Fractured Sanity Review – Breaking the Super Ego

“In these grimy halls are the things that I want. Respect, power, purpose – but all I truly have is myself.”

The trailer for Fractured Sanity VR plays the game up like it’s the next big thing in horror. It just feels so different; The presentation, the soundtrack, everything just gives you this impression that the game shown before you is something new, something great, something to truly fear.

In hindsight, Fractured Sanity’s trailer feels a bit pretentious. It builds itself up as a deep psychological thriller that delves into the concept of the treatment of mental illness is a source of horror. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to tell you right off the bat that I felt that Fractured Sanity really dropped the ball. 

This game from developers United Games starts out well enough. You wake up alone in a cell in the Triton Institute, an experimental asylum headed by decorated psychologist Dr. Matthew Simmons. You don’t know why you’re there, and the asylum has recently received reports of abuse and inhuman working conditions. All in all, the game starts out very Outlast, but it’s a thrilling enough opening for a VR game. 

What the game does that is a little different from other games in what I like to call the “horror asylum” genre is reference real psychology. See, the director in charge of the facility is said to be attempting to deconstruct Freud’s tripartite psych. 

Essentially, Dr. Matthew Simmons, the head of the institute, is attempting to separate the Id, Ego, and and Superego, and you appear to be one of his newest subjects. 

To me, this concept seemed thrilling; The idea that we, as a player, could be just a fragment of our own mind, a personality split away from the whole and forced to wander about this strange place incomplete. Maybe my understanding of the philosophy is incorrect, but this is where I thought the game was going as I started to piece together bits of the lore.

However, it’s more like the good doctor himself has broken his own mind, and you’re kind of just running away from him. There are parts of the game where it feels like reality isn’t what it appears to be, that you’re having little bouts of delusion, and you definitely aren’t all there — But I didn’t feel like it played into this concept enough.

The game really just amounts to you running from the doctor and his minions as they chase you from room to room. Fractured Sanity features a locked, white room that you return to as you explore the surrounding patient rooms and gather what you need to escape. You solve several puzzles around the way as the Doctor’s minions chase you, making the whole game feel kind of like an escape mixed with a haunted house. 

I worked at the latter, so I can speak on this with some credibility; The Doctor’s design, along with that of his minions, and the overall generic vibe of the entire game felt very much like something we would have set up in our haunt. 

The concept of Fractured Sanity’s story is great but feels like it was rushed to production before it hit the final draft. When I came face to face with the monster of the game, I rolled my eyes so hard they rattled in my head. Maybe it would be too Silent Hill, but I was really hoping that I was going to be chased around by some incomprehensible horror created by my splintered ego. 

There are times when the game does play into this concept, like in the screenshot below.. I think? It wasn’t totally clear to me at times.

Fractured Sanity fails to deliver on a core concept that every horror game needs: It’s supposed to be scary. While the developers did a good job of making a claustrophobic environment, it stopped being scary when I realized every room was sparsely decorated with the same handful of assets. When I saw the puddle of blood floating off the ground, I realized I wasn’t going to be scared by this title. 

And the monsters. Goodness, the monsters. The henchmen look interesting, and the creepy fleshmen like the one encounter early are initially scary, but Simmons himself looks so cartoony it was actually really distracting. Even in VR, I couldn’t get immersed in the idea that this was some threatening being coming to turn me into mince meat, and a lot of that had to do with the fact that he kept clipping into walls and passing through corners like a ghost. 

I don’t want to be mean to the developers. I understand that making a game is one of the hardest, most labor-intensive projects you can take on, especially as a small group. The problem is that horror lives and dies in immersion, and this game simply has none.

VR can be a great tool to immerse players in your horror, but there has to be more to it than just being a VR experience. Narrative can also be a fantastic tool for immersion. However, the narrative felt like it was just scraping the mark without hitting it, and even virtual reality couldn’t make me feel immersed when a man in a Spirit Halloween costume clipped through the walls at me.

If I sound overly critical of Fractured Sanity, it’s because I felt there was a lot of good here the game just wasn’t capitalizing on. I loved the demo, but between bugs and some story beats that I felt were weak I really just think this title needed more time.

Fractured Sanity was played on an Oculus Quest 2. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Fractured Sanity is available on the Oculus Store and Steam.