Sanatorium – A Mental Asylum Simulator Review: Amateur Treatment Done Properly

Infiltrating a mental asylum without any prior experience isn’t easy but you quickly learn how to diagnose patients. While you discover symptoms and plan treatments, you must learn more about the missing person from your past. It’s important to work your way up the ladder at the asylum but that means dealing with new issues. Can you effectively treat patients while keeping your job and finding the information you need?

Sanatorium – A Mental Asylum Simulator lets you diagnose patients and plan treatments to help them get better. Find a balance between profit and keeping your reputation afloat while you investigate the asylum. You aren’t actually in control of your investigation and some diagnoses are difficult to categorise. This game has rough edges but provides a decent simulator experience if you give it a chance.

Sanatorium – A Mental Asylum Simulator is available on PC for USD 9.74.

When you see the doctor, something new will affect you.

Story – Someone’s Missing at the Asylum

It’s the 1920s and you have fallen behind on your bills. Facing eviction, you get a letter from an old acquaintance stating they are trapped in Castle Woods Sanatorium. To investigate, you disguise your credentials and get a job as a doctor there. Work your way up the management ladder, treating patients and handling crises that appear. After work, search the asylum to find clues and figure out what’s actually going on.

The story doesn’t get as much focus as the gameplay though your actions determine how the story progresses. As you treat patients, you often deal with sudden situations or patients who have another agenda. Your investigations around the asylum reveal that something clearly isn’t right. However, you can’t progress the investigation like a normal mystery; it’s something that occurs as you treat patients.

Getting to some rooms requires making progress in the story.

Unlike games such as On Your Tail, the story drives the mystery. While you can investigate and find objects, treating patients drives the story. Your after-work searches only matter once an incident occurs and then evidence appears. Having the mystery only progress with the story weakens the investigation aspect. It doesn’t feel like you are solving a mystery as much as you are waiting for something to happen.

Gameplay – Diagnosis & Treatment

While the mystery has point-and-click elements, most of your time is spent managing your patients. Similar to Organs Please, you check the conditions of the patients and decide what to do. Every patient has a set of symptoms that you must discover before treating them correctly. Patients also come with a monetary amount that is paid every day they are in the asylum. You also earn reputation for successful treatments that help you keep your job.

Every patient has symptoms that you must categorise.

The challenge comes from two fronts: maintaining reputation and earning money. Some patients pay high amounts of money per day, making it tempting to keep them at the asylum. Your reputation is crucial because you lose if it runs out. Improper diagnoses and failing to treat patients properly (or at all) hurts your reputation.

You must balance keeping patients and treating them quickly or keeping them around to bolster your cash reserves. Without money, you can’t pay for treatments or diagnosis tests that allow you to treat future patients. This isn’t easy since some symptoms are difficult to diagnose since they don’t meet any of the game’s descriptions. It makes you feel like you are blindly guessing rather than making educated choices.

It’s a fun balance that drives home the absurdity of the situation. Normally you should be treating patients and releasing them as soon as possible. But at Castle Woods, some patients are kept just for extra funding. You also have patients who aren’t needing treatment but have their own agendas. Whether you cooperate determines how the story can play out. Unfortunately, the story’s mystery and simulation elements don’t mesh together well.

The story lacks gravitas since it’s not a real investigation.

Synergy – Patient Investigation Mismatch

As mentioned earlier, it doesn’t feel like a mystery investigation. While treating patients is necessary for maintaining your cover, you aren’t actually making much headway investigating on your own. The point-and-click aspect only reveals slight amounts and you must progress the story to reveal more. Despite the fact that your acquaintance could be in danger, your investigation never proceeds quickly.

This also weakens the story aspect while focusing on the patient treatments. The game also acknowledges this with Endless Mode where you can focus solely on the treatment gameplay. It’s fun to treat patients but the mystery investigation isn’t as enjoyable, as if the two elements were forced together. Even as you reach the end of the story, it never feels like a proper mystery. You just reach the peak of the symptoms and patients you can treat.

Treating patients gets more attention than the mystery.

There might also be some bugs as a result, since the game often confuses where you are in the story. You may complete an objective but the game repeats the objective completion scene twice. Selecting case files might not happen and require a full reset to proceed. While these aren’t necessarily game-breaking, it gives the game a rough feel since the elements don’t feel as cohesive as they could be.

Audio & Visual – No Moving Parts

There isn’t much animation in the game as you have still images outside of story scenes. Characters have distinct designs though patient appearances blend with each other after a while. Treatment designs are distinct, giving you an idea of what happens to the patients. The setting conveys a sense of a world recovering from the ravages of war, reflected by the statements from some patients.

Audio doesn’t play a large role as there is little conversation. You can hear sound effects and identify them correctly, but it isn’t a big part of the game. The focus is on the visuals and gameplay with the occasional noise. Fortunately, that means the audio doesn’t distract you from the gameplay.

Sanatorium – A Mental Asylum Simulator was reviewed on Steam with a code provided by Renaissance PR.