Sanitarium

About Sanitarium

Sanitarium was made by DreamForge Intertainment and published by ASC Games in 1998. It sold well for a horror adventure of its time, and Dotemu later brought it to Steam, GOG, iPhone and Android.

You begin in the dark. After a car accident, a man wakes up in an asylum with his head wrapped in bandages and no idea who he is. The first question is simple: what are you doing here? The answer leads through a run of places that fold into each other, an asylum, a village where something has happened to the children, and other worlds where it is never clear whether you are seeing things as they are.

It plays as a classic isometric point-and-click. You walk through each scene, talk to the people and things in it, pick up and use items, and solve riddles and mechanisms to open the way on. The store calls it suitable for beginners at the genre as well as for experienced puzzle solvers.

Its horror is psychological and visual: pre-rendered scenes full of decay, disfigured characters, and the steady feeling that your own mind is the least reliable thing in the game. It suits players of horror adventures such as Harvester or Fran Bow who want a classic from the 1990s.

How to play Sanitarium

1. Buy it on Steam, GOG, the App Store or Google Play.
2. Click to walk your character around each isometric scene and examine what you find.
3. Talk to everyone; their answers point to the next problem.
4. Use items and solve the riddles in each world to move on to the next.

Tips

• Hover over every part of a scene; small objects are easy to miss in the pre-rendered art.
• Talk to characters more than once after something changes.
• If a world seems stuck, look for a mechanism you have not tried yet rather than an item.

Questions