to train and become a Psychonaut–from what I’ve played so far, that’s some kind of government psychic secret agent/spy. I dig it.

While undergoing his psychic training, Raz uncovers a sinister plot that appears to center around a strange dentist with a metal claw for an arm removing the brains of the camp-goers. He does this with some sort of pepper grinder that makes them sneeze out their brains. Gross (but quirky!).

Psychonauts’s humor, dialogue, and writing are its strongest assets. The off-kilter nature of it all is supplemented by the wonderful visual aesthetic. Characters are supposedly human, but none of them share similar anatomies. Camp bully, Bobby Zilch, has blue skin, an incredibly long, slender neck, and a giant orange afro. On the other hand, main character Raz looks kind of like an ant with yellow skin. The color palette used for all the skin tones reminds me a lot of the cartoon Doug. The characters in that show were all blue, green, yellow, purple, etc. Anything that recalls Doug gets points in my book.

The level design also complements the humor and unique character design. Whenever you enter into a character’s mind, the levels are always widely different from each other. Vaguely German/Eastern European, stuffy  Agent Nein has a highly controlled mind that looks like one of those massive computers from the 60s and 70s. But on the other hand, the mind of the giant mutated lungfish is a tiny city called Lungfishopolis. It’s bizarre, surreal, and wonderful all at the same time. And of course everything is made up of slightly deformed shapes and quirky angles just like the game’s version of “real life.”

However, Psychonauts falls apart a bit for me when it comes to the actual game mechanics. Jumping is floaty enough for an action platformer like this, but the camera angles and control sometimes make it hard to judge the distance of your jumps in 3D space.

Combat is another weak spot, especially during boss encounters. One boss fight against a Psychoblaster Deathtank was particularly frustrating because you needed to hit it with a ranged attack only at a certain time. However, your attack can only go a certain distance. But the enemy tank has much greater range than you, and it has a dash attack that’s much faster than you. I spent most of my time trying to stay out of its range, while simultaneously targeting it with the game’s version of L2 targeting/lock-on. Again, the range for the targeting mechanic is much shorter than the boss’s range. The entire fight was an exercise in frustration. Sadly, other enemy encounters aren’t much better.

The combat is where Double Fine’s lack of experience making this type of game really shows. It’s really sad because everything else about the game is just delightful, but I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t want to play it. If I could watch somebody else play the game so I could experience the humor and story, I’d be fine at this point. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I’ll finish the game, but from what I’ve played so far (about 6 hours), Psychonauts isn’t the perfect, quirky gem that it’s been hyped up to be. It’s got a lot of high points but also some deep lows.