Despite the promising name, Hysteria Hospital is nothing to do with Victorian lunatics. Instead, it’s a medical variation on Burger Island where you run around a hospital making beds, delivering prescriptions, putting patients in diagnostic machines and so on. The aim – in what we like to think of as a cleverly damning indictment of the American healthcare system – is to earn as much money as possible by curing as many people as you can within the time limit. Why the ‘damning indictment’? Because this game is so painfully dull that it might subconsciously convince you of the benefits of free healthcare for all.

The music and effects loop endlessly, there are only about six patient sprites (leading to identi-ailers in adjoining beds), and however many gadgets are added for you to buy, the gameplay never changes. Once you’ve figured out a system for processing patients quickly – which won’t take long – you can do this on auto-pilot. A terminal case.

Jul 6, 2009