#nucleosys

I got acquainted with the predecessor of Asylum, namely Scratches, somewhere back in 2008-2009. I'm around 14, I love horror point-and-click adventures, and I'm buying a CD with a gloomy house on the cover, which became a treasured memory for me later. So much so that I even still have an account somewhere with Blackwood login, and I repeatedly promoted the story itself to my acquaintances as something truly worthy of attention.

With all respect and deep love to the genre, I have to say that many point-and-click adventures (and many stories in general, I'd say nowadays) have one frequent issue – they have no problem with creating atmosphere and intrigue, but the denouement... er... more often than not feels like, pardon me, a fart in a puddle. It's as if the screenwriter is publicly admitting that he doesn't know what he wanted to say, where he was leading the story and how to end it in a beautiful, monumental way, being tired of writing it. Most of such games I remember fondly for one reason or another have that same disease. You can't imagine how much I mourned, for example, for Darkness Within series or for the first part of Black Mirror, both of which created pleasantly terrific tension but failed in the task of bringing it to its proper culmination.

Scratches didn’t suffer from this. Moreover, unlike most horror point-and-click adventures, it left a duality of interpretation: it allowed the player to decide for himself whether the cause of the events was really something supernatural or whether everything had a completely ordinary, logical explanation – a series of accidents that led to the tragedy. For me, it was (and is) a wonderful example of a good script.

So when, in those distant years, I found out about the beginning of Asylum's development, I waited for the project with burning eyes. But its release date was rescheduled from 2010 first to 2011 and then indefinitely. My focus of attention shifted to other things over time.

Sometime in 2019, I learned that the team had released another mini point-and-click adventure, Serena. I played through it and again found myself enchanted by the wonderful and in every sense chamber script. A little later I also found out that Asylum was still under development, wrote a supportive comment to the developers in Steam and started waiting for the game again.

When the notification about the release came to my e-mail inbox, my “NO WAY!” was heard, I think, throughout the whole building. :D Of course, I bought the game right away and now finally launched and played it through.

And I responsibly declare that it hurts. It. Hurts.

The game quickly draws you in with its atmosphere and captivates you with its mysteries and story in general. The controls were perplexing at first, but the retro gameplay is more of a plus for me because it evokes a sense of nostalgia. Critically disliked only the lack of inventory and, in general, the lack of puzzles. Also, the mini-map for fast teleporting could’ve been useful, but not necessarily, since it could’ve slightly ruined the atmosphere. The witty jokes and Easter eggs about Scratches added to the first positive impressions.

But, unlike Scratches, Asylum's storyline, amazing in the beginning, gradually becomes a complete mess from the second half of the game. Since both games are from the same writer, I naturally tend to compare them, and I still can't figure out what happened to Asylum's plot, considering enough time for it to be developed (15 years to be exact), that it became so badly crumpled and illogically resolved.

THE FOLLOWING TEXT WILL CONTAIN HUGE SPOILERS, I'VE WARNED YOU. IF YOU HAVEN’T PLAYED THE GAME AND PLAN TO PLAY OR WATCH A PLAYTHROUGH, I RECOMMEND YOU TO NOT READ MY RAMBLINGS UNTIL YOU DO.

The minor inconsistencies were there from the beginning. For example, the fact that neither the receptionist Julia nor the guard Bruno asks our name can be written off as a game convention, but when Bruno asks Julia through the speakerphone to “send someone to help him” because “a violent patient has escaped again”, in a place where the only people who are not locked in the “wards” are himself, the old Dr. Miller, the receptionist girl and a quiet skinny patient Lenny who has brittle bones, you involuntarily raise an eyebrow. Who, which one of them are you asking to send to help you with a dangerously strong violent man, Bruno? You've been there for days; you must know there’s no one to help in such cases!

Or, Julia lets us into the hospital on the condition that we won't go up to the top floors of the building, because there's some dangerous equipment up there. Yes, it's really there, as we’ll know further, but it already shows that Julia is definitely a character who should know more than she's saying. But for more than a half of the game, like all the other characters, she's simply absent.

These are really minor things; I can chalk them up to inattention and to game conventions. As opposed to all of the following.

The first half of the game copes with the plot – our protagonist, who remembers the period of his stay in the institution very vaguely, is sure that he belongs to a group of patients under the supervision of Dr. Ann, who applies mild methods of psychotherapy. Noticing that something terrible is happening to her patients, which they refuse to talk about, Dr. Ann discovers an unusual fungus on the clothes of one of them and, after examining it, realizes that it provokes hallucinations and brain tumors. She is sure that this is the reason for the deterioration of her patients' condition, but she can't understand where this fungus came from and why her patients are constantly receiving strange injuries.

However, as the story progresses, we realize that the protagonist was never a part of that group, but is still somehow connected to those patients.

At the same time, we discover the story of the head of the mental institute, Dr. Hanwell, who gradually delved into the occult topics. Due to a lack of funding, Hanwell enlisted patients to work on remodeling the asylum’s facility through the system of underground tunnels and accidentally discovered some sort of ancient and/or alien shrine with an entity that only a “broken mind” can embrace. With the support of two people, his pen pal Dr. Miller (coincidentally the current head of the clinic) and his coworker Dr. Hawthorne, Henwell engages the patients in further excavation of the tunnel and “contact” with the “creature” in the shrine in an attempt to find out what it is. Upon leaving the shrine, the patients cannot remember anything but feelings of fear, so Dr. Hanwell and Dr. Hawthorne torture them to recreate this feeling of fear and therefore to make them recall details about the “creature” under extreme conditions.

The game repeatedly emphasizes both the hallucinogenic qualities of the fungus in the tunnel and the strange, foul-smelling air there as well. Thus we, as in Scratches, get a fork in the road – Is there really a chthonic deity under the building, or did everyone simply inhaled poisoned air and spores of carcinogenic fungus and imagined everything, especially Dr. Hanwell and his companions, who initially fanatically believed in the supernatural and wanted to find and see it?

That's a good part of the plot. A great one. Delicious and logical. Except it deteriorates rapidly from this point.

Dr. Ann no longer appears in the story. Dr. Ann – a character who logically should’ve been the reason this asylum was shut down, because she would have grown from indifference to her patients to genuine sympathy for them. Dr. Ann, who should’ve done her own investigation into where the fungus came from, where the patients' injuries came from (by following them secretly, for example), and should’ve made the facility inspected by someone, or should’ve gotten herself into a direct confrontation with Dr. Hanwell and Dr. Hawthorne, giving up her career… does none of these things. She disappears from the storyline after we learn that she found the fungus. That's it. Zero development of such a POTENTIALLY fascinating character.

In almost all flashbacks of the protagonist, i.e. in 5 out of 8 cases, there is a schizophrenic woman Rebecca, who got pregnant as a result of being raped outside of the hospital. She is also called the most intriguing patient for the study by Dr. Ann. Rebecca also appears in the opening scene of the game, when the protagonist rides in a car to the hospital (it could have been Dr. Ann, but I still think it was Rebecca). The game screams at us from every possible corner: Rebecca is important. Rebecca is important to the protagonist and to the entire story. But no! Rebecca's story doesn't lead to any meaningful outcomes of the main storyline. Yes, the fact that her gruesome self-abortion was the final straw in the horrors of this hospital, leading to its closure, is NOT important to the plot. Narratively, it leads the protagonist NOWHERE.

Dr. Miller is a talented former chemist who bought out and decided to take over the mental institute after his pen pal Dr. Hanwell. The character who tarnished his reputation by developing and releasing a disastrous medicine… who had reliable knowledge of Dr. Hanwell's experiments and was his eager supporter and even provocateur in occult matters… and he shows up for one unimportant brief conversation and then completely disappears from the narrative. What is his motivation for reopening the clinic? Why is he there after all those years? WHAT FOR? WHY IS HE NOT REVEALED AT ALL??

Also, in the present timeline, there are some patients who were relocated to the hospital BEFORE the building was renovated, including patients from Dr. Ann's group. WHAT FOR WAS IT DONE? Because it can't be coincidental within the narrative! It just can't, that's all! Especially in conjunction with the Dr. Miller’s unrevealed story above! It's just a gun that didn't shoot! But, you guessed it right – the game doesn't give us an answer.

Over the course of the narrative, there’s no one who tries neither to interfere with us, nor to create any difficulty in searching the clinic or uncovering its secrets. W. H. Y?

The game, on top of that, also messes up the timelines of events. The protagonist sees visions/memories/flashbacks of a time when the hospital was not abandoned yet – which, I presume, was at least 5 years ago, and judging by the state of the hospital, at least 20. But then we see in his vision how one patient ingests a macguffin, and… the game leads us to the morgue to dissect that patient's corpse and get that macguffin out of it. HELLO! Why hasn't that patient decayed in 5-20 years??! Same situation with a corpse in a tank in the sewer system. The soft tissue would have decomposed long ago! What time are we in? What's going on?!

However, the game doesn't give us any answers.

And in the end, it turns out there really is a fetus-like chthonic deity under the building, and the protagonist is… *drum roll*… Dr. Hanwell! And that's why he is not listed as a patient. Finita la commedia.

And don't tell me the protagonist just made up all these characters like Julia, Bruno, Lenny and Dr. Miller and the hospital was empty the whole time. It's just… it's a disaster of a narrative. And you couldn't find a person more disappointed than I was at the time I finished the game.

The twist that we are Dr. Hanwell simply negates all our research. A person cannot critically forget everything. Or rather, they can, in case of total amnesia, but in such cases people around them notice it and ask for help. We are social creatures; we don't live in isolation. Even those who have no family and friends somehow communicate with colleagues, encounter neighbors, people in stores or in public transport, after all. Look at elderly people lost due to dementia – they may leave or travel to distant places, but their strange behavior often attracts the attention of store and public transport workers, so they are usually taken to the police or the nearest hospital and identified. If Dr. Hanwell has forgotten everything, why hasn't anyone helped him? And even if he had, say, some sort of dissociative fugue, he would still have made up his own identity and had to deconstruct those fiction facts about himself as the story progressed! Besides, in the case of a dissociative fugue, common memories are retained, and Dr. Hanwell had an extremely extensive scientific knowledge of medicine. Okay, fine, build the narrative around this twist that we are Dr. Hanwell, for God's sake, but then be so kind and put the focal point on these memories and strange feelings that we know too much for a mere patient! Let the character, to his own horror, recognize HIMSELF in the voice on the recordings, in the handwriting in the medical notes, in the portraits, in the video footages… if the protagonist slowly understands that he was the one who did these horrors, it also would've been a strong narrative method.

However, without that “awesome” twist, the protagonist gave the impression of a man who can't remember only a small part of his past, an important piece of the puzzle, but who has built and lived his life outside of the hospital, at least those very 5-20 years… he knows who he is. But he simply can't settle down without remembering some personally important events. I was sure that his connection to the pregnant Rebecca would lead to the fact that either he was her son (though that would leave the question of how he remembered anything from inside her womb and would’ve required significant changes in flashbacks) or that he was just another woman's 4-7 year old child who had a mutual attachment to Rebecca. Maybe in her own child Rebecca would still see a spawn of the devil, whereas in this boy (the protagonist) she would see someone she would want to care for. This would also explain why the protagonist is not listed nowhere as a patient, but was present on therapy sessions and everywhere where Rebecca was, and does not remember this period well. He was simply too young and was not mentally ill, so when the hospital closed and Rebecca apparently died or was relocated, he was finally given to some foster family, probably from among the former asylum’s employees. His connection to Rebecca could justify his stay in the hospital – the separation of the two provoked hysterics in both of them, and so the boy was made a “hospital child” and kept with Rebecca, whose condition would improve considerably in the presence of the boy. It would also explain why Lenny only vaguely remembers the main character – he saw him only as a child. And that would explain the large amount of kids' stuff all over the hospital – just make the protagonist remember them as something once his own, and that’s it!

Bring Dr. Ann's character to the forefront, under the main spotlight. I mean, this is a fascinating character! A career woman, a scientific progress activist who, under the influence of circumstances, becomes, literally, the only voice of reason and the protector of the weak from the truly crazy occultists in this story. Make us follow her path, investigate the story of her confrontation with the fanatics in charge of the hospital in the past. Make us find out the reason of why suddenly Dr. Ann's patients, including us in some way, were brought back to the hospital, make us discover Dr. Miller's current intentions and confront him in the present, or maybe even join him in the end, if we wish. And let there really be an ancient/alien shrine in the basement, just leave it to us, the players, to decide whether there was something inexplicably Lovecraftian about it, or whether the head doctors and a number of patients fell victims to hallucinations due to occult fictions and poisonous airs and spores… it's… it's so simple, gosh… all the musical notes were there, but how wrong they were played! And you can't even chalk it up to the rush in the game development – Asylum had 15 years, if not more… I feel deeply pity for a story that could have been really interesting and, without exaggeration, a masterpiece, but in the end became the same fart in a puddle as many stories do lately. I can't take it anymore.

If you read it to this point – first of all, wow, my respects, and secondly – I'd love to hear your impressions on the game. My impressions are very strong, as you can see, and I, as usual, tried to justify them with arguments and offer a variant of correction, but I don't claim it to be the only truth. It's simply my usual mental gymnastics, nothing more, and I believe there're plenty of other variants of how everything could be logically structured.

And now… I think I’ll go and find something to drown my grief in.