Sanitarium (video game)

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"If Jacob's Ladder was reality squared, this is reality cubed" —J.C. Herz (The New York Times) on the game

Sanitarium is a Point and Click Adventure Game by ASC Games. It is set in a mental hospital, except when it isn't.

More clearly, it begins with the main character losing his memory and being instituted in a sanitarium. Occasionally, he is transported to strange, alternate worlds, sometimes changing his form, sometimes not. A constant feeling of bewilderment and fear follow you as the worlds you visit become stranger and stranger.

You need to figure out many things: Why have you lost your memory? Why are you in an insane asylum? Is the asylum the "real" world, or is it just another dream?

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This game provides examples of:

• Abusive Parents - See Mummies At the Dinner Table, below
• Adult Child: Lenny
• Adventures in Coma Land
• A Glitch in the Matrix: The "real world" starts becoming more and more unreal with each chapter.
• All Just a Dream - Most of the game, except several cutscenes, is just Max's dreams while he was in coma.
• All the Worlds Are a Stage - The next to last subchapter is a mishmash of all of the non-"real world" chapters. You also have to Shapeshifting between Max and all of his alter-egos.
• Alternate Universe - It turns out that the Morgan from Max's past is not the same Morgan that he encounters throughout the game. The former exists in the real world. The latter exists in Max's dream world.
  • Two of the chapters have an alternate universe version of Max's wife as well.
  • Then there's a non-playable AU version of Max himself.
• Ambition Is Evil
  • Played straight with Morgan
  • Averted with Max
• Arc Words - "Seek the truth"
• Babies Ever After - During the final cut scene, it is revealed that Max's wife was pregnant during the events of the game. The end credits/epilogue shows a picture of them with their new baby.
• Back From the Dead - A dead woman comes back to life long enough to give Max some cryptic warnings.
• Bandaged Face
• Bedlam House - Well, of course.
• Big Bad - Morgan. Interestingly, he is not the final boss. He gets defeated in the cut-scene after the boss is destroyed.
• Big No
• Black Bug Room - More like Black Bug Universe, but still...
• Body Horror - You don't even know.
• Booze Flamethrower - Sarah is taught how to do this by Inferno, which is then used to fight Iggy.
• Bratty Half-Pint - Billy, Jennifer, and Dennis.
• Breather Episode - In chapter 3, the horror takes a backseat to...comedy?
• Buried Alive - Happens to at least 3 characters
• The Chessmaster - Morgan (both of him) and Gromna
• Circus of Fear - Playing with a Trope. The circus is very unnerving, but only two of the staff members are dangerous and, of those two, only one is actually evil.
• Cloudcuckoolander - A non-comedic example. Don, Lenny, and Martin in the first chapter. See "Foreshadowing" below.
• Combat Tentacles - Iggy
• Cool Big Sis - Inferno to Sarah
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Morgan is much happier TREATING the deadly disease that's killing children world-wide, rather than helping Max develop the cure, because treating the disease is far more profitable than wiping it out.
• Creepy Children
• Creepy Circus Music
• Creepy Twins
• The Cuckoolander Was Right - See "Foreshadowing"
• Cuckoo Nest
• Daddy's Girl - Sarah and Eileen
• Dead Little Sister - Two of them!
• Dead Man Writing - Carol's diary.
• Deadpan Snarker - Max, when the situation calls for it.
• Doppelganger - Max's shadow and the two Morgans
• The Dragon
  • Max's shadow to Dream World Morgan
  • Dream World Morgan is unwittingly this to Real World Morgan, due to him thinking they are the same person.
  • The scarecrow to Mother.
• Dying Dream - Both Morgans try (and fail) to invoke this trope for Max while he's in a coma by keeping him confined and confused (Dream World Morgan) and slipping him poison (Real World Morgan).
• Evil Laugh - Dream World Morgan and The Scarecrow.
• Face Heel Turn
• False Widow - Played with. Inferno isn't exactly lying about her widowhood, but since she's a part of Max's dream, that means that her dead husband never actually existed in the first place.
• Final Boss: Max's Shadow.
• Five-Man Band - Played with because all of them are one character, but they DO have to work together in the finale, and the others even (kind of) say goodbye to Max at the end.
  • Max is The Hero and The Smart Guy
  • Olmec is The Lancer
  • Grimwall is The Big Guy
  • Sarah is The Chick (and The Tagalong Kid)
• Foreshadowing - The first chapter contains a room of babbling loons who each talk about different worlds...worlds that you will travel to throughout the rest of the game. Then there's the stained glass windows in each segment of the sanitarium, Zippy the Clown's predictions... really, a second playthrough of the game can be seen as a grand conga line of Fridge Brilliance.
• Freudian Excuse
  • Hinted that this is at least part of Morgan's motivation.
  • Mother
  • Inverted with Max, who used his own past tragedy as motivation to become a doctor and help people.
• Ghost Town
• Go Among Mad People - Most of the game. Except not really-turns out it's a Black Bug Room caused by Max being in a poison-induced fever dream.
• Good Is Not Nice - Olmec (hoo boy).
• Grave Humor
• Greed
• Happier Home Movie - Watching these comes into play in the "Mansion" sub-chapter.
• Happy Ending
• Haunted House
• Hybrid Monster - Iggy, though it depends whether the human head and torso on top of his squid head is actually part of him or a body of a victim that somehow got stuck up there.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Vera
• Infant Immortality - Nnnnope.
• Involuntary Shapeshifting
• Ironic Nursery Tune - "Don't go into the pumpkin patch. 'Cause if you do, you won't come back. Mommy says to stay way...if you want to play another day."
• Jerkass
  • Dennis
  • Morgan's Father
  • Olmec
  • The Clown with the Balloons
• Kid Hero - Sarah
• Little Miss Badass - Sarah (again)
• Loads and Loads of Characters - It may be an Adventure Game, but it utterly averts the Beautiful Void trope.
• Lotus Eater Machine - after the Maze, Morgan attempts to trick Max into believing he's in the real world and just had a nasty bump on the head, and dreamt everything. Max breaks out of it when he realizes SARAH IS SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD, even though she's alive and living with him and his wife. Still a kid. And levitating. A very eerie scene, all in all.
• Mad Scientist - Morgan, the dream world version. Given the real Morgan's personality, it isn't a stretch to see why Max thought of him this way.
• Make It Look Like an Accident
• Mama Bear - "Mother"
• Manipulative Bastard - Morgan
• Mental World
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body - Multiple shape-shifting events
  • At its most extreme with Olmec, who is almost the exact opposite of the kind, compassionate Max.
• Mind Screw - A good example is the pumpkin children. In fact, there's a lot of unexplained symbolism.
• Mommy Issues - Lenny. Surprisingly averted in Max's case despite his banters with "Mother".
• Mummies At the Dinner Table - Made extra disturbing by the fact that it's a kid
• Nice Guy - The Main Character and Timmy O'Toole.
• Non-Identical Twins
• One Bad Mother - "Mother"
• One-Winged Angel - Morgan
• Plant Aliens - "Mother"
• Preacher Man
• Red Herring - Three literal red herrings. One is a red fish painted on the roof of a building. The main character even comments that he was sure he would find something inside.
• The Reveal: A whole lot
  • "Mother" is an alien, chapter 2
  • Max was called by his parents because his sister was dying, chapter 3
  • Morgan is behind everything, chapter 4
  • Everything other than the opening and the flashbacks was a Dying Dream resulting from Morgan trying to kill Max; also, there are two Morgans; the one who sabotaged Max's car and the one who exists in the dream world and tries to prevent Max from making any progress, chapter 8
  • Max's wife is pregnant, chapter 9
• Rhymes on a Dime: Vera
• Romancing the Widow
• Rule of Scary - Subverted near the end when it turns out it was All Just a Dream, which perfectly explains away all the outlandish stuff.
• Scary Scarecrows
• See You in Hell
• Shape Shifter - Max (the main character) does this involuntarily throughout most of the game, and voluntarily in the second-to-last level. With one exception, each of his forms has a different voice actor.
• Sliding Scale of Anti-Heroes - Olmec is Type III
  • Appropriately, as he is the least likable of the playable characters, Olmec is voiced by the same actor who plays the Big Bad
• Songs in the Key of Lock: One of the doors in the Hive has a lock with keypad buttons that produce individual musical tones.
• Surreal Horror
• Theme Naming - All of the cyclopses have names beginning with "GR."
• Timeshifted Actor - Frank Schurter plays Adult Max while Paul Crocker plays him during his childhood flashbacks.
• Town with a Dark Secret - The entirety of chapter 2.
• Twist Ending
• The Unseen - A big part of Max's arc. His face is covered in bandages. When he is seen in flashbacks, his face is always hidden. The one exception is a flashback from his childhood.
  • This is a rare case of the main character pulling off this trope.
• The Un-Reveal - The Cure
• Unusual Euphemism - Grimwall's favorite exclamation, "Grap".
• Unwitting Pawn - Arguably Dream World Morgan. He believes that he and Real World Morgan are the same person and doesn't realize that his fighting Max and enabling the poison to work its way through his veins will actually kill him along with Max. The example has the oddity of both the pawn and the manipulator being unaware of the manipulation due to Real World Morgan being unaware of Dream World Morgan's existence.
• Villain with Good Publicity - Morgan and Gromna
• Waking Up At the Morgue
• "Well Done, Son" Guy - Morgan
• Wicked Cultured - Morgan
• Womb Level - The Hive is unpleasantly organic.