Sanitarium

About Sanitarium

Sanitarium was made by DreamForge Intertainment and published by ASC Games in 1998. It sold around 300,000 copies, a success for a horror adventure of its time, and Computer Gaming World named it Best Adventure of the year, tied with Grim Fandango. Dotemu brought it to iPhone and Android in 2015, and today it is sold on Steam and GOG under Ziggurat, with an enhanced edition announced on its Steam page.

You begin in the dark. After a car accident, a man wakes up in a run-down asylum with his face wrapped in bandages and no idea who he is. The first question is simple: what are you doing here? The answer leads through a string of places that fold into each other: the asylum grounds, a town where only malformed children are left, a demented circus surrounded by ocean, and stranger worlds still. Between each one you come back to the asylum, a little closer to remembering.

It plays as a classic isometric point-and-click. You steer the hero through pre-rendered scenes, examine what you find, talk to the people in each world, pick up and use items, and solve riddles and mechanisms to open the way on. In some worlds you even take on another identity for a while. The store calls it suitable for newcomers to the genre as well as for experienced puzzle solvers.

Its horror is psychological and visual: scenes full of decay, disfigured characters, children in danger, and the steady feeling that your own mind is the least reliable thing in the game. It is rarely if ever gory, and it does not rely on jumpscares or chases. What sets it apart from other adventures of the 1990s is how often you cannot tell whether a world is real or imagined.

It suits players of horror adventures such as Harvester, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream or Fran Bow who want a classic of the 1990s. One playthrough takes about 9 hours.

How to play Sanitarium

1. Buy it on Steam or GOG for PC (GOG's version also runs on Mac and Linux), or on the App Store or Google Play.
2. Steer the hero around each isometric scene with the cursor and examine what you find.
3. Talk to everyone; their answers point to the next problem.
4. Pick up items, use them on the world and solve the riddles in each place 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.
• The hero walks slowly, so plan where you are going before you set off across a large scene.
• Talk to characters again after something changes; they often have something new to say.
• If a world seems stuck, look for a mechanism you have not tried yet rather than an item.

Questions