Asylum

About the game

Asylum is a platform shooter that Andy Southgate wrote for the Acorn Archimedes, the British home computer, in 1994. Young Sigmund has a few problems, and the way to help him is to go inside his mind and shut down the brain cells that are misbehaving. That mind is split into three big zones named after Freud's model of the psyche: the Ego, the Psyche and the Id. Each one is a single huge, scrolling maze, packed with platforms, lifts, strange creatures and piles of bonus items.

Somewhere in every zone there are eight pulsating neurons. Reaching one takes you into a smaller sub-level built around it, and finishing that switches the neuron off. Shut down all eight and the zone is done. The trick is finding them: the mazes loop back on themselves, many paths only open from one side, and the quickest way across is often a teleporter rather than a corridor.

Along the way you pick up guns: miniguns that spray bullets in three or five streams, rocket launchers that fire one, two or four rockets at a time, versions whose rockets burst into a star on impact, and the MegaBlam weapons, the strongest of all. The MegaBlam rocket launcher can even blow holes through some walls. Most of what lies around is food and other bonus items for points, and taking them in the right order fills the bonus counter at the bottom right for a big reward.

Andy Southgate released the game into the public domain in 2002, along with its source code. Hugh Robinson then rewrote it in C with the SDL library, so it could run on modern computers, and Gregory Maynard-Hoare updated that port to SDL2 and WebAssembly. The levels, graphics, sounds and music are the original ones.

Playing it here

This is the SDL2 port, compiled for the browser from its source code. The whole game is about 1.7 MB, so it starts almost at once. The menus and the play area keep the original 320 by 256 picture, scaled up to fit the player. Your saved game, the high score tables and your settings are kept in this browser; clearing this site's data deletes them.

The game needs a keyboard. Pressing Escape on the first options screen, outside a game, closes the game; reload the page to start again.

Controls

The default keys suit the original Acorn keyboard. If they feel odd, open Define Controls from the options screen and choose your own, for example the arrow keys and Space.

Getting started

Start with the Ego. On the options screen, Choose Mental Zone lets you pick the Ego, the Psyche or the Id. The Ego is the gentlest and the Id only opens once the Ego is complete, so begin there.

Look for teleporters. In the Ego they look like candelabra standing on a small cabinet; in the other zones they take different shapes. Stand in the middle of one and press the teleport key (full stop) to jump to its partner somewhere else in the maze. Without them some areas cannot be reached at all.

Save your position. During a game, press Escape and then O to reach the options. Save Position keeps one saved game. To come back to it, open Choose Mental Zone and pick Saved Game.

Tips

Pick up every gun you see. The creatures in the mazes hurt, and picking up another gun of the same kind moves you on to its next model. A minigun keeps firing while you hold Enter; with a rocket launcher, holding Enter swings the aim up and down before the rocket leaves.

Be careful with the MegaBlam rocket launcher. It only has six shots, but they are strong enough to break parts of the level, including the base of a teleporter. Destroy that and the link is gone.

Shoot from close range. Enemies blasted at point blank range with a strong gun tend to leave more bonuses behind.

Watch your score. This version gives an extra life every 100,000 points, so the bonus sequence is worth chasing.

Don't take everything. Now and then it is better to leave an item where it is.