The Asylum (Psychiatric Clinic for Abused Cuddly Toys)
The game takes place in a clinic specialising in the treatment of plush toys. Filling in for Dr Kindermann, the clinic's director, the player is presented with five mentally disturbed soft-toy patients to treat.
The patients[edit]
- Lilo - a purple hippopotamus with a zipper for a mouth. He has developed an obsessive-compulsive disorder around a wooden jigsaw puzzle, and refuses to speak to anyone.
- Sly - a multi-colored snake. He has been diagnosed as having "paranoid hallucinatory delusions" and is obsessed with his own tail.
- Kroko - a crocodile who initially hides, trembling, in a cereal box. Suspicious of everyone and everything around him, he has been diagnosed as having delusional aquaphobia.
- Dolly - a sheep. She has been been exhibiting uncharacteristic aggressive behaviour, and is apparently under the periodic delusion that she is a wolf (it later turns out she is a reversible plus, and her other side is in fact a male wolf named Lyall, who is ironically a little less temperamental than Dolly).
- Dub - a turtle that has been compelled to endlessly skip rope with the aid of his stopwatch. His fixation can be compared to Lilo's.
- Dr. Wood - a raven under the illusion he is both a doctor (which is true, as he is introduced one of the asylum's staff) and a god (which is not). He attempts to "cure" the other patients with both therapy and black magic, and if you're not careful, tries to cure YOU as well.
For each patient, a menu of several different possible therapies is presented (including, amongst many others, dream analysis, paint therapy, a Rorschach test, or the administration of psychoactive drugs). Each treatment may either help the patient, or make their condition worse, and the player must find a combination of therapies that works and eventually leads the plush patient to sanity and a return to the outside world. As the therapy progresses, insights are revealed into what happened to the plush toy that caused them to end up at the Asylum.
The game is available in many languages: German, English, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Korean. There are several mistakes in the translations to English. From the game's website, actual plush toys of all the patients can be purchased.