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Sanitarium Released: 1998 Manufacturer: ASC Games In Brief: Amazing, truly perverse and surreal game with first rate, very difficult, puzzles.
Sometimes I play a game with an involving story like Gateway 2: Homeworld or The Last Express and I think, someone should make a movie out  of this. I don't think this about Sanitarium, even though it has a kick-ass story, because the narrative is so perfectly designed for an adventure game that there's really no way you could do it justice as anything else. Perhaps no other game so perfectly integrates plot and puzzles into a seamless whole.
The story is hard to describe, and to do so it detail would take away a lot of the surprise, but it begins in a decrepit old sanitarium. A man is beating his head against a blood splattered wall, a woman thinks she's a chicken. You don't remember who you are, and patients talk about robotic insects and scary mothers. And this is as normal as things get.
Between stays in the sanitarium you find yourself ... well, elsewhere. A village of mutant children, a carnival, an Aztec village. Are you insane? Are these mad fantasies? Memories come back slowly: your name, your occupation, your childhood. You're not always you, but whoever and wherever you are certain themes keep coming back; there is a core of truth, if you can just find it.
The puzzles are also pretty cool. In each chapter you have a new basic task, and these tasks involve solving a variety of puzzles, some easy, some of medium difficulty, and some that are pretty damn hard. I cheated a few times, but if you're more patient and a little smarter than I am you can probably get through this without cheating, as the puzzles are pretty much all logical and well constructed (although it is easy sometimes to miss objects you need among the tons of little objects strewn about). Anyway, the first chapter is pretty easy, and surprisingly the last is too, but outside of that I had to cheat at least once on everything except the Aztec village (which is also near the end, so perhaps the more you play and understand the mind of the puzzle designer the more you're able to solve).
There are a few little action scenes in the game, but these aren't as annoying as action games usually are in adventure games. The first one was actually the most difficult, for some reason. The biggest problem in these parts are the controls for walking around. You hold down the mouse button and show where you want to go, and in tight places you will sometimes find yourself going the wrong direction. This is particularly annoying in the maze, as I kept going up and down flights of stairs by accident, and in the final bit on the chessboard thing, where I had trouble stepping on the squares I was aiming for.
Visually, Sanitarium gives you a kind of 3/4 bird's eye view that I've only seen previously in some action games. It's a surprisingly effective approach and it's surprising that no one else is doing it. On momentous occasions there are some pretty cool flashbacks, many of them using a scratchy black and white movie look.
Sanitarium is as involving and gripping as any adventure game ever made. It is about as perfect as an adventure game can be. Go out and get it, now! Demo Review:Real nice demo, good puzzles and a couple of cool cut scenes. -- Charles Herold -1999
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