Well, Jespher, get ready for another one you've likely never heard of:
Psychonauts -- PS2 (2005) -- Another completely cracked platformer that I just loved. You play as Raz, short for Razputin, a young psychic who escaped the circus to sneak into a secret summer camp for other young psychics. Shortly after you arrive, you discover that someone is stealing the other campers' brains as part of their evil plot. The area of the summer camp itself has a lot of puzzles and collecting missions, but functions largely as somewhat of a home base -- you'll interact with other characters here to get more clues/information and navigate to get to the various worlds, but the bulk of the gameplay takes place within the minds of campers, counselors, and the inmates of a nearby asylum. This is where the game really gets fun. And amazing looking. The mind of the camp's Army drill sargent is a complex obstacle course with landmines and battle tanks. The "Milkman," a character within the game who's got a thing for conspiracy theories, has a mind that is series of twisting suburban streets through which you're constantly followed and harassed by mysterious black vans and government officials. And when you enter the mind of Fred Bonaparte, a ridiculously tall descendant of Napoleon's, the entire level takes place on an elaborately staged strategic board game on which, in addition to normal platforming, you've got to convince the peasant gamepieces to stage an uprising and help Fred finally conquer the game he's been playing with Napoleon/his own inferiority complex. One thing that will be great about having this on my island is the huge amount of stuff there is to do in the game -- the Bonaparte level alone took me over three hours. The gameplay is wonderful, as normal platforming is supplemented by various psychic abilities picked up throughout the course of the game (telekinesis, levitation, invisibility, etc.). It is extremely clever; when in the brain levels, you can unlock new features by collecting "figments of imagination" (chalk drawings that hover throughout the level), you can help clear emotional baggage (by finding hidden tags and matching them with suitcases hidden within the level), and vacuuming up mental cobwebs will give you access to secret areas and repressed bits of information. It's also really funny, which is a nice change since video game humor so often misses the mark completely. And, with a visual style that's similar to Tim Burton's stop-motion films, both in character design and in the
feel of the graphics (textures and sense of mass almost resemble claymation, rather than computer graphics), it's amazing to look at.