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dkirschner's Sanitarium (PC)
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| [September 23, 2013 08:00:20 PM]
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Played through roughly 1/4 of this game today and stopping mostly because I've got so much else to play through and this isn't captivating me. Sanitarium is a late-90s point-and-click adventure game with psychological horror themes. It isn't scary, but it is grotesque. The art deserves a big commendation. The writing is pretty good too, and the story seems like it *could* be (more) intriguing, but it's very slow-paced, and the voice acting is killing parts of the game for me. The protagonist, Max, awakes with amnesia in a mental institution that is on fire. He escapes, then goes into a series of bizarre dream worlds that I guess are parts of his psyche or something, and I guess you find out about Max, who he is, why he's in the asylum and so on, through these dream worlds. The first was this town full of deformed but pretty happy children who were being brainwashed and transformed by a dominating alien called Mother who crash landed there in a comet and lives in a barn in a pumpkin patch. Yeah, it's weird. Problem for me playing this is I've got no idea how it relates to anything, nor the second world, which is a freaky circus or something. The game as a whole seems mature for its time in terms of themes, art and music, and storytelling. Another thing I particularly liked was the UI, once I figured it out. It's minimalist, with just a magnifying glass letting you know you can "examine" something, or a hand for "use" or what looks to me like a ball of trash for "inventory." Actually I was stuck for a while because I couldn't figure out how to deselect an item from my inventory. If you click on the character you are controlling, that brings up the inventory and is how you deselect an item that you are holding too. But, I didn't know that for a long time and was quite confused as to why I would just sometimes be able to pick up an item and why I couldn't make the item go away once I'd picked it up. I then scoured the internet and figured out that I was actually clicking on Max and opening the inventory when I had assumed I was clicking on other things. Sometimes the character is close to interactable objects and it can be hard to interact with the object, and you keep opening the inventory instead. Despite the cool stuff I've found in the game, and like I said before, the snail's pace of the characters walking and the really unconvincing voice acting are turning me off. I'm sure it's a cool story and whatnot, but I'm just not bothered to continue. I think I'll go through another point-and-click game next because I've accumulated several in the past year or so.
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dkirschner's Sanitarium (PC)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Something better came along
GameLog started on: Sunday 22 September, 2013
GameLog closed on: Monday 23 September, 2013 |
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This is the only GameLog for Sanitarium. |
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