Fell into the initial pit and ... crash...
Everything I look for in a platformer.
I played Sanitarium a loooong time ago and completing it again was a genuine challenge. The puzzles are relatively simple and very self contained within specific adventure chapters. All of your tasks are completed within the current chapter/ sub-chapter, so you'll never feel like you forgot something from a separate location. If you can't find something, it's likely that you didn't pay attention to detail or simply overlooked it. The visuals are disturbing, especially your character's perception of other characters in the story and the psychological aspect keeps the story interesting. I was able to connect each of the chapters to the main story, but I think I missed out on the meaning of the Aztec chapter... maybe, I wasn't paying close enough attention. I gave the game 4-stars due to the sub-par voice acting, IMHO. While the actors weren't truly bad, most of the voices, especially the main character seemed a bit flat after playing a while. Otherwise, many of the other characters had strong character in their voices. If you want a classic and relatively simple adventuring game, this one is for you. The story, visuals, and psychology are pretty good and worth the GoG price!
This is the full game I played way back when I was younger and I'm glad that GOG brought it back to us! All of the details still work including the excellent SCUMM interface, full voice acting, and colorful scenes! The one glitch (and it's not a biggie, but it's significant) is the use of the sun, moon, and world stones. In my installation of the game, these puzzles did not work as described in Plato's book! I finally figured out that the puzzles were off by one to the right! So, if after I've read the correct solution in Plato's book, I have to pick each symbol from the right of the correct symbol! This glitch occurred on 2 separate game re-installations and with 3 different plays through... so I would say it's a bug... I'm interested to know if anyone else had this problem? Otherwise, the nostalgia of playing old Lucas Arts games has satisfied my tastes for now! Thanks, GOG!
