Sanitarium

I've just finished this game and would recommend it to any gamer not just adventure fans. The story is gripping and the puzzles are in the main quite straight forward. Only a couple of times will you be left scratching your head. The only bad point for me are the controls, you have to keep the right mouse button pressed to move your character towards the curser. This means that you are unable to scan the rooms while your character moves like I do in other adventure games. It can also be quite imprecise taking stairs when you were just trying to walk past them and making the final puzzle quite frustrating. However the overall quality of the game makes up for it and does not warrant bringing down the score so a 5 star from me. Buy it and enjoy every second.

Truly a master piece in adventure genre! A game who will play with your mind and make you think!

In some 20 odd years of playing PC games, no game left me more frustrated, confused and ultimately pleased than Sanitarium. Other games were more entertaining, but none more engrossing. Sanitarium is one of a very small handful (less than, actually) of games that left such a lasting impression that I found myself constantly going back, re-installing and re-playing until PC technology left the game behind. So purchasing this on GOG was a no-brainer.

As adventure game titles go Sanitarium is very punchy. You have a set of several, relatively small, areas to explore and puzzles in those areas to solve before things get mixed. This style of puzzle handling was also used in the Castle of Dr. Brain and its sequel, but unlike those titles the puzzles here are not the ends onto itself. The puzzles are instead integrated into a story, which for gaming purposes is solid enough and much like Blade Runner leaves itself open to being read into by those who care to do so. This punchy style further assists by making it hard for any particular area of the game to excessively drag, and allowing for plenty of variety in puzzles. Add on to this inventory management that’s straightforward enough and this title manages to avoid a lot of its brethren’s failings, although it has more problems with moving around the character then most. On the nature of the puzzles while like similar titles some require a certain amount of pixel hunting to find something the developer intended you to mouse over, on the average they involve legitimate logical thinking. This is one of the title’s I suggest players take a mediocrum of notes with, and figure out some of the puzzles out on paper with, as that tends to help with some of these more complex puzzles verses simply manipulating things on the screen. Hence I can easily recommend this title for those who enjoy these type of adventure games. It is not however appropriate for children.

I should preface this by saying that I'm new to adventure games; I picked up this and The Longest Journey a while ago and only just got around to playing this one. I can't believe I waited so long. This game has one of the best stories ever, no kidding. You wake up in an insane asylum, with no memory and no real idea what's going on. If the premise sounds cliche, I can promise that it only stays that way for about the first five minutes. And then you get to a twist, which I don't want to spoil, but it's awesome. The game trips constantly from hallucination to reality, and it constantly makes you question which is which, or if anything you're seeing is real at all. Trying to piece together the clues that the cutscenes and gameplay provide is immensely satisfying. The game also teases you by including some heavy symbolism in it's environments, and again, figuring out what it all means is a lot of fun. The puzzles are all quite logical (the main reason I went to the walkthroughs is because some of the items you need to pick up are really hard to see. There were also a couple of sound based puzzles that gave my tone-deaf ears some trouble). Really, I can't recommend this one highly enough. The art, narrative, and gameplay combine in really extraordinary ways. If you like games as a storytelling medium, Sanitarium is really something you shouldn't miss. BTW, I was able to run this on Vista without any crashes. I did hit a gamebreaking glitch during Chapter 5, though. Fortunately, starting a new save seems to fix that. You can find saves for the beginning of each chapter here: http://www.mediafire.com/?2zlx2by3ynz. If you hit a glitch just copy them to your save game folder, load the proper one up, and you should be fine :-)