Completed Sanitarium.
Switching to a four-handed goat-legged Conan-like creature that fights giant cybernetic insects was certainly an inventive moment.
The music puzzle completely trashed me, though. I figured out that the children are singing the six notes you need to input. But for the life of me, I couldn’t repeat it.
Funnily enough, most of the walkthroughs get this part wrong as well.
Besides that, though, I managed to beat the game without looking into the guide. Which is an achievement for the game designers. Usually get get stuck in point’n’click adventures early on.
The story turns out to be not as confusing as I assumed by reading the reviews.
We play as Max, who’s some kind of a doctor. His sister died of illness when he was a child, and he baselessly blames himself for that. She wanted to go to the circus “once she gets well”, and her favorite toy was a clown. Max liked to read comics about Gromwall, the four-handed barbarian.
Later, Max becomes a doctor and he starts working for a guy named Jacob. Kids are getting sick. Max discovers a cure while traveling South America. But Jacob is not interested in developing a permanent cure: instead he wants to continue selling the drug his company produces. First Jacob tried to fire Max, then he messes with the brakes of Max car.
As he drives by a castle, his car crashes. Everything that follows is a mix of those memories: dying children, cure, clowns, four-handed creatures fighting bugs. While Max is in coma, Jacob also tries to inject him with a poison, but Max wakes in time from his “nightmare”. That’s it, Jacob goes to jail, and Max becomes new head of the company. Happy end. Not really complicated, once you piece everything together.
