Game Review: Sanitarium

I've been on an old-school pc gaming kick recently. Now, you have to realize that what I call "old-school" may not mean the same thing to everybody else. I consider early to mid 90's games old school, simply because I didn't have a computer at the time and when I did get one, I had never heard of these games.

Sometimes I go on IGN or GameSpot and search a game I have, say Thief: Deadly Shadows for instance, and I look at the other games it recommends. Sometimes the recommendations pan out like when I searched for T:DS and I found out it was the third game in the series and that lead to me playing the other two, which are much more tense and overall enjoyable than the third. One game I found while checking out recommendations was this one, Sanitarium by ASC Games.

Sanitarium, besides being one of my favorite Metallica songs EVER, is a nice little action game where you take control of a prisoner in a very whacked-out asylum. It's your job to figure out what in the hell is going on. The game is divided into eight chapters across three disks and..It's freakin' awesome. I'll admit, I got this one quite awhile ago and lost interest when I got stuck in the second chapter. I found it again the other day and re-installed it on a whim. There are a few things I disliked and I'll get to those but I'm going to start off with what was awesome.


The story was great. I don't want to give anything away, but it kept me guessing right until the end. The visuals were creepy and, although dated, were still good. The sound also added to the atmosphere, although most of the voice acting was, well, bad. Then again, it was released in 1996 and I don't think I've seen any game from that time when the voice acting didn't kind of suck.

Now, there were only a couple of things that irritated me about this game. Mainly the length. Even though it was eight "chapters" it only took me a few hours altogether to beat. Sadly, the controls were completely horrible too. Now, I'm playing on a touch pad on my laptop, so maybe it's better with an actual mouse, but I had real difficulty controlling the movement of the character and sometimes would be thrown in an odd direction just because I wasn't paying enough attention to where my cursor was. I would have liked an option to use the keyboard for movement, but oh well. It was still a great game and if you haven't tried it, you probably should. It's currently up for purchase on gog.com.