Sanitarium (PC)

Developer:

DreamForge Intertainment

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Release Date:

1998

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Systems:

Windows, iOS

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm writing about the critically acclaimed 1998 PC horror adventure Sanitarium! They were going to call it Asylum before learning that the name was taken, but I think it worked out better this way. 'Sanitarium' is definitely a more distinctive title; you won't find a second one on MobyGames.

This was one of the last games developed by DreamForge Intertainment: the company that put the 'in' into 'entertainment'. I recognise the names of some of the other games they developed, like Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession and Menzoberranzan, but the only one I've written about is Veil of Darkness and that was ages ago. If I remember right it was some kind of isometric horror adventure game, which makes sense because so's this.

I've only got the CD version of the game so I expected it'd be a struggle to get it running in Windows 10. I was ready to start hunting down fan patches and messing around with processor affinities. But all I did was add '-w -e' to the exe's arguments to put it into windowed mode and it was happy, which makes me happy as well.

Okay I'm going to play through a couple of chapters and start taking screenshots, but first I feel like I should let you know that this is a horror game dealing with horrible things (and horrible things happening to children) so please be aware of what kind of rabbit hole we're going down here.

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Also I want to show off the box because it's one of my favourites. The artwork isn't all that amazing, it's just a face wrapped in bandages, but if you angle it to catch the light just right you can see the eye has been embossed into the cardboard.

I'm a sucker for boxes like this. Someday I'm going to get hold of that Stonekeep box with the holographic skeleton on the front as well. Someday...

I had to make a choice here: leave the interlace lines on the screenshot and risk it looking like a mess to some people, or edit them out and make it less authentic. In the end I decided to just leave them, because the low res and motion blur means that it looks a mess either way.

The story begins with someone getting into their car and driving off the rain, which is something you should never do in the CGI intro of a video game, especially on a night as ominous as this, on roads as treacherous as these.

To make things worse he gets on his phone to tell someone (presumably his significant other) that after all those years he's finally found "the answer" and he'll explain everything "when I get home." It's like he's trying to tempt fate. Though now it's got me wondering: could this be the first adventure game where the hero has a mobile phone?

Oh no he's gone and driven his car off a cliff! Who could've seen this coming? I am a bit surprised by how it just punched straight through that crash barrier though. It's like the barrier didn't even feel like trying.

The good news is he's got a real chance of becoming the next Sorcerer Supreme after this, unless Dr Strange has already beaten him to it.

CHAPTER 1: THE TOWER CELLS

Nope, he's ended up in an elaborate asylum with bandages covering his entire head. For a moment I wondered if he'd become the Invisible Man instead, but I can still see his bare arms. I'm the guy in the room by the way, not the one trying to tunnel his way out using his forehead. You can tell my character apart from the other residents because his clothes are a slightly different colour than everyone else's. I only got a glimpse of his trousers in the intro video but I think this might have been what he was wearing in the car as well.

Right, the game's a mouse-driven adventure game but clicking around the screen isn't getting me anywhere. Instead I have to hold the right mouse button down to steer him around like in an action RPG. Trouble is that he moves so slowly, and moving the cursor further away doesn't help. Neither does double clicking.

Maybe there's something in the options.

There's no title screen in this, but I can at least show you what the menu screen looks like. Some of the icons are a bit vague, but it's got a creepy reverse-echoey kid's voice reading out what they mean when I move the cursor over them. It's also got eyes that follow the pointer around the screen. I tried moving the cursor to the middle to make him go cross-eyed, but no luck.

I've had no luck with the options either, as it doesn't seem like there's any way to for me speed him my character up. No slider, no key to hold down. I couldn't find a button to highlight interactive objects either, though I have found that the F-keys make him say random stuff.

Hey there's a giant candle-lit angel statue up here. Very eye catching, but not a whole lot of useful. I clicked it and he said there's a locking mechanism in the base… but what for? He put those ellipses in there himself by the way, it wasn't my fault this time.

He's really not impressed by the state of the living conditions here, it's apparently really filthy, but I was able to persuade him to pick up a towel from the room next to his. Also there was an annoying alarm going off, but I identified the switch and then turned it off with a couple of clicks of the left mouse button.

Oh, I should mention there was an emergency message earlier saying that the generator's about to explode and kill everyone. That's probably what the alarm was about now that I think about it.

I'm trying to talk to this guy but every time I try my stolen towel appears in a bubble above their heads. I tried clicking the towel and then using it on him, but that doesn't work, so don't know what's going on here.

Oh, I know what's wrong: clicking the hero brings up his inventory, so I have to make sure he's standing away from the thing I want to click on. But not too far away or else he complains he can't reach it.

I've got dialogue options! Well, more like keywords. Either way it's nice to be able to ask people the sensible obvious questions like 'Why?' and 'Where?' and 'What makes you think I'm a spirit here to demand vengeance?'

The more information I get, the more topics I get to click on.

I'm in the Village? Oh crap, I'm not Dr Strange or the Invisible Man, I'm the Prisoner!

I'm also lucky to be here, at least according to Dr Morgan. I feel like that's a name I'm supposed to remember. The game's got full voice acting by the way, though that's true of pretty much every adventure game since CDs became a thing.

The main character's got kind of a hammy voice but it suits the tone of the game, which is somewhere between horror and black comedy. For example, a man accidentally fell to his death here as I walked up to say hi, which is horrible, but he did it with his pants around his ankles, so it's also hilarious. The actor chose to exclaim "My God..." in a way that's 50% genuine concern and 50% Adam West Batman and I can't fault him for it. I mean how else do you exclaim "My God..."?

Anyway, I'm clearly not getting a conversation out of him anymore, and the person next to the stairs seems to be planted there to get my dude continually walking up and down the steps whenever I try talking to him, but there's probably a room on the right I can check out.

I've found a guy called Lenny, but he's not keen to speak to me as his mother told him not to talk to strangers. He at least told me why he's in here: he ate some pumpkin pie from the patch and that's apparently very bad.

I asked him where the patch is and he screamed. I asked him where everyone else is and he said mother made them all go to school. I'm starting to feel like this the wrong place to look for a good conversation, especially as the generator's going to explode any minute.

There's nowhere else for me to go though, except for that tower in the middle with the stylish indoor roofing. Trouble is that the bridge is out and when I (accidentally) clicked on the power cable he told me that it's not safe to touch. Hang on, I've got an idea...

It's not a rubber chicken with a pulley in it, but a towel gets the job done in a pinch.

I turned the bridge on so that getting back across will be less of a hassle, then opened the door and had a look around. There's some filing cabinets (locked), a safe (locked) and a VCR (unplugged). Well I've got no reason to think that getting a VCR working is going get me any closer to freedom, but I haven't done it in ages, so I'm going to check it out.

Wait, the puzzle is about plugging composite video cables in? I'm impressed with how realistic it is, but all I'm doing is matching colour to colour.

Hey it's a video of me talking to Dr Morgan!

Morgan explains that the protagonist stole the car he drove away with in the intro in an attempt to escape the asylum. That explains why he already had the outfit, though not why he was on the phone talking about finding the answer. Then again we just met someone convinced he's been sent to his room for stealing pumpkins, so there is the possibility that the protagonist is a little bit delusional himself.

I was pretty impressed with my ability to match colours earlier, but I apparently wired it up wrong as the equipment suddenly explodes into smoke and sparks. In fact the damage was so extensive that the game immediately crashed and shut down.

A FEW MINUTES OF TROUBLESHOOTING LATER

Okay I've switched the compatibility mode to 'Windows 98 / Windows ME' and turned cutscene subtitles off, and the game seems to be stable now. This may already be a solved problem in the Steam and GOG versions, I dunno.

All I know is that the exploding VCR has opened both the lockers and the safe for me! Somehow! Their terrible design failures have led to my success as now I have an ancient key. Wait, what the hell am I supposed to do with an ancient key? Find an ancient keyhole I guess.

Wait, I just remembered something...

Hey I was right, the key is for the angel statue! Also does that stained glass window up there on the left look a bit like a pumpkin patch to you?

When I put the key into the statue's base electricity started arcing across her and she came to life! Then blood started pouring out of her eyes and she began to speak.

She's not impressed with the state her tower is in at the moment, but right now she's more concerned about the cries of her children. She tells the hero to look for the truth, then covers him with her wings.

CHAPTER 2: THE INNOCENT ABANDONED

The magic angel statue teleported us outside the exploding mental hospital and now we're free! In a lot of games that would seem perfectly reasonable, but somehow I get the feeling that we're not quite at 100% sanity right now.

Seems like the statue's fallen asleep again, but that's fine as I already know what I'm doing here: I'm seeking the truth to save the children. They don't look like they're in any urgent need of being saved though. I guess I should go over and talk to them.

Oh damn!

Yeah, okay, I can see there's a problem here. The kids themselves seem pretty okay with what's happening to them, they're just playing together like normal kids, but I'm sure most doctors would agree that two mouths is beyond the recommended amount for their age. Also the town around them is falling apart and there's no sign of their parents.

You know what this means?

It means I get to ride the big ugly springy duck!

I have to be honest, I wasn't expecting him to actually get on the thing. I tried clicking on the pig next to it to have a ride on that as well, but it broke. So he shoved the whole thing into his pocket to hide the evidence. You never know when a spring rider shaped like a pig is going to come in useful.

This isn't a huge village, there's only a handful of buildings here and the one up there is locked, but the walking speed is making it feel like I'm going on a hike just to get from one side to the other. In fact I should time how long it takes.

30 seconds. It takes a whole half a minute to go from the top of this town to the bottom, and that's a lot of time to spend doing nothing.

In more interesting news, a comet is heading for Earth! In fact I suspect it already got here, looking at the state of this town hall. The only other thing I can look at in here are the circus posters and they've got me worried that they're foreshadowing that chapter 3 will take place in the clown dimension.

Also if you look at that sign in front of the church at the bottom left there's a '451' for you. Though hang on, this came out in 1998; seems a bit too early for it to be a deliberate reference to the Looking Glass Studios keycode.

I've been trying to talk to the children, but I only get so far before they tell me to go away because I'm a stranger. If they knew my name I wouldn't be so strange to them, but I don't know what it is myself and making one up would just be wrong!

Also a weird clip of a woman walking down a hallway and a kid reading a comic keeps coming up and it's weird. It's really grainy footage and has a number etched into it, so it seems like someone filmed this for some reason.

Oh, I just had to keep talking to people to get the final clip to appear, where the woman calls the kid 'Max'. Turns out this is our hero as a child and now we know his name! This means I can talk to everyone properly and ask them all the keywords I've been collecting.

Seems that everyone around here is scared of saying too much in case Mother hears them and sends them to the patch... it's very similar to what the guy in the asylum was saying.

This guy has a fishing rod but he's not going anywhere until the church bell rings, so I can't have it. Max drew my attention to the car by mentioning that it smells like gasoline here, but there's nothing in there for me to grab either. The game has me running laps of the place searching everywhere... well, walking laps, but all I've been collecting so far is clues.

Things got worse when the kids challenged me to a game of hide and seek. Now I've got to walk around trying to spot the hiding behind bits of the scenery!

A LOT OF WALKING AROUND LATER

The good news is I found a crowbar and used it to open the school and find the last kid. The bad news is that it's full of the corpses of their parents. So that's what the guy back in the asylum meant when he said Mother made everyone go to school.

This kid is a real dick by the way. He promised to give me a key to the store if I found everyone, but he claims I haven't found his secret weapon yet. There's one more girl here called Carol who's been hiding for almost a year and no one has any idea where she is!

I don't know what else to do but drag Max's slow ass from one end of the village to the other again looking for clues to where Carol went.

At least now I've learned that the cursor wobbles a bit when it's over something I can interact with, so I can tell that this is the only gravestone here I'll be able to click on without going to the effort of clicking on everything else first. Not sure why I want to be interacting with C. Driscoll's grave though.

Oh.

Oh no.

'C. Driscoll'... that son of a bitch kid knew all along. I think one of the other kids has a spade I can borrow as well. Man, this game is messed up.

I dug up Carol's grave and now one of the kids is pulling her around in his wagon, so I'm just going to let them all carry on what they're doing. They gave me the key I to open this building up and I'm ready to get what whatever I need to get out of this damn place.

Though it turns out all that's behind the locked door is an empty gas can and another article about the comet. Seems that the comet crashed nearby and started making the vines grow, but the reverend took charge and made it illegal to cut them. I guess when you're the reverend and the mayor, people have to do what you say. And now they're all dead and their kids are turning into mutants.

Worse, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do next! I found the cross from the top of the church lying in a river, but I can't fish it out without a fishing rod, and I can't get that without ringing the bell. Plus I found a hose, but it needs some kind of tool to disconnect it and all I have is a gas can and a springy pig.

I know, I'll throw the pig in the river and use it to hop over to the other side!

Wait, that worked? Seriously? I could've done that at any time?

Now I've finally reached the famous pumpkin patch. Except not quite, as there's a locked fence in the way and Max has no interest in trying to climb over it.

It's a combination lock, so I don't need to hunt down an item this time, but I don't remember seeing any numbers written in any of the news articles I came across. Maybe I could ask the kids about it, though I seriously doubt they'll be any help and I don't feel like making the hike back over there.

OH, OF COURSE! DUH!

4-5-1.

It's Reverend Mayor O'Toole's favourite number! (I guess he must have been a System Shock fan. Either that or Crusade: No Regret fan, because they're the only games I'm aware of that used the 451 lock code before this did).

Max is way too hyped about his new scythe.

I went back to use my new toy to cut the hose free and fish the cross out of the lake, but the moment I reached the fence he put the scythe back down again! I guess this scythe is for pumpkin patch business only.

So I reclaimed the scythe and carried on through the winding pumpkin field instead. Didn't take me long to figure out what it's meant to be used for, as I was soon assaulted by evil birds and had to keep swinging it in self-defence. There's no health bar, but I can hear Max's heartbeat when he's in the field and it gets faster every time he gets hit, so I'm thinking I should avoid that.

Oh no, it's Jack Pumpkinhead from the movie Return to Oz and he's trying to beat me to death with a stick! It's an actual boss fight in an adventure game!

Or maybe not. Max seems convinced that there's a way to beat him that doesn't involve swinging the scythe, and I hope he's right as I just got my ass kicked here. Fortunately the vines took pity on Max, as once his heartbeat was racing too fast he was just dragged beneath the ground and spat back out at the start of the field.

I'm going to need some other item to defeat the pumpkin warrior. I could try setting him on fire if I had some gas in my gas can, but I don't know where I'd find any... THE WRECKED CAR! Man, I must have forgotten to wind my brain up today or something, because I'm being way too slow to come up with obvious answers. Hey didn't I syphon gas in Full Throttle as well?

ONE TRIP ACROSS THE WHOLE TOWN AND BACK AGAIN LATER

Turns out that I can't get the gasoline without the hose, but I don't actually need it to fight this guy. I just started smashing pumpkins and that weakened him somehow.

There is an empty gasoline-powered generator here though... sitting right next to the glowing metallic space comet. I also found some jumper leads inside a tractor so I connected them to the empty generator, but I'm going to need something else before I can attach the other end to the comet. Some kind of metal cross maybe?

I'll check inside the barn and see if there's anything helpful in there.

What a huge disgusting nightmare!! His words, not mine.

I've found Mother and she's given me the rest of the story, though most of what she's saying I already picked up from the notes I found. It's a bit of a Maniac Mansion scenario, except with more vines and less tentacles. Basically, the people in the town were dicks, Jeddah Driscoll and Reverend Mayor O'Toole in particular, and the comet creature decided to step in and do something about it. I wouldn't say she's the hero of the tale though, as she killed the parents and started turning the kids into plants. You know, for their own good.

Mother swats Max away, but I found a wrench lying in the doorway afterwards so I got what I wanted! Now I can get that hose, and I don't even need to traverse the pumpkin field again as I've made a shortcut.

ONE TRIP ACROSS THE WHOLE TOWN AND BACK AGAIN LATER

Alright, I used the wrench on the hose, used the hose on the car, used the gas on the generator and now I just need that metal cross to finish this electrical execution contraption and IS THAT ANOTHER BLOODY CLOWN POSTER ON THAT WALL? That's it, chapter 3 is clowns, there's no way it's not.

I really wanted to make it through this chapter all by myself without checking a walkthrough, but I'm completely stuck now. I know I have to ring the church bell to get the kid away from his fishing rod, I just don't know what I can use to do it and I can't bear making another trip around all the buildings looking for items. It takes so damn long and I've already searched everywhere thoroughly.

But what's worst of all is this shed with the fish on the roof. If you click on it, Max says there's surely going to be some clues inside, but there isn't. In fact Max even mentions that he expected it to be more useful.

Completely redundant shed... big red fish on the roof... why did it take someone else to point out to me that it's a red herring? How did I not figure that out myself? I'm so ashamed.

Okay GameFAQs, I give up, tell me what to do.

Turns out I needed to grab this rock over here. None of the other bits of debris or trash lying in the streets will do the job, just this rock. All I need to do is throw it at the bell and the fishing rod is as good as mine. Okay, next problem: figuring out where it wants me to stand before he'll throw it...

I got the metal cross, connected the jumper leads to it, and... it worked! The space monster was killed, the kids are turning back to normal, and I've even got a portal out of town. Everything's working out implausibly well really.

Oh, it was all a dream? That explains a lot really.

Now I'm back in the asylum again like nothing happened, chatting with Elvis Presley in bear slippers. No clowns though, so that's something. I suppose I should stop here before I start pushing my luck.


CONCLUSION

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I might have mentioned this already, but you walk really slowly in Sanitarium. I feel like this needs to be stressed. It was driving me mad even before I had to check every room for a third time to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

There's another big problem: interactive objects and inventory items aren't always easy to spot and there isn't a button you can press to make them all appear. Sure you wouldn't expect there to be on a game from 1998, but it would've been a big help. Especially when I was looking for something to lob at that church bell. You can't even quickly sweep the cursor across the screen looking for it to change when it's over something of interesting, because you have to wait to see if it's wobbling.

Also I haven't had this much trouble navigating the level in an adventure game since Escape from Monkey Island. They went with action RPG controls, so you have to steer Max around the scenery instead of just clicking where you want him to go, and it's not a good match for the gameplay. Though aside from that it's definitely a proper 'talk to everyone, use stuff on other stuff' adventure game, and it's been a fairly logical one so far despite taking place in nesting realms of madness. I often knew what I wanted to do, I just didn't have all the pieces I needed to do it yet. It helps that the realms of madness have been fairly small, so you're not overwhelmed with potential puzzle pieces, and you can't die or make it unwinnable.

It's also fairly pretty I reckon, with its Baldur's Gate-style rendered world, but you can make up your own mind about that from the screenshots. They did well with their 256 colour limit. It looks more alive in game, with rippling water, birds flying overhead, and trash blowing in the streets. Good footstep sounds too. The sound's pretty decent in general, with creepy ambience, creepy piano and lots of creepy child voices (though the voice acting can be a bit... Resident Evil)

Plus there's something about this game that pulls me in even when I'm not enjoying it all that much. In fact I bought the game after playing the demo, knowing exactly what the controls were like and how slow it was, because that bit in the asylum at the start was so weird and fascinating that I wanted to see what happened next. Though I couldn't have been that enthralled as I never actually finished it.

There's plenty of reviewers who have finished it however, and every one I've checked has been overwhelmingly positive. Seems that people really like this game! They do say it goes a bit downhill after the first few chapters and no one's all that keen on the controls, but this could've been considered the best adventure game of 1998 if it wasn't for Grim Fandango LucasArts'ing all over the place.

Anyway, the game's a pain in the ass, but I feel compelled to give it a 'not crap' star regardless:

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Alright, I'm done, now it's your turn to tell everyone how much you love/hate Sanitarium. Or you could have a guess what the next game's going to be. Or you could just sit there in silence being completely uncommunicative. Either way, thanks for reading!