Sanitarium

Sanitarium is a psychological horror game in the form of an isometric adventure and one of the darkest titles released on Windows PC in 1998. The player wakes up in an asylum for the mentally ill with a bandaged head, no memory and no certainty whether what he sees is even real. Escaping the cell is only the beginning of a journey through several entirely different chapters: a village inhabited by deformed children, a town under the rule of insects, an alien wasteland, or a comic-book city with a superhero. Each functions as a self-contained world with its own rules, characters and its own logic of horror.

The gameplay is classic adventure fare: the player walks through locations in an isometric view, talks to characters, collects items and solves puzzles that mostly grow out of that chapter's own logic. A few tasks are purely logical, others require the right sequence of steps or spotting a detail in the background. The progression is fairly linear and the game cannot be irretrievably broken, so the emphasis lies on storytelling. Technically it used pre-rendered high-resolution backgrounds combined with animated characters, which ran on late-1990s Pentiums without needing an accelerator and allowed for very detailed, at times almost painfully rendered environments.

The game's strength lies in its mood. The sound design works with whispers, children's laughter and music that often narrows down to a single repeated motif, and visual ideas like a field of sunflowers with children's heads rank among the most powerful things adventure games ever offered. The game treats the theme of mental illness as a source of both horror and pity, and its ending gives meaning to all the preceding chapters, something stories built around dreams rarely manage. Critics received the game very well, but sales weren't large and the studio folded soon after. Today Sanitarium holds a firm cult status, and thanks to later digital re-releases it also runs on modern Windows.