Man, I’m pretty sure the definition of ‘my shit’ changes every time I wanna say something’s my shit, but god is Sanitarium my shit. Namely, by being the spiritual successor to Harvester that I never knew was out there. Transgressive, fucking gnarly, yet at the same time so evocative. A mystery you’re trying to solve regarding who you are and why you’re here, interspersed with segments where you animorph into a little girl or a four-armed freak and walk around a Doctor Who episode. Oodles of characters, with oodles of dialogue (oodles of voiced dialogue, too, which is pretty incredible for a game from 1998), who all yet feel distinct from one another and cover a different piece of the greater picture. The idea, the immediate indication that everything around represents something else entirely, prompting the player to speculate at every little thing: to put the puzzle pieces together in their head as more and more keep getting added to the board. Wrap it up as a 90s adventure game, add all the ambitious storytelling shit without any of the typical design issues being a 90s adventure game entails, and… you get the picture. One painted in viscera, in grime, in some unfortunate 90s stuff, but that’s frankly just part of the package. And, to an extent, part of the appeal.
I think what I love most about this game is… not just its artstyle, but how that kinda feeds into how the game is played. Unlike most adventure games of its ilk, Sanitarium is isometric. As opposed to seeing things from side-on, you see them top down. And as opposed to seeing merely one room at a time, each chapter gives you the whole map as one big ‘room,’ encouraging you to explore, interact, find items, and solve puzzles, in part to unlock more areas of the map, in the goal of eventually finding your way out of the puzzle box and into the next one. They’re generally self-contained, and to an extent, episodic — while each odd-numbered chapter follows your journey through the titular sanitarium, even-numbered chapters send you somewhere else entirely: almost alien worlds, following their own storylines, yet still thematically connecting to the main plot, both thematically and through the memories you periodically get back. I’m especially fond of how this helps the game avoid… the typical adventure game pitfalls. As everything is in its own little box, and as things don’t transfer between chapters, there’s very little risk of softlocking, nor does your inventory ever become so big that it becomes unusable. With the exception of one chapter, I never had to pixel hunt for anything: items are fairly well highlighted against the environment, and the mouse cursor will happily highlight all the things you can interact with. You never have to backtrack, or go through room after room after room after room: there are generally only a few points of interest all interconnected with each other, and even then, as opposed to the typical inventory puzzles, most of what you have to do in Sanitarium is… talking to people. Talking to other people about what the first person just said. Listening to them so that you know what to do next. Interfacing with the story…
Which, in turn, means interfacing with the best of what this game has to offer. I know I’m kinda repeating myself here but I’m really into this game’s narrative. Not only the main story — the way it dripfeeds more and more until you slowly clue into the full picture — but… honestly I think the side-chapters were my favourite part of this, if, partially, because I never knew what I was gonna get going into them. They vary, not just in aesthetic — the grey, dreary, run-down circus besieged by an outside threat compared to… the sheer grossness of The Hive — but in the kind of stories they want to tell. Compare chapter 2’s slow-burn Children of the Corn-themed mystery, where you explore an abandoned town, play games with the denizens, slowly piecing stuff together, to chapter 8’s… incredible bungling of Aztec mythology, one where you go to the Water Temple and the Wind Temple and the Jaguar Temple to defeat therandom guy god Quetzalcoatl, a name the game is incapable of pronouncing correctly or even consistently. More than just being really fun on their own, though, I really like how they link into the main plot: beyond being the vector in how the main character gets their memories back, they serve really well as explorations of the main character’s subconscious: everything being representative of something and the game all but inviting the player to try and get their head around it, trying to understand what means what, shoving some utter gobbledygook in your face and yet still having it make sense by the end. It’s great. Such a ride.
I also have to say, if you really have to put combat into your 90s adventure game, there are worse ways to do it than what Sanitarium does. While it still leaves a bit to be desired — the combat sections feel rather extraneous to the story themselves, and I preferred going through the random obstacle challenges the game also does — it’s unintrusive on the rest of the game, and not much of a chore to go through. Specifically, the designation of combat to specific “combat zones” within an area, and the fact that combat itself is rather low stakes (with the player… only being sent back to the beginning of the combat zone upon death) means that… while it feels rather pointless when the game stops in its track to go make you do combat for five minutes, it’s rather inoffensive, not a mark against the game like combat was for, say, Harvester. Where I think this game perhaps does falter is in how much dialogue there is. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword. Whereas sometimes it’s to the game's strengths — all its characters, and how well they fill in whatever world they happen to be inhabiting — oftentimes the dialogue you get is… the same explanation/exposition somebody else has given you, and that somebody else is gonna give you when you talk to them. I get why that’s the case (you need to account as to whether a given person is gonna talk to that given NPC first, or is only gonna try to talk to that NPC) but what this results in are lotttttttttttsa cases where the game is endlessly repeating itself but where you still feel obligated to keep checking because maybe this time you’ll get some new info, or find some fun dialogue, or something worth it. Kinda found my eyes glazing over after the third person in a row talking to me about the exact same thing. It’s rougghhhhhhhhhh.
And it’s a bit sad that that is a bit of a knock against it because otherwise this… really is a game that’s firing on all cylinders, and otherwise does everything in its power to appeal to me and me specifically. For being a 90s adventure game that avoids… basically all the pitfalls its genre otherwise tends to fall into, an utterly evocative set design that never fails to feel so effectively grotty no matter which disparate place you happen to go, and a story that’s more than happy to keep providing more and more as you piece together both the literal and figurative parts of its narrative… man I hope there’s more like this out there. It might not be the only thing that appeals to me, but god did this really hit the spot. 9/10.
I think what I love most about this game is… not just its artstyle, but how that kinda feeds into how the game is played. Unlike most adventure games of its ilk, Sanitarium is isometric. As opposed to seeing things from side-on, you see them top down. And as opposed to seeing merely one room at a time, each chapter gives you the whole map as one big ‘room,’ encouraging you to explore, interact, find items, and solve puzzles, in part to unlock more areas of the map, in the goal of eventually finding your way out of the puzzle box and into the next one. They’re generally self-contained, and to an extent, episodic — while each odd-numbered chapter follows your journey through the titular sanitarium, even-numbered chapters send you somewhere else entirely: almost alien worlds, following their own storylines, yet still thematically connecting to the main plot, both thematically and through the memories you periodically get back. I’m especially fond of how this helps the game avoid… the typical adventure game pitfalls. As everything is in its own little box, and as things don’t transfer between chapters, there’s very little risk of softlocking, nor does your inventory ever become so big that it becomes unusable. With the exception of one chapter, I never had to pixel hunt for anything: items are fairly well highlighted against the environment, and the mouse cursor will happily highlight all the things you can interact with. You never have to backtrack, or go through room after room after room after room: there are generally only a few points of interest all interconnected with each other, and even then, as opposed to the typical inventory puzzles, most of what you have to do in Sanitarium is… talking to people. Talking to other people about what the first person just said. Listening to them so that you know what to do next. Interfacing with the story…
Which, in turn, means interfacing with the best of what this game has to offer. I know I’m kinda repeating myself here but I’m really into this game’s narrative. Not only the main story — the way it dripfeeds more and more until you slowly clue into the full picture — but… honestly I think the side-chapters were my favourite part of this, if, partially, because I never knew what I was gonna get going into them. They vary, not just in aesthetic — the grey, dreary, run-down circus besieged by an outside threat compared to… the sheer grossness of The Hive — but in the kind of stories they want to tell. Compare chapter 2’s slow-burn Children of the Corn-themed mystery, where you explore an abandoned town, play games with the denizens, slowly piecing stuff together, to chapter 8’s… incredible bungling of Aztec mythology, one where you go to the Water Temple and the Wind Temple and the Jaguar Temple to defeat the
I also have to say, if you really have to put combat into your 90s adventure game, there are worse ways to do it than what Sanitarium does. While it still leaves a bit to be desired — the combat sections feel rather extraneous to the story themselves, and I preferred going through the random obstacle challenges the game also does — it’s unintrusive on the rest of the game, and not much of a chore to go through. Specifically, the designation of combat to specific “combat zones” within an area, and the fact that combat itself is rather low stakes (with the player… only being sent back to the beginning of the combat zone upon death) means that… while it feels rather pointless when the game stops in its track to go make you do combat for five minutes, it’s rather inoffensive, not a mark against the game like combat was for, say, Harvester. Where I think this game perhaps does falter is in how much dialogue there is. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword. Whereas sometimes it’s to the game's strengths — all its characters, and how well they fill in whatever world they happen to be inhabiting — oftentimes the dialogue you get is… the same explanation/exposition somebody else has given you, and that somebody else is gonna give you when you talk to them. I get why that’s the case (you need to account as to whether a given person is gonna talk to that given NPC first, or is only gonna try to talk to that NPC) but what this results in are lotttttttttttsa cases where the game is endlessly repeating itself but where you still feel obligated to keep checking because maybe this time you’ll get some new info, or find some fun dialogue, or something worth it. Kinda found my eyes glazing over after the third person in a row talking to me about the exact same thing. It’s rougghhhhhhhhhh.
And it’s a bit sad that that is a bit of a knock against it because otherwise this… really is a game that’s firing on all cylinders, and otherwise does everything in its power to appeal to me and me specifically. For being a 90s adventure game that avoids… basically all the pitfalls its genre otherwise tends to fall into, an utterly evocative set design that never fails to feel so effectively grotty no matter which disparate place you happen to go, and a story that’s more than happy to keep providing more and more as you piece together both the literal and figurative parts of its narrative… man I hope there’s more like this out there. It might not be the only thing that appeals to me, but god did this really hit the spot. 9/10.