Sanitarium by ASC Games (1998)
To quote the box, this is "a journey through the depths of one man's consciousness to confront the demons from his past and escape the imprisonment of his mind." Interested?
I should tell you straight out that if you're the squeamish type or not into animated horror, then you should steer clear of this game. I was raised on a steady diet of "One Step Beyond," "Outer Limits," "Alfred Hitchcock presents" and Saturday night "Creature Features," so, I'm pretty warped.
The game is rated "Teen."
Story
You begin the game in a cutscene where your character has jumped into his car and driven off into a dark, rainy night. As he careens around the curves on a rain-slickened road, he pumps the brakes only to find that they're not working and he plunges through the guard rail and off the cliff... only to awaken with his head completely swathed in bandages. With amnesia. In an insane asylum. (Not a good way to start the day.) The game begins when he wakes up and you must navigate your way through nine chapters of mind-warping "worlds". The gameplay alternates between time spent in the asylum and other locations; including a "Children of the Corn" type town, an Aztec village and an insect hive. ick.
Graphics/Sound
Graphically speaking, some of the scenes can be pretty graphic. A couple of times I found myself saying "oh ewww!" - but you'll notice that it didn't stop me! I'm making a guess that the backgrounds are pre-rendered, while the characters are animated on top. Whatever the correct term for the graphics, they were astounding. The sound efx and music was suitably creepy, dark and moody. Believe it or not, the place that really creeped me out was the options screen where you saved or loaded games. There's a face with sinister eyes that follows your cursor. At times, the eyes look right out at you. ::shudder:: The cutscenes were wonderful. They used a fade feature to go into a cutscene and gave the remembrances a faded, old 8 MM look and feel.
Interface
The interface is traditional point-and-click with a slight variation. To move your character, you *right* click, hold the button and move the arrow cursor to where you need to go. Once there, you release the button. Personally, I disliked this method. It was especially bothersome in close quarters, in which case I either ran up and down stairs, a lot, or bumped into objects when I was trying to go elsewhere. Everything else was accomplished by using the left mouse button. The inventory system was fine. You left-clicked on your character and all the objects he carried appeared in its own little circle, which in turn circled the avatar.
Gameplay
The entire purpose of Sanitarium is to discover who you are and why you're in the asylum. All the puzzles make perfect sense. There aren't any thrown in there to pad the game. In some cases, the puzzles take place in the "world-at-large" whereas others will offer an "up close and personal" view. There are a couple of music puzzles and one... drumroll... maze. The maze is pretty easy as long as you don't do what I did and push ALL the buttons (subtle hint). Any problems that I had with the puzzles was purely due to either not talking with everyone enough or not paying attention and picking up the things that I needed. This game is pretty linear, so you cannot move on the next chapter until you've completed everything in the current chapter. As far as I'm concerned, this game is of the "long" variety. I don't precisely know the time in hours, but I spent about 2 weeks playing. I only played a couple of hours per day and some days not at all.
Specs
This game is on 3 CDs and runs on Win95. I honestly don't know if the game will run in Win98/2K/ME as I'm only running Win95B. The specs aren't excessive and the video card only requires 2 MB onboard RAM (recommended). I had no problem running the game on my PII 300. When the game was orginally shipped there was a "fatal flaw" in that doors in chapter 2 wouldn't open and stay open, so there was the possibility of getting stuck in that chapter and not realizing it right away. There's a patch for it at GamesDomain - just unzip it and install it in the game directory called "data." Rumour has it that later games shipped correctly; however, I wasn't willing to take the chance. If the game was flawed and you installed the patch, prior saved games wouldn't work and you'd need to begin all over again.
I really liked this game for its innovative story and creepy atmosphere. In keeping with the atmosphere, there's a big, green eye staring wildly out of a bunch of gauze on the box and the jewel case! I enjoyed all the puzzles and various locations. If you're thinking this game is too serious, there are a couple of scenes where I laughed out loud - one of which was a scene in the courtyard of the asylum and you have the opportunity to change the music being played over the loudspeaker. That was a hoot!
Try this game. You might be pleasantly surprised!
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Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.
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