The game was also a nominee for GameSpot's "Best Story" and the AIAS's "Outstanding Achievement in Character or Story Development" awards, which went to StarCraft and Pokémon Red and Blue, respectively. PC Gamer US 's editors remarked that Sanitarium has beautiful graphics, interesting characters, and well-designed puzzles. Computer Games Strategy Plus, PC Gamer US, GameSpot, IGN and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences (AIAS) all nominated Sanitarium as the best adventure game of 1998, but it lost these awards to Grim Fandango. The editors wrote that the game "came from out of nowhere to provide the creepiest, most compelling, and best-told story of the year, bar none". Sanitarium won Computer Gaming World 's 1998 "Best Adventure" award, tied with Grim Fandango. Īccording to PC Accelerator, Sanitarium was a "critical success" that helped to raise DreamForge Intertainment's profile as a company. Chris Kellner of DTP Entertainment, which handled Sanitarium 's German localization, reported its lifetime sales between 10,000 and 50,000 copies in the region. According to Mike Nicholson of DreamForge, the game sold roughly 300,000 copies. When the player reaches the end of the path, a cinematic is played and the game proceeds to the next chapter. If the player fails to do so (by, for instance, getting killed) then the player is transported back to the beginning of the path without losing progress, thus a Game Over in this game is non-existent. The player must find clues, solve puzzles and interact with other characters to reach a final challenge where the player must reach the end of a path while avoiding obstacles. The game is separated into different levels or "chapters" with each having a different style and atmosphere. This indistinction underlines much of the horror portrayed in the game. In many cases, it is unclear to the player if the world the character is currently in is real or a product of Max's own imagination. Each world and setting carries a distinct atmosphere that presents either the real world, the imaginary world, or a mix of both of the main protagonist. The game uses an isometric perspective and a non- tiled 2D navigational system. Max is in a coma, trapped in a dreamworld. He sabotaged Max's car and caused him to have an accident. It is revealed that Max was working on a cure for a deadly disease, but his rival, Jacob Morgan, didn't like this. He remembers the death of his younger sister Sarah years ago and the real reason behind his institutionalization. Between each episode, Max returns to the asylum grounds, blending real and unreal, each time closer to regaining his memory and unraveling the truth surrounding the mysterious Dr. His fellow inmates seem to know him simply as "Max".Īs he delves deeper into the asylum's corridors in search of answers, Max finds himself transported to various obscure and otherworldly locations: a small town inhabited only by malformed children and overseen by a malevolent alien entity known only as "Mother", a demented circus surrounded by an endless ocean and terrorized by a squid-like individual, an alien hive overrun by cyborg insects, and an Aztec village devastated by the return of the god Quetzalcoatl. Plot Īfter a car accident knocks him unconscious, a man awakens from a coma, his face fully bandaged, to find that he has been admitted to a dilapidated sanitarium and that he cannot remember who he is or where he came from, or how he came to be there. In 2015, it was ported to iOS and Android devices. It was a commercial success, with sales around 300,000 units. It was developed by DreamForge Intertainment and published by ASC Games in 1998. Sanitarium is a psychological horror point-and-click adventure video game that was originally released for Microsoft Windows.
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