The game opens with a figure running into the rain and jumping into a car, which proceeds to crash over a cliff. The player awakes with his face bandaged in what is obviously a nightmarish insane asylum -- fellow residents bang their heads bloody against walls and dance about like chickens.

Of course, the player has no idea who or where he is, or why he’s in the asylum. Worse yet, the asylum staff has fled -- the place is on fire -- so the only ones to question are the inmates.

This leads to a series of surreal worlds chock full o’ common themes: redemption, the rescue of children, overbearing mother-figures, general insanity and death. Along the way, our hero recovers his memory little by little, though the ultimate answer is a mystery until the very end. Is the player dead and trying to earn his way into Heaven, or is the solution somehow less spectacular? We’ll never tell.

Sanitarium uses the top-down 45-degree point of view that served the later Ultima games so well. Control is almost the same: It’s entirely cursor-driven, with the right mouse button controlling movement. The left mouse button performs special actions prompted by the cursor -- it becomes a rotating magnifying glass over hotspots that can be examined, a grasping hand over items that can be manipulated or taken and a set of chattering toy teeth when the player can enter dialogue with an NPC.

That dialogue is also similar to Ultima -- and Harvester. As with the latter game, character portraits bookend a set of topics. Sanitarium’s computer-rendered characters, though, do a far better job than the low-quality digitized photos from Harvester. As the player performs actions or uncovers information, new topics are available.

That can sometimes help the player solve puzzles, though they are often very easy. And, unlike Myst, these puzzles genuinely make sense within the context of the game. Combat situations are almost nonexistent, and anyway the player has unlimited lives in those specific locations.

In fact, there’s nothing the player can do (until the endgame) to kill off our amnesiac hero. That encourages bold exploring, though it does remove some of the urgency that might keep players on edge -- exactly where Sanitarium wants them to be.

This is instead left to the excellent sound and graphics. The sound is directional: Move toward children playing tic-tac-toe, and their voices grow louder; move away and they fade. This is great for atmosphere.

The graphics are also topnotch and intricately detailed. Best of all are the things players will catch out of the corners of their eyes, gargoyles, for instance, shifting position or crying tears of blood.

Along with the easy-to-solve puzzles, Sanitarium’s brevity also works against it. The game comes on three discs, but also features two or three movies for each of its nine levels. These are extremely well done; our hero’s memories are presented in grainy, yellow-tinted footage, like the newsreels of old.

Don’t let this discourage experienced adventurers. Sanitarium features enough mind-twisting surrealism, especially in the first few levels, to keep players guessing as to what’s really going on. Lucky for us, ASC Games and DreamForge also keep us wanting to find out more and more.