Sanatorium: A Mental Asylum Simulator

Even though they wrote on the game's developer page that they consulted with these professors and received grants from this institute, it's truly surprising that they managed to make such an unsuccessful game. If you're curious about the period or psychiatry, instead of playing this game, you might as well check Wikipedia. Or just stare at a plain wall. Both are more entertaining.

An original, thematically bold indie that nails atmosphere and moral tension but is held back by a deliberately restrictive core loop and a handful of polish and UI issues.

A flawed but fascinating experiment, Sanatorium is a place worth visiting—just don’t expect to check out without a few scars.

Sanatorium – A Mental Asylum Simulator provides a unique coat of paint over a deckbuilding-style puzzle loop. That coat of paint is about as deep as the theme goes; however, the game unfortunately lacks a lot of immersive features or mechanics beyond color-matching cards. If you know what you’re getting into, it’s not a bad game, but the promise feels like more than what the title actually delivers, which also feels a bit like it should still be in Early Access.

The oddball staff members at the asylum are full of charm, and the patients are just as endearing. It struggles with some unfortunate design choices and some unusual bugs in the menus, but is overall worth a bit of your time.

I got hooked on Sanatorium's paperwork during the preview build and needed to see where this undercover journalist-turned-fraudulent-psychiatrist thing was headed. Twenty hours and a couple of Campaign restarts later, the bugs had other plans entirely.