Sanitarium

Your character moves painfully slow, the puzzles don't have interesting solutions and the characters are unremarkable. The game also laughs at the mentally ill, which doesn't lend itself to an interesting narrative. The game tends to be inexpensive. I don't regret buying it for $1 but there are far better adventure game classics to invest in.

Outside of the usual nonsensical adventure puzzle solutions, the plot is great. Characters are very interesting, and the worlds you visit insane. Too bad the voice acting is atrocious.

Unfortunately, I can't find out whether or not this is a good game, because I can't play for more than a couple minutes at a time before the game crashes. None of the "standard" or even bizarre fixes mentioned in the forums work for me. Graphics corruption hell, too. And GOG, as usual, does not respond to support requests. Somehow I had the clearly insane idea their promise the game worked on XP and Vista meant that it did-- but it doesn't. If you ever get this working at all, it'll be in in spite of GOG; not because of their efforts to get this incredibly ancient engine moving. Does *NOT* work out of the box. Beware!

‘Sanitarium’ is not something I’d typically play. I decided to give it a try after hearing some recommendations. Although I like some works in the psychological horror genre, like ‘SIMULACRA’, ‘Doki Doki Literature Club!’, ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Black Swan’, I find this game a miss for me. The game’s premise is promising and intriguing. The game has many trappings of a 1990s video game: gothic theme, 3D animated cutscenes, attempts in being cinematic, cheesy voice acting, brown and grey colour palettes, and trying to do something different with conventional point-and-click adventure game controls. The controls frustrated me. I disliked holding down the right mouse button and dragging my characters around. This was especially so in the game’s very last puzzle. I gathered this was done so the programmers didn’t have to deal with character pathfinding issues. If you think you can play this game well using a touchpad on a laptop, forget about it -- you’ll need a mouse. If you’re into the macabre, you’ll probably like the designs in ‘Sanitarium’. I found the isometric graphics to be stale and boring for an adventure game that tries to cinematic. I also found the story, while interesting, just shy of a few plot details to be complete. It felt like some content was cut during development, or some was thrown in last minute for shock value. While it might have been good in the 1990s, it doesn’t hold up well 20 years later. The puzzles are okay, but they often don’t offer clear instructions as to what to do and why you need to solve them. Sometimes you solve them because they’e there, and you won’t realize what the real purposes are until you’ve solved them. It’s hard to figure out what parts you can interactive with, leading random clicking. I’ve read that ‘Sanitarium’ is result of putting various proposed project ideas together. Overall, the game does feel like a Frankengame, with a couple of good parts that I wish could have been developed further.

This game is a legend.. One of the best point & click adventures of all time.