Psychonauts

It's great. I don't even like platformers and I love this game. It's getting great reviews so I'll skip that.

I've been following this game's long development for years, because of two people: Tim Schafer, who's been involved with some other great titles (Full Throttle in particular, one of the greatest games ever, but also Grim Fandango, which was awesome, and Day of the Tentacle) and who you may know, and Erik Wolpaw, who you probably don't (but along with Greg Kasavin, writes the best game reviews on Gamespot and more importantly wrote Old Man Murray which has gone years without being updated and is still funny).

The thing that's so great about Psychonauts is that it's got a sense of humor, like the other Schafer games. It's legitimately funny: the setting's funny, the dialogue is funny, there are weird sight gags , satire of computer games, and adult humor.

The relationship between increased development costs and creativity's been discussed elsewhere, but essentially the more money it costs to push out a game, the safer it is. I have enormous respect for companies that continue to do innovative and crazy things with their games (like Nintendo) even if I don't play them, and for games like Psychonauts that display such care and attention in every detail that even when I'm frustrated with a particular puzzle or level, I can appreciate the effort and creativity they poured into it.

So go check it out. Support this kind of work.