Explore a decrepit mental asylum and find your missing boyfriend in Haunted Halls – Green Hills Sanitarium!
Title: Haunted Halls – Green Hills Sanitarium | Developer: ERS G Studios | Publisher: Big Fish Games | Release Date: October 28th, 2010 | Genre: Adventure Horror | Platform: Steam | Source: Self-Purchased | Unstarred Review
Haunted Halls: Green Hills Sanitarium Review
Big Fish Games have a large library of point and click adventure games, most of them pretty good. Haunted Halls: Green Hills Sanitarium is not one of them. It’s not terrible but it’s also not great. It’s very middle of the road with some pretty cool ideas that, if expanded well, could have been really awesome.
I liked the idea of each room having been used to create that patient’s greatest fear. And the rooms were decorated creatively in keeping with each fear. You had the basics, claustrophobia, fear of heights and bugs. Others have a bit more variety to them such as paranoia represented by a room of monitors and eyes. A girl cowers in a room of freaky toys that you have to puzzle out to make them ‘happy’ toys again. One of the rooms that had a little depth to it was a girl in a room covered in mirrors and she’s cowering on the bed. You get from text clues that she is in there for appearance dysphoria and the experiment is ramping it up. You also get this twisted little locket as a puzzle.
The puzzles are fine. Even on Expert they’re very easy. There is very, very little story to it. There’s juuust enough to make it somewhat interesting but there’s no background on the doctor or why he’s doing the experiments. There’s not even any notebook entries to read any more on it.
There are some interesting things to look at. Like these tentacles. And the puzzle to get by them was pretty fun.
There will be some light spoilers but it’s not very story-heavy anyway. You get through, solving the puzzles to free each patient (who proceeds to hang out in their room rather than getting the heck out) and getting tokens to set your boyfriend free.
There are some interesting visuals like these tentacles and you can play a bit of tug of war with it for a rug. That’s kind of fun to mess with. And the puzzle to get past them is pretty fun. You have to find sheet music for the tentacles to play the keyboard.
The ending is very meh and should really come with a warning. Your boyfriend goes to confront the doctor because your tiny little woman brain who just saved his ass can’t possibly handle that. The end should also really come with a warning because it suddenly goes to a flashing screen. There’s no indication of it and took me by surprise. I don’t know if it could trigger anything but even if there’s a slight possibility of that happening it should have come with a warning. Games used to come standard with them. I don’t know why that changed.
All in all, if you can find it cheap as dirt during a Steam or Big Fish sale then you could give it a go. It’s pretty short and some of the rooms are pretty interesting. Other than that, eh. Why bother when there are much more interesting games to play out there.
Sorry for just the review tonight folks but it has been a week. We’ll be back to my regularly scheduled ramblings next week!
GracieKat was the first co-host of Sci-Fi & Scary, Lilyn’s partner-in-crime, and sub-head of the Kali Krew. She reviews horror books, movies, and games for the site. She also does a weekly Focus on the Frightful feature, and is the site list-maker. She is also in control of the Sci-Fi & Scary podcast which will relaunch soon.