Games that open strong and slowly fade into mediocrity are challenging experiences. When you know for a fact that the first few levels you’ve played are as good as you’re going to get, the entrée cooked far better than the main, what should motivate you to pick up such a game?

Well, it should be because the first few levels of Sanitarium ooze fantastic horror. Not just that, but they construct an atmosphere of complete and total immersion, that you will forget you are playing a fairly old point & click adventure game. The sense of mystery built is so complete, it will be hard to think of anything else until the plot is resolved! At least, that was my experience.

It seems to be an underrated game, or at least a kind of “lost” experience. Despite being awarded a game of the year award in 1998, I don’t hear many people talk about it these days, and on Steam for instance it only has around six hundred reviews. But it’s uniquely effective. A point & click adventure probably shouldn’t be that effectively spine-chilling, but Sanitarium does this very well, primarily because it recognizes the strength of the medium. That is, telling a story while engaging the brain.

Puzzles in Sanitarium are generally morbid or grotesque affairs. Playing hide and seek with a corpse is a memorable one; having to find a way to bust a freak out of a freak show is another. Each level is well compartmentalized, telling a fairly standalone story. At the same time, each level constructs layers of additional meaning. There is context provided that the world will continue existing when you have stepped away from it; that what you are seeing are only the edges, and there’ll be more to come later (even if you can’t see it). And there also seems to be a running theme through most of the levels, a shared set of ideas, repeating on and on throughout the game.

A shame that the game does trend downhill the longer you play it. Sanitarium begins with probably its most famous level, where you find yourself in a strange town filled with deformed children (a sort of Children of the Corn style romp) where you have to figure out what’s happened to the adults in town. It plays a lot like a point & click Silent Hill, and any reader of this blog would know I’d always be down for something like that. You then progress to a variety of different locales; an asylum where you have to escape a freezing cold morgue, a strange flooded circus, and a weird, really haunting and disgusting fantasy world, where not all is as it seems – to a truly awful degree.

The problem is that the best puzzles and world ideas are early on in the game, and the overall thematic links across levels become less and less obvious as you progress, making it hard to see why exactly you are actually playing these levels. The game ends with an annoying boss fight, which is not at all what you should end a point & click with. It really does fade into mediocrity, but the game begins with such awesome power, such great foreshadowing and fully intriguing plot, that you can’t help but want to progress.

When playing a point & click, you do want a sense of internal consistency, at least when it comes to puzzle logic. I’m not the best at point & click games, but I only managed to get stuck two or three times, and there are a few well-written text guides out there that can help you make it through some of the more obtuse sequences. For each different level, the writing is still interesting on the basis of an individual level, but the revelations that you’d expect to be coming about 3/4s of the way through the game are dumped on you very, very close to the end – and after what is the worst level in the game, a point & click maze puzzle that relies on perspective. Despite this, every other level is perfectly playable at least, or awesome, imaginative and engaging at the other extreme.

Whether or not you think it matters that the money you spend on an experience should provide you a consistently entertaining experience, or have a better ending than beginning, I think this is a neat curio to pull from the back catalogs of both horror and point & click adventures. Two levels in particular still haunt me today to some degree. I find my thoughts stray to them whenever I’m in the mood to write something particularly spooky. They capture the imagination in such a way that renders them inescapable. If that sounds like a horror experience you want to be a part of, I can highly recommend the well-written (if cheesily voice-acted) Sanitarium.

You can buy Sanitarium from both Steam and GOG. As of writing, it is 50% off on Steam.