Sanitarium

The Good
Sanitarium's wonderful atmosphere and plot, with tons of screwed up characters and bizarre locations, sets it apart from most adventure games. And with those gorgeous graphics, good sounds and nice cinematic sequences, it really got me hooked.

The Bad
Some puzzles might be a bit too easy for fans of the genre.

The Bottom Line
A great game well worth playing, if you like entertaining the darker side of your soul.

The Good
(eh, I'll just start by saying that I refer to the main character as "the character" as well as "you", since it is you playing it. I just can't remember the guy's name...it's been a while)

I heard nothing but bad things about this game. My uncle thought it was horrible, my friends thought it was the worst game ever made. They probably weren't alone, since at the time the only places I'd even heard of the game was through their ranting. I picked the game up out of boredom - just to see what was so bad about it, if nothing else - and was surprised to find such a great game!

This is what an adventure game should be. It reminds me of the old Lucas Arts adventure games, but with updated graphics and a story that's completely unique to the computer gaming world.

Sanitarium was one of the few games nowadays that actually brings a chill to my spine. Not necessarily because it was scary (though, there were times...), but because surprise plot elements that were revealed were actually interesting. It wasn't just a "oh look, he's a demon" or "oh wow, that guy's evil" plot twist that you find in so many other games.

The thing that adds to the game's atmosphere the most is that it all takes place in a man's own reality. Because of this, the game is not limited by what can and can't be, but every area and object you find is related to, and contributes to the game's plot. Every part of the game you see is coming from some deep recess of the character's mind, some dark, destroyed, warped, fading image of something, and it is a wonderful thing. You will journey into images from his childhood, from the insect-like world from a comic book, to a melting image of his once home, through his mind and destroyed memory all the while trying to understand who you are and what lead up to this. And the second area you visit, with the mutated children - it is one of the most chilling and memorable places I've ever seen in a computer game.

Though it becomes obvious who the real "bad guy" is in the game, you are never distracted from it, because you get the feeling the character in the game suspects as well, but he is more concerned with finding out who it is and what part it plays in his madness.

Puzzles are fairly simple, but I like easy puzzles in adventure games. I love the adventure genre because it often feels more like playing an interactive movie than just killing brain cells playing a computer game, and too many adventure games have ridiculously pointless, impossible puzzles in it.

When you complete some of the more plot-contributing puzzles, you are rewarded with fantastic cinematics. They're all high quality and very well-done. Sometimes they're just a more detailed view of what you just accomplished, and sometimes it's another journey into the character's mind. And you can go back and view them all later, if you want, which I loved.

Even though all the characters in the game were either warped memories of someone from the character's past, or a completely imagined person, most of them were quite interesting and had some actual depth to them. I liked listening to them talk about themselves and coming to realize how they might have spawned from the character's madness.

This game gets my highest recommendation. The adventure genre is dying, but it's because there aren't more games like this.

The Bad
While I grew to love the character in the game, I thought that (especially in the beginning of the game) his voice was annoying. It was acted well enough (though not perfect), but it just had a certain tone to it that was annoying.

Maybe I'm just stupid, but I wish there had been more emphasis or explanation as to some of the parts of the game, particularly the Sanitarium areas, especially the second one, since it seems much less insane than the first one. Were they the character's subconscious realization that he was trapped within his own mind? Or were they spawned from coming in and out of a coma and interacting with doctors? Well, like I said, maybe I'm dumb or missed the reference, but if we were expected to just draw up our own conclusions...well, I don't like that.

Some quests involve asking dozens of characters the same questions over and over. Now, I didn't mind this because most of the characters were so interesting, but some parts had characters that were no different than the one next to it, save for a unique name or something. Though I think there were only two parts where this was necesarry, I think this is the game's biggest drawback.

The Bottom Line
Journey into the mind of a madman and follow the footsteps through your destroyed memory to find out who you are and how you got here. You'll begin to question what is reality and what is madness. This game is one of the best adventure games ever created.

The Good

Bizarre. That is the only word that can summarize this game. You play Max, an amnesiac who may or may not be insane, in an environment that is either his subconsciousness, or a hallucinatory version of the insane asylum he is in. Or both. Sounds like a good idea for a video game? Of course it does!

This basic idea is easily the strongest point of the whole game. I'm not sure it is completely unique, but at the very least games dealing with minds of the insane are not particularly common. "Sanitarium" is divided into several chapters, some of which manage to display the mess that is inside human brain wonderfully. The others, unfortunately, don't, but I'll return to that later. The atmosphere and the subtle details linking the chapters together (like the recurring circus and clown motif) are very impressive (even though the graphics are not particularly so, especially in the cutscenes) and seem to show that someone was really thinking when putting the whole game together. The interface is very simplistic and easy to use. And of course there are several very creepy and disturbing (which does not mean frightening) moments.

The Bad

Unfortunately, there are flaws, and quite a lot of those. The most obvious design mistake is that the by far strongest chapter is the second one. And if that wasn't enough, the second best follows almost immediately afterward and from there on it gets steadily worse. Partly it's because the writers (as mentioned in other reviews here) desperately try to find a sensible plot, reducing all the madness to a hallucination, which essentially means that you stop caring for your hero and, well, about the game as such.

The other thing is that especially the later chapters are connected only very loosely to the rest. This is particularly true of the "comic book" chapter and the incredibly annoying "Mayan" chapter that feel like completely different games that have been added for some very obscure reason as an afterthought. They are different not only visually, but also in overall style; I even think the Mayan chapter was actually supposed to be funny - and I have to stress I did not register anything even remotely resembling a joke in the rest of the game! And if it wasn't meant to be funny... Well, that's even worse.

Then there are the puzzles, which are terribly easy and with very obvious solutions. If you ever get stuck, it is quite likely because you overlooked something (which happens rather a lot). Mostly you just walk around and talk to everyone about everything; the first part of the Mayan chapter in fact consists of virtually nothing else but endless walking and talking. To make the game more difficult, it is seasoned with some "action" sequences that just show that the interface that was more than good for an adventure game is otherwise completely useless (and yet again I point to the Mayan chapter - as if we all didn't know mazes in an adventure game have never ever been a good idea).

What's also incredibly irritating is the walking pace of your character. Almost all of Max's incarnations you will control (yes, there are more than one) are incredibly slow, considering you spend vast majority of playing time walking around. If there were a way to speed him up, the game would be much shorter - and it actually is quite short even as it is. And a last point, though I agree this is nitpicking, the savegame files have a completely ridiculous size for an absolutely linear adventure game - averaging about 1.5 megabytes each (easily RAR-able into about 15 kilobytes). I know that's not really an issue on modern machines, but I think that tells you something about the game's programmers.

The Bottom Line

The beginning of the game is very good and unique, but as it progresses, it becomes more and more annoying and I quite frankly finished it just because I knew I was almost at the end.

Nevertheless, I heartily recommend giving "Sanitarium" a try - but if you can manage that, stop playing after the end of the Mansion segment. You'll have a gaming experience to remember and save yourself a lot of disappointment.