Posted June 18, 2014
I have historically been a console gamer, but after hanging out here for a while, I've been discovering a lot of PC games I would have otherwise never known of, much less tried. Sanitarium is one of those titles that I see revered here, so I bought it a couple years ago. Finally got around to playing it and here's my post-game thoughts:
The Bad
* Movement / UI - This is my biggest complaint about the game. To walk anywhere, you have to hold the Right-Click button down. There's no pathfinding or setting up destination-points, so you're constantly depressing the mouse and moving it to do anything. It's just crude. It's weird, because I don't think any other games circa-1998 have that kind of control-scheme.
* Walking Speed - The first half of the game was particularly laborious because your character moves so slow.
* Technical Issues - Along with many others on the forums, this is the only GOG game I own that has given me issues. I'm running Win7 64 OS w/AMD Trinity APU, and encountered the same crashing. I've had mostly good results using some of the forum fixes here (I did the regedit fix and the WinXP SP3 Compatability checkbox) , but the last two stages seemed to crash frequently. Not a dealbreaker, but definitely annoying.
The Good
* Atmosphere - My favorite aspect of Sanitarium is the atmosphere. The locales are imaginative and surreal, often grotesque, and are not your typical video game backdrops.
* Characters/Voices - Complementing the atmosphere are all the NPCs you interact with. Even those that don't serve to advance the puzzles or plot have their own personalities, and speech patterns. The voice acting really adds to that experience, and make the atmosphere that much more believable.
* Puzzles - As someone who enjoys adventure games, I found most of the puzzles to be the right level of logic and complexity. There's the typical find item, and use it on the right object adventure puzzles. And there's also solve-this-lock-and-key mechanism by experimenting with inputs, and deducing the outputs. I liked that both kinds of puzzles were present here.
In the end, Sanitarium is more than the sum of its parts. It doesn't change the landscape of point-and-click adventures (and in terms of interface, it's some steps backwards.) But just because of how bizarre and creepy it is, it stands out. And isn't that what we all want out of a game? Something that's memorable? Enjoyable, despite its flaws.
The Bad
* Movement / UI - This is my biggest complaint about the game. To walk anywhere, you have to hold the Right-Click button down. There's no pathfinding or setting up destination-points, so you're constantly depressing the mouse and moving it to do anything. It's just crude. It's weird, because I don't think any other games circa-1998 have that kind of control-scheme.
* Walking Speed - The first half of the game was particularly laborious because your character moves so slow.
* Technical Issues - Along with many others on the forums, this is the only GOG game I own that has given me issues. I'm running Win7 64 OS w/AMD Trinity APU, and encountered the same crashing. I've had mostly good results using some of the forum fixes here (I did the regedit fix and the WinXP SP3 Compatability checkbox) , but the last two stages seemed to crash frequently. Not a dealbreaker, but definitely annoying.
The Good
* Atmosphere - My favorite aspect of Sanitarium is the atmosphere. The locales are imaginative and surreal, often grotesque, and are not your typical video game backdrops.
* Characters/Voices - Complementing the atmosphere are all the NPCs you interact with. Even those that don't serve to advance the puzzles or plot have their own personalities, and speech patterns. The voice acting really adds to that experience, and make the atmosphere that much more believable.
* Puzzles - As someone who enjoys adventure games, I found most of the puzzles to be the right level of logic and complexity. There's the typical find item, and use it on the right object adventure puzzles. And there's also solve-this-lock-and-key mechanism by experimenting with inputs, and deducing the outputs. I liked that both kinds of puzzles were present here.
In the end, Sanitarium is more than the sum of its parts. It doesn't change the landscape of point-and-click adventures (and in terms of interface, it's some steps backwards.) But just because of how bizarre and creepy it is, it stands out. And isn't that what we all want out of a game? Something that's memorable? Enjoyable, despite its flaws.
