A twisted psychological horror point-and-click adventure? (Sanitarium (PC))

Member Name: Mutalisk

Product:	Sanitarium (PC)
Date:	11/05/09 (133 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: long, original entertaining, dark, cerebral, rewarding, well-develpoed. fun, unnerving

Disadvantages: repetitive, pixel-hunting, occasionally overly-elaborate, mediocre graphics, linear

Sanitarium is an intense "who-dunnit" psychological adventure thriller, in which the player controls a man trying to escape from a mental asylum, despite being unsure of who he is, or how he came to be in this situation.

In order to discover his true identity, and escape his fate, he must explore the darkest recesses of his mind.

This is your standard point-and-click adventure but with a hell of a dark, unpleasant and downright disturbing twist. The lead character travels to bizarre and unnerving realms where he must solve elaborate puzzles in order to attain his goal. His consciousness however, seems to fracture, as he takes agency of various figures from his past in order to escape the nightmare.

The game has a great deal of cinematics at every turn to further the plot, which means it is necessary to have 3 CDs for just this one game. The puzzles are a little tedious however, as they lurch from one cinematic to the next, with just a little pixel hunting and trial-and error, but still remain very rewarding. Nonetheless the dark cerebral plot and symbolism involved more than make up for the slowness and mediocre graphics of the game itself. It has an eerie musical score with even more eerie and surreal characters.

It has a non-tiled 2D navigation system to move the player around from a birds-eye perspective and operates on principles of inventory, character interraction and on-screen-puzzles. It is very linear, but this can be expected of a 1998 point and click adventure. Recommended system specs follow:

System: Pentium-133 or equivalent
RAM: 32 MB
Video Memory: 2 MB
Hard Drive Space: 70 MB

Summary: Worth a play, for fans of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango who feel like something a bit more serious