Asylum

17 April 2025

This game was pre-ordered during the initial Kickstarter campaign, and I never expected I would actually receive it. In some ways, I wonder if it would've been better had I never. This review has also been posted on Steam and Backloggd.

Asylum is, first and foremost, a love letter to a genre of fiction which doesn't need love letters.

It is secondly an amazing technical accomplishment in the realm of modern pre-rendered video games, optimizing for minimal system specs to make an accessible play experience that can likely run on a Windows 7 PC with no issue. It is an achievement of technical art, with some wonderful environmental design and an immense amount of care and attention put into making the environment feel real.

It is unfortunate that in the lengthly development time it never once stopped to pay attention to the surrounding dialogue of these sorts of stories, to learn from their pitfalls, or attempt to do better. But more than being offensive (which it ultimately is, despite its strong start), it is shoddily, hastily written.

There is a point 2/3 of the way through the game where a character simply hands you a key, which unlocks a room that contains a more important key and a video document. That video is the first we see and hear about an occult artifact. The room which the second more-important key opens contains a lengthly expository document which introduces the idea of some lovecraftian Entity. This leads us on an exploration where, eventually, we find a cult room with another lengthly, expository document, where the entity's relation to ancient peoples is explained. These three elements are all, in totality, that connects our journey to the final confrontation with the (admittedly well-designed) lovecraftian Old One. After which we leave the Asylum, maiming an innocent women on the way out for seemingly no reason, and endingn with a reveal that we were the "high risk patient" we've had to deal with twice priorly (in somewhat offensive ways).

Oh dear lord, the horror, that we may have been the "crazy" one all along.

If my sarcasm is not apparent, let me digress. In 2013, the video game "Outlast" was released, one of the most offensive regressive video games depicting "insanity" that I have ever seen. There are a handful of games which I would give zero stars, because I believe the world is legitimately worse-off for them existing: Outlast, Hatred, Outlast 2, and the entire Postal series. (If you need an explanation on the last one, look inside yourself and fix your heart.) Outlast has placed the bar so far low when it comes to asylum settings that it is literally on the floor. You just have to not trip on it.

Asylum catches its toe and stumbles, but doesn't trip on it. It is offensive primarily in how it treats the protagonist's sanity, the secondary character Lenny (who is sort of a generic amalgam of untreated OCD ailments), and the "high risk patient" - who is just a catch-all "insane violent behaviour" character, including with a random pacification by harp music for no explained reason. But these are all rather incidental gestures at trying to write "insane" characters without understanding much about insanity. The eugenicist practice of mental asylums is not particularly commented on, and the game attempts to be sympathetic... and then decides to double back and trips on the bar on the floor at the end, landing face-first where it started.

I do not know what I was supposed to get from the encounter with the old one, and the subsequent reveal that we are the high risk patient. I suppose all the other characters were in our head? Except for the receptionist, who we have maimed for no reason (other than i suppose to make sure every woman in the game leaves permanently injured - hm...).

But every plot line introduced early in the game, every element of abuse and malpractice that the game somewhat compellingly lingers on early-on... it becomes meaningless in this ending. The doctors horribly abused their patients to mine a tunnel to find an Old One, and then... they were right to make sure they only used "insane" people to figure out it's shit, because that stopped it from escaping? And then we, finally, another "insane" person, let it free and take it with us? The world would be better off were we confined to a cell?

I was left with the distinct feeling that the start end ending of this game were written seperately, and they tried to write towards the middle, and never found a way to weave it together. The jarring expository documents in the middle, the way it drops so many threads from the beginning, and leaves such an ambiguous (and violent) ending feel like a writing style that instead of taking a decade to cook, took a decade to spread. But it's a feast where everything is undercooked, overcooked, or flavorless. And when I stood up from the table I felt empty.