ASYLUM

A spiritual successor to a game called Scratches that I learned about too late to get when it was around. I had heard here and there about Asylum and was watching it with great interest. Then after so long it finally came out to a solid....... O.K. The characters are all interesting with great voice work except for one that doesn't stick around for long and the asylum itself is large enough to where you will have plenty to do throughout it. The game will start off super slow as you learn what you can and can't interact with but around the half way point in the story I was flying through to the end since I had already thoroughly looked through most of the areas up to that point so once you find one item that leads back to something you saw a couple of hours ago it clicks then you start going down a chain of solutions pretty quickly. The only thing I had trouble with was actually seeing what was on the screen at any given time in some areas. Not sure why but the game felt darker than I think it meant to be in certain parts of the map. Not gonna spoil the story but I unfortunately figured out the end an hour or so before it happened so that kinda dinged the wow factor for me. For what it is and what I wanted out of it I can't say I'm disappointed but I do feel it's hard to recommend at the full price and would feel a bit better at $20.

A nice throwback point-and-click adventure!
Once I got a hang of the navigation and tool controls, I was breezing around the Asylum. It was easy to get turned around in the map, which can be frustrating, but it also added to the atmosphere of exploring a decrepit, sprawling institution. The voice acting was good, but I wish all the protagonist's thoughts were narrated too. My only other issue was that the game is often very dark and it can be hard to see items that you need to pick up. I found the puzzles intuitive and enjoyed gathering pieces of the story.

Asylum is a point and click horror narrative game. Some of the major strengths that are directly adopted from Senscape games previous title "Scratches" another point and click style game. Along with some minor nitpicks.

+Incredible ambience (Both visual and audio)
+Nice soundtrack and sound design
+Cut-scenes are fine for the art style being delivered here.
+Voice acting is pretty good
+Sense of progression is nice, definitely nowhere near as "find a needle in a haystack" as Scratches was.
+Runs well enough on Linux, some minor hiccups regarding Proton. Mostly just lack of data of how it will run.

Now for some nitpicks.

-The one thing I enjoyed about Scratches was the sense that you were virtually cut off from everyone, beyond a single phone call that you would give on occasion. Asylum has living residents or staff on premises
doesn't really give a sense of being isolated in an "abandoned" Asylum. Both settings are definitely plausible, but it definitely maintains that carrot on the stick to engage the player until the end. Just different carnival rides with different sights to see.

Overall it's nice to see the point-and-click genre is alive and well. I was very fond of Scratches, and it's nice to see games like Asylum exist and can still deliver moments of subtle tension and unique art. If you enjoy the point-and-click style of game, doubly so for the horror element, not overly scary, just a nice mystery to solve, consider Asylum!

As a fan of oldschool point & click adventures, I like Asylum and wholeheartedly recommend it to fans of the genre. The ending feels a bit rushed, but the buildup to it was carefully executed.

The critique about character dialogue feeling "padded" is something I cannot agree with. The dialogue matches the characters, including the player character The Visitor.

What I will critique about the story is the absence of conspiracy. The game eludes to bigger things at work, however at no point do characters seem to have ulterior motives and actively act upon it during the course of the night, which makes the story feel a little flat.

At the same time games by Cyan have advanced the genre in a much more accessible and fun direction over the last decade. The fully 3d environments of the Riven remake and the movement system that is possible due to this change feels much more enjoyable than the pixel peeping dioramas of Asylum.

Great puzzles. Creepy sounds and scenes allow for immersion into the horror of the asylum. Great game.

This horror game has great atmosphere I found the gameplay and puzzles a little simplistic but its an entertaining game.

Some people might find the controls a little outdated but the frame by frame movement will be good for those who get motion sickness from fps.

The sound design and environments are really good and the voice acting is done well. Very creepy game. I liked it!

Iv'e never wrote a review for a game, but i loved this one as much as i loved "Scratches" and i was so exited every time i found an "easter egg" in this game!
Everything is at the right place: characters, style, music... the plot its pretty intuitive but not too straight forward, leaving you able to wonder many interpretations before the ending revelations.

I definitely recommend Asylum for everyone that likes dark themes and hungry for chilling mysteries.
Enjoy!

I've been playing point and click adventures my whole life and have been waiting for this game in particular since it was kickstarted in 2013, so refunding this is painful, but wow. What a genuinely awful initial experience.

The dialogue is exhausting and bordering on purple prose. It feels like it was written with the deliberate goal of padding out playtime by forcing every character to speak like they were in a play written by a high school drama student who just finished Wuthering Heights. The pacing and rhythm of speech is unnatural and stilted, and it sounds like voice actors just did one take and ran with it. Shoutout to the main character whose English accent is not at all hidden. Dialogue stupidity extends to written descriptions of environmental objects and options, all of which scroll slowly on the screen and come straight out of r/iam14andthisisdeep. There was not a single description or flavor text that did not come across as the most labored and painstakingly crafted artificial sentence that you can imagine. This isn't a dig at ESL developers or actors (I play STALKER for God's sake), but the writing/dialogue in this game just fails to be either convincing (Red Dead Redemption) or charmingly bad (Dracula: Resurrection/Last Sanctuary). Furthermore, Senscape demonstrated they can write reasonably well with Scratches - how did Augustin unlearn this over the last twelve years?

The mouse cursor and movement feel like I am trying to grab a fish in a river. Unreal's default mouse acceleration and smoothing is godawful and there is no option to disable it. I'm sure I can .ini mod it out of the game but I shouldn't need to do that in a game where the single method of player interaction is the mouse.

Interaction zones and movement areas feel un-intuitive. Why do I have to click on the top-center of a door to open it and not the knob, or the entire door area? Why can I only move to another "screen" using a single pixel? I'm standing next to the receptionist but can't talk to her unless I walk all the way around her desk after finding the small hotspots to do so. Silly.

Not having an actual inventory is inexcusable. You have to click on the interactable object and then use the scroll wheel to just iterate through items until you find the one that works. Imagine standing in front of your car and randomly pulling every object out of your pockets one at a time until you find your keys. This is definitely how normal humans retrieve objects they need.

To add insult to injury, when I tried to exit the game, Unreal crashed lmao.

All in all I'm deeply disappointed. I don't think Asylum should have stayed vaporware, but I think that a massive amount of fat needed to be trimmed from the end product. If this is what twelve years, three separate engines (Dagon, Unity, Unreal), and countless hours of development managed to produce, tighter direction and control is required for future Senscape products to ensure quality improves. I hoped Scratches wasn't a fluke, but Asylum makes me think it was.

I loved this so much. Point and click, no chase or QTE no 3 D. No nausea!
I was comfortable with all aspects of the game play although I was lost much of the time, and sometimes it was my own silly fault, not seeing clues that were quite apparent.
I loved all the documents and am one who does exalt at finding such items as I love finding out backstories to good games such as this.
The voice overs were excellent and I loved the little easter eggs referring to Scratches.
I did feel sad about the event at the very end, and rather wished that it didn't occur.
HOWEVER , I totally recommend this game if you are late to playing.
It was such an enjoyable experience, that I truly did not want to be discharged....

Kind of tedious and boring. There's a ton to click on that serves no purpose.

If you like horror/mystery adventure games, you'll almost certainly enjoy Asylum. There's not a ton of dialogue, with only four NPCs to talk to, so if you prefer dialogue-heavy games this might not live up to your expectations, but otherwise, it's great. The atmosphere of the asylum is top notch, the story makes sense (particularly if you take the time to read all of the notes), and certain revelations are fully considered and foreshadowed throughout the game. The puzzles were pretty intuitive for the most part, with there only being one where I was completely on the wrong track and had to go to the discussions for help (something that can be much more frequent with other games in the genre). Some people think the ending falls flat, but I think it was pretty good. There might not be very much to analyze about the game based on the ending, (at least with what the community has found so far,) but it's still gotten me to think about various parts of the game in different ways, so I'd say it did its job.

My husband and I had a lot of fun playing this together! We're both Scratches fans from back in the day, and I think fellow fans will really enjoy Asylum as well. There's a lot of well-written reading to do, interesting characters, and the atmosphere is excellent.

I was initially not thrilled about the setting because I feel like asylum stories tend to recycle the same tropes, but I was really pleasantly surprised by how the plot developed. There are some horror moments, but overall it was an intriguing slow burn mystery (which is my favorite kind!).

You will definitely want a buddy to discuss the ending with when you finish!

I was waiting for this game for years. I love it! Good ol' Fashioned Point-'n-Click adventure game with horror elements.

Some navigation is clunky but that's part of the charm.

The developer listened to his fans and did fix the achievements. This is a sign of integrity.

~10 hours to finish without a walkthrough. Another 3 for achievement hunting (assuming you save early, save often).

Overall rating: 9/10 (achievements are fixed)

We don't have many click and point horror games recently, and Asylum is a good example (I suppose you can't expect less from developers of Scratches). The location, e.g. mental hospital, is greatly designed. I would like to specifically mention the level of details, especially in the lab and in the morgue. The sound library should also be praised - it was quite uncomfortable to find myself in the basement with high risk patients for the first time.
As for the story, it was a bizarre one. The ending made me think a lot of what I've just experienced. The owls are definitely not what they seem. I suppose that if I am still trying to figure out was it real and who was the protagonist, so that was a good story.

Scratches was one of the first horror games I ever played and I absolutely loved it - now years later I finally get to experience Asylum since it was first announced and I am happy to say I am super pleased with how everything turned out! It was scary, but not in a overbearing way and the atmosphere of the game was perfect. Brings me back to my old point and click horror days.

not bad franky but nothing that makes it good either,,,, i wish the supernatural part wasnt there but i can understand how some might like that
left me disappointed tbh, hoped for more

Announced on July 9, 2010, released on March 13th 2025.
15 Years in the making, and what do we get?
We get a 7 hour point and click gaming adventure throughout a dilapidated Asylum.

+ The layout of the asylum is well designed, I believe the developers built it off the designs of a real asylum.
+ Loads upon loads of newspaper clippings and documents to collect and read, with background story lore of the asylum.
+ There are a few characters you can talk to in the game, with hours of interesting dialog options. The voicework is quite good.

+/- For the most part, the puzzles are well balanced. There are only 1-2 spots where I was stuck, and it wasn't because I didn't understand the puzzle, it was because I didn't know I could click in a certain area. Certain areas are too dark and the interface is extremely dated.
+/- The story kept me intrigued throughout the whole game, however it fizzles out near the end. Also, there is only one ending and it is a letdown.

- The whole asylum is drab looking and most of the rooms look the same inside. Usually I get a sense of wonder exploring in games like this when unlocking new areas, but I didn't get that feeling in this game at all. Many rooms are just bland, with nothing to collect or do in them.
- Surprisingly there are not that many items to collect or puzzles to solve in this game. Most of the time in game you are either talking to other characters or reading your found documents. This can lead to boredom. There can be hours without anything interesting happening.
- The way you move around in this game made me dizzy after playing for long periods. Your character "Hops" from one location to the next and then you can swing the camera around in 360 degrees looking for items or clues. This constantly hopping and swinging the camera around made me nauseated.
- The game is priced high for what you get, with its dated interface.
- If you want a horror game this isn't it. Its a mature slow burn of a game that has a horror story that you read in documents and files. Not much horror gameplay here, except for 2-3 sections that last for a few minutes each in the entire game.

I just have a very "Meh"... average feeling of the whole experience.
Nothing stood out as special, especially after baking in the developmental oven for 15 years.

Overall: 6 / 10

Being a game that is a spiritual successor to one of the all-time greats in the horror genre (Scratches) and that was stuck in development hell for over 15 years, ASYLUM had big shoes to fill. While there may never be another Scratches, ASYLUM does a fine job of conveying the feeling of absolute horror and bewilderment fans of Agustin Corde's original classic conveyed.

The game was a day one purchase for me, and I was hopeful it would be fully playable without issue due to the length in development. There was that feeling in the back of my mind, however, that there would be some release issues...and for sure there were. Multiple engine errors and crashes were quickly addressed by the Senscape team, leading to a smooth playing experience less than two weeks after release. The thing I'm most impressed with about this developer is their willingness to listen to their customers. Myself and some other players complained about motion sickness and a lack of graphical options, and instead of being ignored, Senscape spent about a week adding in requested features that made the game a much smoother playthrough experience.

The game and story is quite captivating. Without giving away any spoilers, ASYLUM is most often brilliant, only let down by a controversial ending that there is a lengthy, ongoing discussion over. The best type of art makes you think and lead to different conclusions. ASYLUM does this, but I'm not always sure it's for the best....having a vague ending that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense isn't artful in this case, as there are multiple other dead ends or unexplained situations which make it feel more like a rush job the last 25% of the game instead of something just surreal, but explainable. This seemed like a game that could have benefited from an additional 5 or 6 hours of playtime, or perhaps a DLC or sequel that would describe events further. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be in the plans. "Scratches" also had a controversial ending, but not quite to this level.

If you're reading this and already a fan of horror-adventure, pick this up. Nice art and graphics, strong voice acting, and a haunting soundtrack round out the experience. It's a point-and-click that also could have worked as a regular first person adventure game with WASD movement. You have a journal and inventory, but you won't be collecting a ton of unneeded junk to progress the story. All puzzles were logical which is refreshing. I like to use my brain when playing adventure games, but not so much a fan of moon-logic.

Hopefully the success the game has leads Agustin and the Senscape team to release more horror adventures, as not too many people do it better than the Senscape team.

I never thought I would be writing this review after so many years of waiting, but here we are :). Having finally finished Asylum, I can say that, for me, the game delivered. I believe it is a worthy successor to Scratches.The best compliment I can give is that from the moment I stepped through the doors of the asylum, I felt the same eerie, unsettling sensation that I experienced 15 years ago when I first entered Blackwood Manor. However, this time, the creepiness has been taken to a whole new level—something I truly appreciated. That final memory in the game will haunt me for a long time.Of course, the game isn’t perfect. In particular, the ending left me somewhat confused, but despite that, Asylum ultimately satisfied my long craving for a classic horror adventure game, a genre that unfortunately has become increasingly rare.I sincerely hope this isn’t the last we see from Senscape. Their unique style is something I deeply admire, and I would love to experience more of their work in the future, god knows the game industry could really use it too.

Overall I really enjoyed this game. There are a few caveats with my recommendation, but overall this game is another masterclass in ambiance from this designer. His last work Scratches was phenomenal. Unfortunately you can't get it anymore due to licensing issues, but he did give away a few hundred unused keys for it in his Discord so he's a pretty cool guy.

Back to Asylum, I love how this game embodies Point and Click games from the 90s. The pre-rendered sequences are intentionally ran at lower framerates to feel weird and disorienting, but is used so limited or confined to a small portion of the screen so people more inclined to motion sickness won't feel anything from it. The click to move transitions that fade out the previous frame into the new one also feel perfect for the POV character and his hallucinations. The soundtrack for this is phenomenal. It always kept me in full suspense throughout my gameplay, even when I knew nothing was going to happen in a previous area. The characters are also a joy to talk to. And the interview system, while basic, really allows their personalities to shine through this dark atmosphere. I also found the writing in this game to be very enjoyable, both the text and conversations between characters, just a tad too lengthy at times.

For the few cons I have for this game. Every point and click game comes with some BS you have to deal with. Asylum is no different. Most of the early game puzzles have realistic logic and limited exploration scope to make them easy to solve. It's only when the game opens up that some of these puzzles can become really misleading. Being given the strands for several different puzzles at once, but still having to complete them linearly is no fun. I spent so much time trying to piece together a puzzle, just to find out I was unable to complete it until a chapter or two from now got really annoying. The level design does minimize this somewhat by discarding useless items and text options between chapters. I know for a game designer you have to strike a balance between realism and fun, and I think changing up the layout of the asylum with some more farcical features or paths to cut down on the available puzzles would have streamlined the game a lot more. In addition to this I found myself missing prompts to interact with some clickable objects. The game tries to minimize this issue as well by allowing you to turn on glowing white circles when you mouse near an object. I would have loved an option to keep these circles on at all times, although I do acknowledge it would ruin the immersion somewhat. It also felt like the game ran out of steam at the end with rooms having significantly less things to interact with in the later chapters.

A few nitpicks. I would have loved to read through my collected articles in the pause menu. It already has the option to see past dialog so adding the articles shouldn't be a big issue. It also would have been nice to see what questions I've already asked the different characters. I also find most horror games by default to be slightly too dark and Asylum is no exception. There were a few times where I couldn't tell what I was interacting with visually because of it just being a shadow on my screen and had to go off of the on screen dialog.

Overall a great game, hopefully to become an Indie Horror Classic with the likes of Amnesia. With a few design changes this could easily be one of my favorite horror games. For now I will have to settle with labeling it Pretty Damn Good, but for how little attention the Point & Click genre gets that's fine with me.

To say Asylum was a long time coming is an understatement. Was the wait worth it..... HELL YES! Asylum is a wonderful reminder of why we love adventure games, The story, the game play and the mystery. The game is an absolute mind trip and that ending blew me away, which is what a good adventure game should do. I have a feeling people will be discussing that ending for a long time to come. I hope to see many more games from this developer in the near future. I give Asylum the HIGHEST recommendation!

I dont remember the last time I played a game that had such an incredible level of detail. The care that was taken to build such a rich and immersive environment is impressive. Every corner felt thoughtfully designed, conveying a great depth of the world.
And the amount of documents, descriptions, and dialogues is simply amazing!
The gameplay of Asylum centers primarily around exploration with a little bit of puzzle-solving. It reminded me of the Darkness Within games.
I had quite a lot of fun piecing together the story while exploring around and reading/listening to all the documents I found and the comments the main character and NPCs had to say. Every item/topic can be observed/asked about multiple times. Sometimes the text/dialogue was quite funny, and the devs even took the opportunity to introduce various Easter eggs through these interactions.
At the end of the game, I realized I was missing half of the NPCs' interview records. I clearly played the game too fast and will have to explore the asylum again.

Man, I don't normally write reviews because it makes me feel pretentious, but seeing some of these ridiculous comments, I had to. To the devs, I'm so excited you made this game. I love that you stand by it, and I could tell you cared about the game. Please keep going, ignore the turds. I loved Scratches, including the ending, and I'm loving this game so far. I wanted to wait until I finished it to review it, but some of these comments are unbelievable. A game's quality and someone's preferences are two different things. Games are art, and should be treated as such. Also, love how you worded your update. haha I'll keep an eye out for future projects you work on.

People should play games for the experience, not just expecting it to be made specifically for them.

This game started off SO strong, but the ending left me with more questions than answers, and not in a cool spooky mystery way. The puzzles seemed to devolve throughout the game as well, and an important task that was required to complete the game were not included on my task list. It got so frustrating trying to figure out what I had missed in the huge building. Also, there was one cool chase scene that got 100% ruined because they wanted me to stop and read long notes in the middle of it kewk

Atmosphere was top tier, but that story and ending just left a bad taste in the end.

A solid point and click horror/puzzle game.

I was a big fan of Scratches and it's hard not to compare them, but I think it's best to see Asylum as a different game, even though I can see why they call it a spiritual successor. While there's a lot of similarities and even some nods to that game, Asylum has a very different vibe overall.

Overall I had a good time exploring the asylum and uncovering the secrets and puzzles of the game. Be warned though, there is a ton of reading, but that shouldn't be surprising for a point and click adventure game. They balance it out a good bit with voiced character dialogue and I found it enjoyable going back to certain characters and asking them about some of the things I had discovered.

If you're looking for a play at your own pace horror-themed adventure puzzle game, this is a good one you can complete in a few nights.

Very, very disappointing I'm sorry to say :( I had high hopes, I'm a fan of "Scratches" and usually am fine with retro graphics and lo-budget production values, but this is a mess. Pre-rendered graphics are grainy and lack detail. The lighting is all over the place. The character models and animations are straight from a low budget PS2 game. The story is one big cliché and the ending is just awful. Did I wait 15 years for this? Really?

Terribly disappointing. I was excited to play a retro point-n-click with a solid horror ambiance, but this one isn't working.

The premise of returning to a mental institute in which your character was a patient before is a good one: but once you get there, there's a bunch of people with whom you have terribly long, amateurishly voiced and written dialogues that break every effort the game made to put pressure on you and stress you out.

I think the main character's voice actor might not be an English native speaker, which is extremely fine and okay, but it jumps out in pronunciation errors in the first three minutes of the intro cutscene. This makes the game feel cheap, and it probably would have been scarier without voice acting altogether. The writing feels lacking and its vocabulary limited, both in medical terms and literary ones: I read the word "heyday" 3 times in 2 minutes, in around 6 lines of text, come on. Same goes for, rather than using actual medical terms, inventing the shorthand "SMI" for "Serious Mental Issues", describing "SMI Patients". The script feels... incomplete?

That said, the game is *constantly* trying to slip in tiny jokes and funny quips from your character that end up just being annoying and deconstructing the mood. You examine a radiator at 2 AM in a spooky asylum: "A radiator, but no lady in it.". You examine the forest outside "(quote from Scratches) Oops, wrong game.". Asylum really wants you to know it was made by the people who made Scratches, but everything Scratches did right because of tech limitations, Asylum falls short on. The isolation doesn't work because you are not alone in the asylum; where Scratches shone because your only contacts with the outside world were on the phone, here you're looking at dubious 3D models with dated animations that blurt out a convoluted script.

There's a few minutes where I almost had the feeling that the game could recapture the eeriness of 90s-00s 3D models and the charm of the point n click system, but then my character had another crummy, Marvel-movie-humor remark about the environment I was pixel hunting to find a possible interactible, and I felt that was enough. There's also a certain insensitivity towards sensationalizing the patients and mental illness in general that I'm not even going to touch.

I really wanted to enjoy this game. I haven’t played a point and click game in an extremely long time. So I was kind of excited to try this.

My main issue is that this really doesn’t evolve on the point and click controls. I’m not sure what that evolution should entail, but playing thru this is a real slog. It just doesn’t feel good to move thru the asylum, especially with a controller. There has to be a more intuitive way to do it with a game that involves so much backtracking.

To be honest, I also just don’t like the puzzles. I don’t like games where the puzzles are too easy, but in the same respect, having puzzle solution buried inside books you’re supposed to read…I dunno man, I’m playing a game not reading a book. If I wanted to read a book, I’d read a book. I just don’t find that “fun”. But I’m glad a lot of people do.

Another gripe is that this claims there’s cloud saves, but there isn’t. So I’m locked to playing on my ROG Ally, where performance is decent, but I can’t play on my main PC unless I want to start over. Thats a no for me.

I also can’t figure out some of the controls/gameplay elements. I’ll pick up a book or an item, read it and it’ll say “journal updated”. What journal was updated? I can’t figure out where to find the information that was recorded. At least on controller. It says there’s full support for controllers, but when it prompts you to press something, it’ll say “press tab”. Well okay, but what does that translate to on a controller? If you’re not going to change the icons that appear on screen to match what you’re using, at least have a section in the settings that displays the control scheme for reference.

I’m glad people are liking the game, I know it was a long wait for them. But for me, I’m just not feeling it. Whereas I don’t see any “horror” in this game, it is beautifully designed. I can tell love was put into the game, but it doesn’t translate to 13+ years of development love from the little I’ve played. If I ever decide to give it another try, it’ll be on a really, really steep discount.

Kinda meh in the end, the ending isn't satisfying at all. The first half of the game was interesting but I lost interest around when the protagonist starts wanting to do really strange things. This game advertises itself as scary but it isn't. There's never any real threat in the game, except that you'll miss some achievements. All that said I'd say it's still a decent game and checks the basic boxes for a point-and-click adventure. It's still rather buggy though so save often with different slots if you buy it. That will also save you having to replay sections of the game if you miss anything.

Unfortunately, this is one of those games that gives me instant motion-sickness, nausea, and migranes.
I'm so upset. I was so looking forward to this game.

As heartbreaking as it is, I must admit to myself I didn't like this game much in the end. Didn't hate it, either, but there's nothing I would recommend it for unless you really like this sort of game. There's not a lot to do aside walking around a mostly empty building with puzzles being few and basic. The protagonist has the personality of unseasoned lukewarm sock soup and the story fails to build up tension or mystery. While you start trying to find out what's going on, there's not much to make you care about it and the game then reveals it rather early anyways. Worst thing is at no point does the game get at least a little scary as if the developers thought being in a run down asylum was scary on it's own. Don't want to sound too harsh as it's still not a bad game ... just not particularly good, either. One of those where you want to give a horizontal thumb.

I really wanted to like this game. I saw a video essay on Scratches a while back, and it looked really interesting, so I couldn't wait for Asylum to come out.

The game starts off very strong. The atmosphere, puzzles, and interactions with the other people at the asylum are immersive and put together well. Things are ambiguous but intriguing enough to try and figure out whats going on.

Somewhere in the middle of the game, around 12 pm, is where it starts to fall apart. Several tasks require immense backtracking, which in a point and click adventure game is not an enjoyable experience. Click 14 times and waste a few minutes to go all the way back to get an item, another 14 times and a few minutes to get back. To save spoilers, I won't describe steps, but there are several tasks which require steps you need to take which can't be reasonably inferred from context clues. You have to resort to the classic clicking on everything and see what works.

Then begins the absolute breakdown of the game. The last few hours of the game became so ambiguous (and you can check the community discussions around the game) that I considered dropping it many times. Not because of its ambiguity, but because ambiguity meant you had to waste so much time going into rooms and clicking on everything. Not only that, but there is an incredibly easy way to lock yourself out of any progress! NOTE: The dev said they will be delivering a patch to fix this.

And after all the hard work the payoff seems to be.. a 30 second cutscene and another 30 second inexplicable cutscene and the game is over. No revelatory power, nothing. It could be said that this is lovecraftian, but i'd argue it isn't, story-wise there are several beats that are very anti-lovecraft.

If I could rate this game on the front-half, i'd give it an 8, maybe a 9. The modelling is rough, and the cutscenes break a lot of immersion, but the story, events, and puzzles are well worth it. Because of the back half of the game, this feels like a 3. I would never recommend this game because of the immense dissapointment of the potentially powerful second half. It's not that it's even that bad, it's just a huge letdown from the expectation the game gave.

Much love to the devs, it feels like a labor of love, just wish the whole game was like the beginning. I don't know if there was a time crunch but it feels rushed and unfinished. Almost like a race to a conclusion.

Back in 2006 a very small team from Argentina created a moody horror themed first person view point and click adventure with pre-rendered backgrounds called Scratches. And while it became a surprise hit, after releasing a Director’s Cut of the game the following year, the original team ceased to be soon after. Then, in 2010 lead programmer and designer of Scratches Agustín Cordes announced that their new studio was making ASYLUM. Almost 15 years of development later, it’s a released game one can play. Which I immediately did and enjoyed my time with it quite a bit.

The story premise is simple enough – the main character, for reasons not fully understood by him, drives back to the mental institution he previously stayed in to find information on what exactly happened there. The titular asylum has been closed a while ago and is meant to be abandoned, so his hopes are to just search through the old documents and fill in the blanks in his own memory. To his surprise, the place isn’t empty – it’s in the early stages of being reopened, and due to that has some staff and patients in it, complicating the investigation. Over the course of several hours, that serve as “chapters” of sorts, you will be learning more about what happened in that place and solving problems that block your investigation.

What’s very nice is that there’s rarely a reason for the main character to just grab a random junk item into inventory or need to think as an “adventure game protagonist” rather than a normal human being trying to get what they want. And while there is a certain level on non-linearity, it’s never about finding random junk and trying to apply it random pieces of scenery, solving things you don’t even know you need to solve too. Vast majority of problems to solve are very well made, story is told mostly via documents you find along the way or from talking to the few characters you meet along the way. And the atmosphere is built nicely, with wonderfully paced sequences that build and relieve tension.

That said, the overall storytelling does falter closer to the end and completely misses the tone on the ending. Several of the very late game problem solving sequences start feeling like they’re there just to be there, rather than flowing nicely as they did up until that point. And as you will be exploring and investigating a lot, you will from time to time stumble upon very poorly handled easter eggs and references, that destroy the atmosphere. They’re so bad, I’d honestly wish they could be toggled off if not cut from the game entirely. Nonetheless, at least the game avoids repeating horrid unintuitive pixel hunting puzzles that made Scratches far less enjoyable. Although, while Scratches did get a better soundtrack of the two, in my opinion, even if ASYLUM still nails the overall sound design.

And speaking of it, when I’ve revisited Scratches around 7 years ago, I had to put things into perspective about why Scratches was released at the “right time”. The way Scratches (and ASYLUM) control, where you’re exploring the game almost as if in an FPS game, but in a very limited manner, always felt awkward and artificial. Which could be excused in the early 90s, when they could also bring the visual fidelity not achievable with real time 3D and direct controls. But right after Scratches released we’ve had Penumbra tech demo and Overture, Portal, Dear Esther – all of which have shown that it’s not just possible but perhaps preferable to build first person adventure games with FPS-like controls. And by now, we’ve seen the remakes of Myst and Riven, which I would argue play objectively better than the originals for that same reason. So is there a place for a game like ASYLUM in the modern market?

I would say yes. It does feel quaint and also obvious that the choice to make the game work this way is more due to the budget and design limitations, rather than technological limitations. Yet what matters is that while limited and sometimes frustrating, the game controls very well and the developers spent a lot of time making sure that your exploration feels “just right”. The transitions are nicely done, the way camera follows the mouse is good and I think even people who’s never had experience with these types of games before will have an easy time adjusting and “getting” it.

ASYLUM is a title that could’ve felt outdated, could’ve stopped existing somewhere between its announcement and today or could’ve just been not very interesting. But it is interesting and it does play well. Yes, I wish it wasn’t the type of game that just starts and you have to view the intro before you get to the menus. Yes, the ending is weak. Yes the characters look like talking heads from Fallout 2. Yes, there are visual inconsistencies between different pre-rendered elements. And yes there are bugs that will hopefully all get fixed in time. But it is a game worth playing. And I was very happy to have finally played it.

Very good first half, but then it becomes apparent that the story has been rewritten several times throughout the last 15 years. Doesn't mean the game is bad, but some story points are left unresolved.

Absolutely worth the wait I think, it is everything I hoped for and more.

To those who did not get to enjoy "Scratches", this is basically a point and click adventure game from a first person perspective. That means you move by "clicking through" the scenes from hot spot to hot spot rather than a free movement, click on points of interest to observe, find items, use items on certain things or areas (like key on door) and find documents and talk to the few other people present, figuring out the plot.
Maybe it's an acquired taste, but the presentation is really great to convey the whole atmosphere. That's what the game does best.
Puzzles aren't super moon logic annoying, I could figure it all out with minimal pointers, that means an averagely intelligent person will not have any trouble - in that regard it is in fact much easier than Scratches, which could be good or bad depending on your disposition.
I wasn't too keen on the ending resolution honestly but, you know.. Life's a journey, not a destination.

I've waited 16 years for this, since the very first announcement, and I finished this game in one sitting. It was undeniably a very impressive ride, and it had a lot of things going for it. In my opinion, the game was also SORELY let down by its ending, to the point where I'm now tempted to give a thumbs down to the experience as a whole. I won’t, of course - up until the final credits rolled, I was very excited about it.

This situation is incredibly annoying. This ziggurat was clearly built by a very small team entirely out of their own blood, sweat and a deep love for horror and the adventure game genre. And it is a very well-directed experience. It’s *fun* and *interesting* to play, and being in the middle of this sinister mystery feels great. The asylum is pretty big, with a lot of different rooms and corridors. The game does a very good job of strategically introducing parts of the building so as to not overwhelm you, but the interface also ensures that you won't need to hunt for pixels, and makes it so it's a lot harder to miss important things as you explore.

The same goes for the story. The game makes you ask questions, and when new bits of information get strategically revealed, they recontextualize the facts that you already have, making your existing assumptions slide into new places, and when it happens, it feels very satisfying.

The adventure game medium works both for and against the game. For example, Yes, I've seen the interaction prompts on the water taps and some close ups of the drain covers, I wonder if anything will happen as I finally hold this small metal object that I obtained with great effort during a very sensitive interaction right over one such drain , but also early in the game you come across a book with detailed instructions on how to use a machine to conduct an invasive medical procedure, and how you definitely need someone else to supervise it in order to ensure safety, and you think, "F@%&, I'll have to do it alone on myself later, won't I," and it colors your expectations accordingly.

Unfortunately, this is also where my main issue lies. I get the idea behind the ending and can appreciate why it is made this way. It stays true to its inspirations, even if the intended effect belongs to a calmer timeline, and not the one where you get assaulted by a barrage of news about evil running unchecked every time you decide to see what’s going on in the world. However, being a part of a game, and not a movie or a book, actively works against it. When I first saw the ending, I thought, wait, what the hell did I do wrong? Was it the door puzzle? Let me try again. An hour later I went to check the discussions on Discord and saw a confirmation that what I got was the *only* ending. And it honestly felt like a slap in the face out of nowhere.

It does make sense in retrospect – the Great Old Ones as Lovecraft envisioned them aren’t just big scary animals that you can send to R’lyeh with a blast from a shotgun, good ol’ ‘merican way, like. You can’t run with that crowd and emerge unscathed. I heard this specific tale many times before, and I even don’t mind hearing it again, but not when the intended result of all my efforts feels as sudden and carries as much weight as a death screen in a Sierra game.

Besides, the clues that lead up to the ending aren’t exactly *prominent*, not until you consider them all after the fact. When you are playing the game, you see other possibilities, and honestly, I would have found a lot of them more exciting than the current explanation. My expectations were also colored by Scratches, where the ending was ambiguous enough to be interpreted from two different angles. I fully expected at least a “Could this be a mushroom?” ending here as well, especially since it was hinted at.

My other issue with the ending is that it doesn’t feel personal in any way, and doesn’t offer any emotional payoff. If one important detail wasn’t kept till the very end to serve as a SUDDEN PLOT TWIST, it could have been avoided, but we have what we have.

On paper, the events are tragic, but the game doesn’t develop the personalities of anyone involved to a sufficient degree. While playing, it sometimes feels like some things happen in a strange parallel reality, but not in a good (unsettling) way. The issues that should be addressed get sidelined, you don’t get a lot of information in general, and what you get has a very specific focus. While you are busy with your current objective and also keep making guesses about the possible solution to the mystery, this doesn’t feel jarring, but when you look back after reaching the ending, the aftertaste is not great.

The game definitely looks, and it also sounds. A lot of effort undeniably went into the first, and it shows. The building is sprawling, decrepit and oppressive. It’s also a giant mess – which was absolutely intentional. Some music tracks are pretty cool, and I wouldn’t mind listening to them again. Others are nice, and they enhance several specific events a great deal. Others still are serviceable, but it’s not bad overall.
The atmosphere is definitely there, and I’ve found myself being startled by the shapes of mundane objects a number of times. On the other hand, I didn’t feel really scared at any point – but I was definitely darkly intrigued, and this is the feeling I value the most.

So it's worth it overall, but the game could have been so much better with a few possibly even minor alterations, and it's really sad. Perhaps, this was the real horror that we've found along the way.

Very good horror /point click adventure game. Reminded me of the 90's point and click games only modern and first person and very scary moments i only wish the game was longer. I <3 Lenny

First things first I'm judging this game on its own merits. I didn't contribute to this game's development and I don't have nostalgia for Scratches.

I liked this game a lot. The presentation and the writing are its strongest points. There are a lot of reflections implemented on surfaces and a few gnarly animations. The flashbacks and character conversations look pretty good for an adventure game. The sound design is excellent with a couple minor exceptions. The diegetic interface is fantastic; I loved using the notebook and the main menu book to navigate, and I loved the different fonts and paper types for the different notes. It all helped to give the asylum a real sense of place.

The writing is really the star of the show. Multiple lines have been implemented for most objects, and the notes and audio/video you can find are compelling. The notes tend to be between 2-5 pages as well, so there's potentially quite a bit of reading. You can finish the game without paying too much attention to most of them, but a few are required for puzzles and there are several I think are necessary to understand the ending. Personally, I loved these, and read every one I could find.

I didn't like the ending very much initially. After sitting on it for a while, discussing it with others and mulling it over I think I like it more now. I feel compelled to go back and get the few notes I missed to see if that alters my understanding at all. Fortunately, the game gives you enough information that you can understand basically everything about the ending, you just might have to look for it; I just have one (minor) question remaining I am hoping gets addressed in a note I missed. One criticism I could make is that the scope is very small; about a quarter of the asylum is functionally closed off and you never go there, and there are only a handful of characters. It is a very tight and streamlined experience, for better and worse; it took me a little over 6 hours without a guide, but I read very quickly so your results may vary (additional time from note hunting after seeing the credits).

I will say the puzzles in particular are quite rudimentary. They require you to remember things about the environment and put pieces together but they were mostly (one exception) very logical and ultimately simple. There are no sliding tiles, grid puzzles, towers of hanoi etc. No abstract mechanical constructions serving an unknown purpose. Everything is very grounded.

I did experience a few bugs. Nothing game breaking, but there are a couple screens where the picture would get cut off at the top or bottom of my display and show fog in the background. I use an ultrawide so that may be why. There were also a couple instances where interactions wouldn't trigger and I would get stuck. Ctrl+Backspace fixes this. There are a couple scripting bugs but the developers have already put out a patch on the second day fixing many of them, so they probably won't be around long.

I'm very satisfied with my purchase. Despite feeling underwhelmed by the puzzles the presentation and writing carry this game. I loved the diegetic interface. I liked the story; uncovering the chain of events was compelling, enough so that I ended up playing through to the end from the start of my second sitting. Having your perception of specific moments changed by new context is very enjoyable to me. If you're a sucker for this kind of thing and you like old fashioned first person point and clicks, you'll probably have a good time.

7 hours in, only 5 achievements left, and after my first crash, I thought I'd go ahead and post a review. One thing first: Yes I am one of the people that have been waiting 10+ years for this game. No, the wait did not make the game better. I do not hate this game, but as someone who has waited this long, I am entirely flabbergasted.

tl;dr
Don't buy this game full price. Wait until it comes down to buy it. There are better point and clicks for cheaper that feel finished and didn't take 15 years to complete.

Pros:
The clouds move
Storm sound effects were nice
Jonathan Boakes
Some voice acting
Ambient noises were nice when no music played

Cons:
Mostly everything else.
The UI is ridiculous. You can't just go through your inventory easily, you scroll one, by one, by one, by one... to get to the item you want. If there is an easier way, it has never explained it. The "journal" was cute with it acting like a psychiatry patient paper, but finding the things you found was ridiculous. Why is it under "achievements"? It never says that when it tells you where to find it. Options were cute too but again, nothing hovered over to explain what each option meant when changing it.

Gameplay: 15 years, we still have pre-rendered scenes and animations, making the game feel extremely dated. It worked for Scratches (my favorite horror game ever), but it feels unneeded now. When I play a point and click now, I expect easier ways of getting to get into the correct position with minimum clicks. I am having to click all over just to get back in the front to talk to Julia. It gets frustrating. Puzzles were fine, easy enough if you spent the time reading. The backtrack was expected for point and click when you don't have a journal to log everything you find, including numbers. Julia's voice also has reverb but main character does not. It feels jarring when they talk to each other.

Peeves: Put the fan names or people that backed it in one place, not all over the game. I am searching for things relating to the story and trying to figure it out, I do not want to find a room dedicated to chairs I zoom in on that just say a name that has NOTHING to do with the story. The morgue paper was cute with Mary and Bram. Put them all there or in a visitor's notebook or even just the end of the game.

Blocking the entire women's wing off felt ridiculous. 15 years and a part is blocked off while making character R a big thing. We could have found more information there. If you can actually open it up, I have yet to find it after 7 hours. I would be willing to edit this if I simply hadn't found the way to open it.

The story isn't special, unique, and was fine overall. Many people could figure it out at the beginning, and maybe while I am still missing some information, the ending was absolutely facepalm worthy. Without spoilers, it felt like it was trying to do the amazing reveal Scratches had, yet fell completely off the rail. It did not help the game.

Overall, you will see many reviews complimenting this game, and most of these people have put money into the game's development, have their names in it, or just feel so relieved that finally this game came out that they think it's wonderful.

Don't buy full price. Save your money. It's not worth it at the price it was set for release.

WOW, what an amazing game. I currently finished my first playthrough. I don't jet know if there are more endings in the game, but still I am quite impressed. The tension and dread kept rising with every new information I gathered. I am still trying to figure out what the ending means.

Here are my thoughts (Spoiler warning! Just in case):

-Controls-
Like Scratches, the game uses Point & Click controls to navigate around the Asylum. Some may argue, that these kinds of controls are dated and a former workaround for the hardware limitations older Puzzle games had to deal with. But, like in Scratches, this works in the Game's favor: Every click in any direction is like a jump cut. The fear that something lurks behind any corner of the Asylum, paired with the rising tension of the story, is quite a nerve wracking experience (in a good way of course). Small nitpick: This control scheme comes with its drawbacks. Like in Scratches, you sometimes need to stand in a specific spot in order to interact with certain Objects. Unlike in Scratches however, there is a feature, that shows you the hotspots you can click on at your current position, which is very helpful.

-Gameplay & Puzzles-
The puzzles were very doable. No complaints here, and a huge improvement over the somewhat confusing and convoluted puzzles of Scratches. But I must say they were sometimes a little too easy. Near the ending of the game though at 4 am, there is a weaker, not really immersive, "Chase section" that I personally didn't like. Let's talk about the "talking-with-characters" mechanic. It is quite interactive and fun. The biggest problem I had was finding the characters in the building, especially when the game decides, that at this time, the character just isn't anywhere in the Asylum.

-Technical aspects-
First the bugs (there are not many to be found) (Keep in mind: I completed most of the game at launch): I played Asylum in german and sometimes text wasn't translated, randomly in the middle of some papers. In rare cases, the game displayed at the beginning of some internal monologue boxes something like "Übersetzter Text" (in English: "Translated Text"), which I suppose shouldn't be there. Also, rarely, some voice lines didn't trigger.
Second, other things: Some characters voice lines strangely sound... compressed? I don't know why, but I know that the voice lines of the MC are noticeably better in quality (They were rerecorded last minute, as far as I know). But the delivery of the voice acting is good.
(Other thoughts: I think the game consists like Scratches out of 2D Still Images brought to live by FMVs (door opening, etc.) but there are real time 3D elements sprinkled in: Like the main menu book, the notepad and most of the character animation. I am quite impressed how good everything blends together, nice compositing work.)

-Horror-
I personally was a little more scared playing Scratches than Asylum. Which is a compliment because Scratches is one of the scariest games I ever played. I guess I never felt 'alone' because of the other characters. But the cosmic horror aspect of the story still terrifies me, even after playing. It all comes down to what somebody personally is afraid of. The few jump scares were quite affective. No cheap jump scares here.

In conclusion: Play it and READ EVERYTHING! The writing is one of the best and scariest parts of this game. It kept me at the edge of my seat!

Kind of a slog so far...

I was pretty excited about the game and the story (thus far) does have me interested, but the general game play is a slog. There's a sort of false sense of interactivity as most environmental elements you can interact with offer very little insight to the story or are arbitrarily locked (aka not actually functional, you can't unlock them). Items that you do find (notes with history, patient files) are placed pretty haphazardly without much sense. Why would you find a doctor's note in a library book or a patient file in the laundry room?

The interactive objects are also difficult to discern at times. There are two areas I've already encountered that I can zoom in on but nothing pops when looking at it (a pile of dirt in a bathroom, a grate in the floor) so it's unclear if I need to come back after obtaining an item that lets me interact with these elements or not. So far, I've spent a lot of time clicking my way through hallways where not much happens. There is one genuinely unsettling area early on when you're sent to retrieve a security guard's baton, but that same feeling hasn't returned since.

There are also some soft-locks I've encountered already (for instance, not being able to interact with the morgue hook controls, not able to take specimen to use in a microscope) because my character doesn't know why they should do it (outside of my, the player's, morbid curiosity).

For currently playthrough status, I'm currently navigating the upper floors that include a morgue, laboratory, etc. I'll update my review if it ever gets truly spooky or moves beyond examining rooms with overturned furniture and crusty windows.

I do not usually enjoy point and click games but I watched Vote4Holt's video essay/s on Scratches and have had this game on my wishlist ever since he name-dropped it as an upcoming spiritual successor of sorts developed by Agustín Cordes.

I'm only five hours in and admittedly I'm really bad at these kinds of games so its taken alot of trial and error and multiple restarts to even get as far as I am rn but so far? Really good game.

The story is intriguing and I'm loving the way they're introducing characters one by one and letting you really get to know them instead of throwing a bunch of NPCs at you all at once and expecting you to keep track of it all. The music is hauntingly beautiful and it pairs so nicely with the level design and overall sense of foreboding that permeates the Hanwell Institute. I've played a LOT of horror games. I'm not all that hard to scare, but I still feel like I know my way around this genre pretty well. This game is the creepiest game I've played in a long time. I think alot of that has to do with the fact that this is a slow paced point and click instead of a balls to the wall survival horror game like the ones I normally play, but still. There's this constant sense of dread and unease and I'm always expecting scares that rarely actually happen. In a lot of ways that makes it even tenser. It may not be bombastic and loud and in your face, but its definitely unnerving and I love it for that.

All in all, really enjoying the ride so far and I'm excited to sink my teeth into this story as I continue.

It’s fantastic to see a point-and-click adventure built with modern technology, and this game absolutely delivers. The visuals are stunning, with every scene crafted in rich detail, while the sound design perfectly complements the eerie atmosphere, wrapping you in its unsettling mood. It captures the spirit of classic adventure games while feeling fresh and immersive. A must-play for fans of the genre!

Oh boy, what a time to be alive! After mere 15 years (pfff), we finally witnessed the release of the long awaited Asylum! Lets pay respects to all those poor souls who failed this test and ended up in asylum themselves, waiting for this day.

But jokes aside, so far - very well and initial impressions are good. Considering the expectations - not disappointed. The game is fully workable on day 1. Got few minor issues but whatever - nothing gamebreaking.

Visuals are nice. Dialogs are fully voiced. Proper lighting and sound design is also at it's place. And atmosphere is indeed creepy. So far, I'm on my way to uncover the rest of this story.

I love the style of this game and the story has me intrigued thus far. I will note, that I couldn't locate a hint system so If you get stuck you end up wandering around and asking a lot of questions in hopes someone might provide an answer. If hints are possible I haven't figured out how to access them. Overall, this game easily surpasses scratches in functionality, graphics, and the inclusion of actually character models. I can't wait to see what this team does next as they haven't disappointed when it comes to spooky stories and an eerie atmosphere.

Been looking forward to this for a while as a fan of Scratches and Serena, feeling great about it and very interested in the story and puzzles!