Sanitarium (1998)

I started Sanitarium. It's far too clunky and cheesy to be effectively terrifying or even unnerving - the graphics are ugly, the production values are low, the UI is fiddly, the acting is hammy, the puzzles are silly and the whole thing has that late-90s Clive Barker/Se7en/nu-metal feel where even the menus have to be grimdark and spooky (here, two big yellow eyes follow your cursor around the screen, and a ghostly little girl's voice reads out the name of every option you hover over which is hilariously out of place when it's stuff like "text options" and "play credits") - but you can feel the earnest passion behind it all, the puzzles are at least fun, and I am kind of intrigued at the story so far.

Ha ha, it just moved into 100% silly territory, as I am now fighting a pumpkinheaded scarecrow by slashing at his pumpkinhead display weakspots with a scythe. It's all very fiddly, plus the game has already crashed a couple of times. Thankfully I saved in time...

Ugh, this got crappy real fast. The puzzles are of the kind that depend on pixel hunting and going back to check for things arbitrarily changing, which includes new dialogue options. It's already annoying enough having to talk to ten different mutant kids with ten badly written and acted options each, all pretty much telling me the same thing, it really sucks having to keep going back to them in case there's suddenly something else to talk about. It reminds me of Broken Sword and endlessly circling around until something unlocks. I've just about finished the first chapter (I had to check a walkthrough to find out what to do once I'd defeated the evil meteor that had killed all the adults and was mutating the kids into plants, though - turns out I have to walk around the whole place to find the one kid who hasn't disappeared, instead of the game just smoothly taking me to a cutscene or whatever), so I'll leave it there for now. I get the feeling I'm going to have to work through a bunch of small different vignettes, I Have No Mouth style, until I find out how they relate to the real world or whatever, so I don't have any particular urge to find out which cheesy genre story I'm going to get plonked in next.

Sigh, I finally went back to Sanitarium and gog updated it in the last week to use SCUMMVM, which has lost all my saves. Apparently if I rename them and move them then they'll work again, but I can't be arsed, honestly.

Endnote: lololol Adventure Gamers list the spooky girl voice menus as a good thing.

Rating: Admirable ambition but poor design and ugly as hell.