Thirteen for Halloween: Sanitarium

Weird. Weird, weird, weird, weird. Weird. Very, deeply, disturbingly, lingeringly, weird. Hailing from an era when extremely weird adventure titles were ten a penny on the burgeoning PC format, Sanitarium stands out from the crowd in terms of its story and presentation. Ostensibly a fairly standard point and click adventure title, Sanitarium boasts everything you'd expect from an entry in that genre: interaction with puzzles, items and characters, an unfolding story, a variety of situations and environments...

Thirteen for Halloween:   Sanitarium
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Where it stands out is in terms of its subject and atmosphere: Sanitarium, as the name suggests, initially appears to be set in a rambling, archaic mental asylum of almost Victorian vulgarity. Waking after a car crash with no memory of who you are and a heavily bandaged face, the player must talk to various inmates and lunatics before reaching an immense and incongruous angel state situated in the institution.

Then things get really weird.
 
The angel animates, enfolding the player character in its wings, engulfing you in light and bombarding you with fractured, obscure images. You awake...outside, near a similar statue, but this one in the centre of an abandoned and dilapidated coastal town. Abandoned, that is, save for the various deformed -and when I say deformed, I mean obscenely, monstrously warped- children that wander the town, playing in the streets, the cemetery, without any apparent adult supervision. Conversing with the children reveals that the still bandaged and amnesiac protagonist believes his name to be Max, that there are no adults in the town, save for a vague and mysterious “Mother” that they all refer to. Further wandering reveals some horrific surprises; accounts of a meteorite that plunged into one of the farmer's fields, causing the nearby plant life to grow in bizarre and rampant manner, various abuses and acts of cruelty perpetrated upon the towns children by their elders...an eventual entry into the sealed church, where the rotting bodies of the town's adult population are stored. Various flashbacks occur throughout Max's wanderings, providing vague suggestions as to what might be going on. Max eventually encounters “Mother;” an alien entity formed of fungal spores and vegetation carried on the fallen meteorite, and the source of the mutations afflicting the children. This “Mother” entity seeks to render the children down and absorb them; making them part of herself rather than allowing them to go on suffering abuse and cruelty in the human world. At this point, it becomes apparent that what Max is experiencing may not, in fact, be real, but a form of narcotic fantasy or delusion, brought on by whatever accident reduced his face to ruin and destroyed his memory. Max eventually destroys “Mother,” but finds himself waking, once again, in the Sanitarium; a wing that has never been seen before, somewhat more open than the previous tower, Max having little to no idea how he got there or why.

This is the pattern the game follows; descents into fairly lurid and surreal moments of what might be derangement or fantasy (the scenarios presented seem to refer to Max's childhood interests or those of his dead sister, ranging from horror stories and comic books to a warped manifestation of the circus she used to love) punctuated by periods of what might be waking coherence or sobriety within the asylum (which becomes stranger and stranger as the game progresses). In every scenario, Max learns a little more about himself; the circumstances that brought him to his current state; a story of ancient rites and modern pseudo-science, of occult ceremonies and the potential for making dreams or hallucinations into waking reality.
 
The game is one of self-discovery, echoing in certain respects similar titles such as American McGee's Alice, Knock, Knock, I'm Scared and numerous others; in order to get the most out of it and piece the story together, it becomes necessary for the player to engage quite deeply with the imagery and subject matter on display: certain consistencies from dream-scape to dream-scape provide clues as to Max's past and the preoccupations that result in his fractured state of mind, not to mention the events leading up to his “accident” and subsequent seclusion within the Sanitarium.
 
It is a work of high symbolism and psychological nuance, Max revealing himself to be not an entirely sympathetic character, but extremely flawed and human, much of the horror deriving not from external threats, but from the bubbling miasma of potential lunacy that lurks in every human sub-conscious.
 
Like the very best works in this sub-genre, the game is fearless; raking up the most obscene muck of humanity, presenting the player with situations of incredible grotesquery, repugnance and distress, as a means of placing them in particularly suggestible states.

The gameplay being fairly sedentary (standard point and click adventure mechanics), the game relies on atmosphere and creeping revelation to sustain itself, which it succeeds in quite beautifully, for the most part.
 
As with many point and click adventures, it can be extremely slow paced and requires patience in order to navigate; some of the puzzles, particularly in latter stages of Max's delirium, are fiendishly difficult to work out without the aid of a guide or walk-through, which may result in frustration for some players.
 
But...with patience and a willing surrender to its dark charms, the game will provide a fairly joyous experience for those seeking something a little more dense and darker from their horror video games.
 
Another fairly major flaw is how long the game is; some of the hallucinatory episodes are so bizarre as to be incongruous, and don't lend an enormous amount to the overall story. There is a sustained feeling towards the game's latter portions that it is dragging itself out arbitrarily, rather than providing a concise conclusion.
 
That said, there is almost always enough of the grotesque and bizarre to sustain interest, the game essentially a great carnival of absurdity and psychological strangeness, that delights in distressing its audience as much as it does entertaining them.

An obscure and curious piece of work, well worth seeking out, if only as a marker of just how bizarre games from this era could be.

READ THE REST OF THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN HERE