This game is an interesting blend of point & click adventure, beat 'em up and RPG. It works really well, with these elements being surprisingly compatible with each other. Also, if you are a hardcore adventure gamer, you can disable combat. If you're more interested in story or fights, you can skip puzzles. Cowcat really did a great job here to make sure the game is suitable for a broad range of gamers. I won't give too much away of the story, but the story feels like a Tex Murphy adventure. And that is a good thing in my book! And wow, this game is beautiful. The artwork is amazing and looks great, with very well done voice acting for each character. All in all, it's a great package for all adventure gamers. I hesitated a bit at first, because I do not like beat 'em ups, but now all I can say is: What a great game!
Well here we are, I quite enjoyed this one. It really feels like work and it’s stressful sometimes. Just like I would imagine a real broadcasting job would be! The developer certainly took care of some of these issues with different and customizable difficulty settings. For example, I really don’t enjoy the interference stuff, so I just disable it. So that really helps, as do the keyboard controls (which take some time to get used to, unfortunately, especially for the swearing censor mechanic). The topics of the game are satirical and black humored. Sometimes it’s a bit on the nose and any underlying commentary gets shoved in your face, and hard. Depending on where you are on a political scale, you may find the social commentary a bit difficult. But the good thing is, it’s so hilariously over the top, that it can be adapted to the opposite spectrum of politics, too. Just need to change some words and left becomes right with the same shock value. It really doesn’t matter in the end, I guess. Hope that makes sense? Anyways, the camp acting is great. I really enjoy the two anchors and the two PMs, supporting Kost is also very good (the first phone calls for example are great!). It’s just a really fun game, if you don’t take it too seriously and don’t mind being offended every now and then. The mechanics take a few moments to get used to, but then they are becoming second nature. If all else fails, you can watch the hilarious clips in the Archive and see what shenanigans happened while you were busy twiddling those screen controls.
Okay, so, if you played the first game, you'll note that the overall mood is much more cynical and dark. Some reviewers complain about this, but this is part of the game. It's basically in the realms of "Death Becomes Her", regarding its twisted humor. The innocent protagonist Lilli (so cute, and soooo innocent) basically kills and murders people, almost always out of accident or lack of alternatives. This is shown by gnomes, painting the crime scenes pink (i.e. her subconscious hiding away the gruesome stuff). There is not a drop of blood shown in the game... and that's just because Lilli is a little girl, and she's innocent in her mind. This alone is pure genius :-D Edna serves as a side character most of the time, sharing the same dark humor and love for destruction as Lilli. Gameplay improved much since The Breakout, I did find it quite pleasant to play. Audio is excellent (the German version at least), graphics are typical Edna-style. You like it or you hate it. Overall: This one features dark humor, cynical satire and a good share of social commentary. It's not everybodys cup of tea, and I doesn't want to be. And that's fine with me, I love dark humor.
The game itself is a cult classic and fun to play. By now, we should all know that. So, let's put down those rose-colored glasses and look at the remake. But the remake is something you either love or hate. I loved the remakes of Grim Fandango and the Monkey Island games, but this one is dodgy. The voice acting is HORRIBLE for most characters (except for Edna and Bernard), and I mean not even "fun cheesy", but boring and dreadful. It takes all the fun and joy right out the game. Plus, the subtitles most of the time take longer than the voice acting, resulting in a pause after some lines. So... Punchlines be gone! You can't even use the skip option, because 95% of the time it skips the rest of the dialog, and you miss the rest. And it never got fixed, thanks Double Fine. Obviously, the sound is way better than the original Soundblaster sound, as far as quality goes. But the "revised soundtrack" is dry and uninspired, sounding like some MIDI on a better soundcard. Nope, not convinced on that. But I will give them that the remake is as close to the original as you can get: graphics and animations look like they exactly redrew the original ones. That being said, I didn't really like the new "smooth" graphics and ... yeah. I switched to classic mode for the rest of the game. Sorry, but this remake is not my cup of tea. :-(
If you look at it, it's basically an old-school point and click adventure. It plays like a game from the 1980s, without spoken dialogue and in 640x480 pixels. But the missing dialogue is one of the strong selling point: There's only speech- and thought bubbles with emotions. Somehow this intensifies the whole experience, because you get used to interpreting the events on screen with emotions only. After two oder three hours of gameplay I stopped "thinking words" when encountering other characters. As it is, it's a sweet little game. And I think "sweet" is what describes it best. The story is very confusing at first, but after a while you sorta get what happened. The story of the innocent, mentally challenged clown that is hated by the whole town is incredibly touching (I'm looking at you, graveyard scene!) Controls are nice and easy, nothing special. Only bug I encountered was with switching back and forth between windows (breaks the game). Unfortunately, the ending is really weak and REALLY corny, therefore -1 star. (Honestly, the ending is the definition of corny-ness. Ugh!)
First of all, I usually love FMV adventure games like these. Toonstruck, Phantasmagoria, you name them. But this one is upright horrible even though you can clearly see that the designers had some great ideas. What kills this game are basically two points: Speed and acting. First: speed. The game is incredibly slow paced. You move by clicking on the edge of the screen, then watching a pre-rendered transition and sometimes a cutscene. It literally feels like a sloth crawling through the house. If you're searching for the next "open" room, it takes AGES just to head from 1st floor to the kitchen. It takes all the joy and excitement straight away - and it doesn't stop there. Within the puzzles, a number of audio clips per puzzle will be played to give you some mysterious hints on to how to solve the puzzle. Nice enough. But if you restart a puzzle (and you will do this a LOT), the voice clips will play again and they are not skippable. This means, the puzzles will take very, veeeery long. Second: Acting. From dodgy voice acting to the really horrible performances by ALL of the actors. I'm sorry, they did their best, but even the worst FMV games like "Voyeur" had better actors. And again, some actors are acting REALLY slow, dragging out scenes. It's as if the director decided: "Yeah, please, play that again half tempo. We need footage." The puzzles are sometimes absurd and really hard to solve, but you're given the in-built cheatbook in the library, so that's that. Overall, it's an interesting game. The story is intriguing, the basic idea of an abandoned house with mysterious guests is a real something, BUT the design and acting is downright awful. If you get this game cheap and if you've got lots of time to spend, this game is for you. If you get easily annoyed with unskippable cutscenes repeating over and over, better skip this game.
I'm certainly not a hardcore adventure gamer, but I enjoy a good adventure game every now and then. This is one of them. Sanitarium is less of a game with difficult puzzles and mind-bending dialogues, it's more of a journey. It's nicely designed and you can see all the blood, sweat and tears that went into making this game. Yes, there are some bugs (no, that's a lie, there are tons of bugs). Yes, the controls take some time to get used to. Yes, the puzzles are very easy to solve if you have some experience with adventure games. But does this spoil the fun? Nope. All these imperfections makes you appreciate the game even more. The story is deeper than you may think at first: it's a travel through a human mind, troubled by traumas. Within this journey you learn to deal with foes and fears in a clever way. I wouldn't describe it as a horror or scary game, it's more of a thriller that is set in an unpleasant atmosphere. And that's what gets you in the end: a deep feeling of trouble. Additionally, the graphics are very pretty and beautiful. Graphics definitely hold up until today, with a bit of tweaking you can get it to run in 1080p as well (see forums). If you get around the bugs - and they seem to get worse with every year that passes - you get an weird and fun ride for some bucks. For some help with the annoying bugs, check the GOG forums where I put up to threads to help with the most common bugs.
