1998 was a vintage year for PC gaming: Half-Life, Unreal, StarCraft, Thief and Baldur’s Gate all released in lavish oversize retail boxes, and it was just as busy in console land: Ocarina of Time and Banjo-Kazooie released on Nintendo 64, while the original PlayStation enjoyed Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil 2.
Into this crowd of future classics was also Sanitarium, which shuffled onto shelves, probably sheepishly, in April 1998. It’s an isometric point-and-click adventure starring Max, an amnesiac who wakes in a bizarre, rundown sanitarium. Lest you think this is a game about exploring a slightly eerie rundown hospital, let me disabuse you of that notion immediately: For fear of spoiling everything, I can only say: this game goes places.
Richard Cobbett wrote about Sanitarium in his Crapshoot column, and Alexis Ong even went as far as to track down its creators. If you’ve played Sanitarium—especially divorced from its mid ’90s context—you’re probably evangelical about it. It carefully balances the line between camp and psychologically gruelling, but questions of tone aside, it’s a gorgeously vivid and varied thing, with beautifully rendered isometric environments.
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I bought Sanitarium for a couple of bucks on Steam a while ago, but it turns out there’s yet another version of Sanitarium coming, also published by Ziggurat. Sanitarium Enhanced is a new reissue with a range of fairly light-of-touch tweaks and additions including widescreen support during gameplay (not just during cutscenes), controller support, and an extras gallery including behind-the-scenes and cut content.
Perhaps most importantly, a new optional hint mode has been added, which should make this quintessentially ’90s point-and-clicker much more palatable to modern players who don’t want to waste hours systematically clicking on things to check if they’re interactive or not. A range of unspecified “legacy bugs and issues” have also been fixed.
Steam Deck optimizations are also included though I should point out that the old version of Sanitarium works just fine already using the trackpads. But, if you prefer to use face buttons and analog sticks soon that’ll be much easier, by dint of this new version also arriving on Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox consoles. When? Some time later in 2026.
