Sanitarium

"Never thought psychology would be this easy..."

The first time I ran across Sanitarium was while aimlessly browsing my local Electronics Boutique, half-heartedly searching for the newest tactical strategy classic on the shelves. What caught my eye was the fantastic, intense image of a half-wrapped face with a terrified eye plastered across the front of the box. The choice screenshots included convinced me to give up on strategy for a while and go back to the good old adventure games.

I'm an old adventure veteran, with my accomplishments including the Space Quest series, the King's Quest series, Myst and Riven, and a host of other, lesser-known titles. That's why, after approximately 7 hours of gameplay, I completed the final chapter of Sanitarium more than a little disappointed.

The premise of the game is pretty simple: you're an amnesiac waking up in an asylum, swathed in bandages and completely sane. Over the course of nine chapters, you need to discover what happened to you.

Unfortunately, you discover what happened to you in the opening cinematic. So the actual premise is kind of different: reveal the Bad Guy's evil plan and stop him. How do you do that? By wandering through your own twisted psyche while escaping from the asylum.

An hour into the game, you'll unravel the real actual premise: wade through a handful of disjointed puzzles to win the next, half-relevant cinematic sequence that reveals the Bad Guy's evil plan.

Confused yet?

The game advertises as a dark, disturbing exploration of an insane mind. This is misleading in a number of ways. First, the game is (accurately) rated T (ages 13+). How dark and disturbing could it be? As it turns out, not very. Second, the exploration is of the different worlds, not the insance mind, and anything you discover during gameplay has little relevance to the plot. It's really a game and a movie in one, but in a bad way. "Solve these puzzles. Watch that movie." Finally, you're not exploring an insane mind at all. You're exploring the imaginations of a perfectly sane mind. So what's left? Three CD's worth of very little.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment is the destruction of the mood. The first two chapters, I must admit, are brilliant. The puzzles were imaginative and realistic, except for one, where *SPOILER ALERT! STOP READING HERE!* the combination of a lock is discovered by counting how many times a child was beaten in tic-tac-toe. *SPOILER FINISHED! COMMENCE READING!* This, of course, made no sense whatsoever. The rest of the puzzles were perfect. They required observation, simple logic, and no random clicking whatsoever. In addition, some of the puzzles and their solutions were thoroughly disturbing, and I found myself mumbling, "I really don't want to do that. I really don't want to do that," more than a few times.

Beginning with chapter three, however, the game makes its slow, unhalting slide into mediocrity. The disturbingly suffocating mood simply disappears, and, in its place, an unfittingly humorous tone is adopted. To make matters worse, the game suffers the common adventure-game-failure disease: the puzzles lose their ingenuity and logic, and you just know that the designers suddenly ran out of ideas. From there on in, the puzzles are no longer challenging, some solutions even seem random, and the story becomes a race to finish before giving up in disappointment.

It's from here that the other problems with the game become apparent. First, the voice-acting, while passable in the beginning, suddenly becomes painful. It's not that the acting quality dropped; it's that the rest of the game suddenly loses it's darkness and difficulty, leaving the lacks in the nuances (like voice-acting) embarrassingly obvious. What's worse is that one of the worst voice-actors is the main character himself, and you know you're stuck with him for the rest of the game.

Second, the controls are not only unorthodox, but they're incredibly inconvenient. Movement is done by right-clicking in a direction. You can't choose a point and walk to it, you must steer your character around obstacles, and the moment you stop holding down your mouse button your character halts in place and stares blankly. The precision in the steering is also flawed, and the result is that you end up walking up and down the same flight of stairs three or four times before you can convince your character to walk past it, instead.

Also, your character, while completely sane, suffers from mild attacks of stupidity. If you want to manipulate something, you must be standing right next to it. If you're more than three steps away, even if nothing stands in your path, your character will tell you it's not possible to get there. What this means is that, often, the only way to be close enough to manipulate something is to have your character stand directly in front of it, making it impossible for you to click on it. Whee!

The last problem is somewhat connected. Many of the puzzles are difficult only because you can't position your character in such a way that he is close enough to poke an object without being in the way himself. Once you find the magic spot, however, the puzzles are inane. Many of them (including all of the puzzles in chapter eight) require nothing more than following every conversation path with the other characters wandering around.

That said, Sanitarium offers a few saving graces. The sound effects are wonderful. ASC games really paid attention to detail in an effort to provide a fully immersive environment. The sound bytes for the game menu are very eerie, and I found myself saving and loading just to hear the voice whisper, "save game." When you walk next to other characters, you can hear them mumbling or chattering away in the background.

The best part, however, is Sanitarium the movie. The plot, while only marginally involved with the game, is presented well. The story is a little cliche, but the cinematics are beautiful nonetheless. The bits and pieces are revealed at just the right moments, and, while incredibly limited, do provide you with just enough information to extrapolate the story.

In the end, the game does make a statement about the designers' ideas on sanity and the human mind. It also leaves you wondering why they decided to call it a game. Short, unchallenging, and way too cheerful, Sanitarium is disappointing in its gameplay and its texture.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/01/99, Updated 11/01/99