Crime Places: Das Sanatorium
2025
Designed by Hans Pieper, Joel Müseler
Published by Oetinger Spiele
Crime Places: Das Sanatorium is a narrative-driven mystery game set in a long-abandoned psychiatric hospital. Decades after a school friend named Solveig vanished, the investigation returns to this forgotten place, where crumbling rooms and fragmented records reveal that her disappearance is tied to other, darker crimes. The theme centers on lost places, suppressed memories, and the unsettling realization that the building itself holds clues to a broader truth. The gameplay combines crime investigation with escape-room-style puzzles using a deck of cards. Players explore the sanatorium room by room, reading short narrative texts, studying illustrations, and uncovering clues that must be compared and connected. Progress depends on observation and deduction rather than complex rules or randomness. The cards remain intact, making the experience replayable. To win the game, players must correctly interpret the collected evidence and reconstruct what truly happened. Victory comes from identifying meaningful links between clues, understanding the sequence of events, and drawing the right conclusions about the crimes connected to the sanatorium. The case is solved only when the final explanation fits all the evidence discovered throughout the investigation.
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Game data sourced from BoardGameGeek, used under their API terms.
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