The Gentleman's Reticule

While suffering side-effects of the fashionable swine-flu vaccine, I force my fevered brain to think up some words on a game from 1998 called Sanitarium.

Sanitarium is like those dreams you get when you’re coming down with the flu; it kind makes sense but is also peculiar and operating on some bizarre logic all of its own.  For example, to complete an early section I had to save a town full of abandoned, disfigured children from a giant, talking meteor-plant they called Mother, who wanted to change them from ‘lumps of sick meat’ into vegetation like herself.  Yes, that kind of makes sense.  In a very creepy and mad kind of way.

Sanitarium is a top-down, point-and-click adventure game in which you play an interned psychiatric patient.  The introductory FMV shows your apparent escape and subsequent car crash explaining the bandaged face and amnesia you awake with as the game begins.  To discover the truth surrounding your incarceration you must traverse the surreal half-realities of the asylum and nightmarish landscapes of the protagonist’s psyche.

D’ya think?

Now, Sanitarium is a clunky old game and there are many reasons to justify why it was panned when released.  Your character walks painfully slowly which is a drag when you have to go back and forth around fairly large environments.  My journeys from A to B were also frustrated  by accidental activation of pernickety trigger zones that would often drag me up or down stairs against my sulky will.  When you have to interact there are no separate ‘use’, ‘look’ or ‘talk to’ commands, instead it’s left click to examine then left click again to interact, slowing the pace still further.  Most heinously, the game is cursed with a deficient system when detecting smaller or less obviously usable objects.   I found myself stuck on several occasions because of this and never for the actual puzzles which provide little challenge for anyone with even the slightest experience of point-and-click adventures.

Sanitarium’s strengths lie in original settings and story; there are several truly memorable and unique places to visit in this game.  One of my favourites was the travelling circus sited on a small island besieged by a rampant, man-eating squid.  It was utterly uncanny: terrified locals, huddled near slum houses, await their deaths while a shabby circus continues to ply its trade beside them.  Abstract encounters like these form the game, with no literal relation to the reality of your character’s situation which is gradually revealed in snippets of FMV.  Where Sanitarium’s puzzles are simplistic, the allegorical nature of its environments in relation to the narrative are refreshingly nuanced, resembling more recent titles like Pathalogic or Bioshock.  Unfortunately, the more impressive scenes  are clustered in the first half of the game leaving the remainder disappointing by comparison.  The dialogue also seems to lapse later in the game with fewer interesting bit-players and a greater emphasis on progressing the story which was, however, still sophisticated and compelling enough to hold my interest.  At its best I was reminded of the subtle complexities of the Silent Hill series as themes of guilt and childhood bereavement intertwine with the subjects of vivisection and pharmaceutical profiteering.  This is epitomised in a genuinely moving section set within the protagonist’s family home.

The touching climax of Chapter 4.

There were many times when I was playing Sanitarium through gritted teeth, frustrated by the controls, pointless combat or occasional necessity to plough through dull dialogue.  For me, it saved itself from these otherwise unforgivable sins with an earnest commitment to telling a sophisticated story in an original way, incorporating art and level design as only computer games can.  With the looks of a polished Fallout 2 and an atmosphere somewhere between Lovecraft and The Twilight Zone, Sanitarium offers some unique experiences to those prepared to work through the shoddy interface and weaker design choices.

Sanitarium is available from www.gog.com