Theme Hospital - Full Review (PC and PS1 game)

Theme Hospital is a comical and witty game that is quite arguably one of the best simulation games of all time and most certainly the best hospital simulator ever created. A successor to the deeply enjoyable ‘Theme Park’, Theme Hospital takes the boring job of hospital management and turns it into something incredibly addictive and with bucket loads of playability.

Developer: Bullfrog Productions (PC) and Krisalis Software (PS)
Genre: Hospital management
Release date: February 4, 1997 (PC), February 1998 (PS1)
Platforms: PS1 and PC (MS-DOS and Windows)
ESRB: E - Everyone

The game was released for the PC and PlayStation 1 though aside from some minor differences like graphical quality and no background music for the PS1 version they are exactly the same game. You’ll play across twelve different hospitals with the task of designing and managing them to success whilst fending off patients with all sorts of strange illnesses and complaints. Theme Hospital is by no means a serious game and in fact it’s a highly original game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. To get you started, here’s the intro to the game.

 

Gameplay and game content

There are twelve hospitals that you will take charge of where you are given nothing but an empty floor plan and the money to start building rooms and hiring staff. You’re given a short amount of time to build the basics of your hospital such as a reception desk and diagnosis rooms like a GPs office and a hospital ward before the time runs out, the hospital opens and patients start visiting. The staff you need to hire consist of doctors, nurses, caretakers and one or two receptionists all of whom will have a short bio such as ‘heckles poor comedians, smells faintly of cabbage, possible liability’ along with their level of skill represented by a green bar. Doctors can have specializations and as you progress through the game you’ll need additional rooms and the doctors with the skill to work in those rooms such as surgeons, researchers and psychiatrists. Consultant doctors can also train their junior counterparts to have their specializations as well as increasing their overall level of skill. Depending on how good they are, their personality and the quality of their room including its size and contents staff may move faster or slower and perform worse and better than their colleagues. 

The game starts out simple and you won’t need many different clinics or rooms as the patients that will be visiting you will only have one of a handful of illnesses though it’s when the patients start showing up that you notice the humour of the game. ‘King Complex’ patients dressed as Elvis are in desperate need of a psychiatrist, patients ailing from ‘The Squits’ from eating pizza found under the oven are sent hurrying over to the pharmacy whilst patients with elongated tongues drooping comically from their mouths are pointed in the direction of a Slack Tongue Clinic; a glorified guillotine crossed with a clothes press. Each new condition or illness you encounter will pop up at the bottom of the screen, along with any other alerts, containing a description of the cause of the illness, the symptoms and the cure and these fact sheets always make me genuinely laugh. The conditions get more and more ludicrous and obscure as time goes by and soon you’ll have patients suffering from hair all over their bodies, radiating a garish and toxic looking green glow and aliens who were once humans and who need a trip to the ‘DNA converter’. 

Your success in this game largely depends a lot on how well you can design your hospital and micro-manage your staff as in later levels you will be absolutely flooded with patients who all require immediate attention. At first the game is quite simplistic and to win the level you simply need to meet certain criteria including number of patients cured, the overall worth of the hospital, a certain bank balance, reputation of the hospital and having to treat a variable percentage of the number of visitors to your hospital. You’ll frequently encounter ‘emergencies’ where a lot of patients with the same condition will all be flown via a helicopter to your hospital and if you don’t cure them by the time the time limit runs out, they all die. This can be fairly simple to manage if it’s something like a quick visit to a pharmacy but when you’ve got eight or nine patients all requiring major surgery you’re going to have a tough time squeezing them all in before their time runs out. Then there’s epidemics to contend with where you can either admit your hospital is infected, pay a fine and take a reputation hit or try to cover it up and cure them all before anybody discovers what’s happened. If you manage to cure them all and cover up the epidemic you’ll get a comfortable compensation bonus for the ‘wrongful’ accusations. There’s always this underlying sense that the hospitals you’re running aren’t exactly trustworthy as there are many unusual methods at dealing with patients and, even more disturbing, an ‘auto-autopsy’ machine in the research department where you can send patients whose condition you don’t understand due to lack of research. The thing is, once the patient is slid into the machine, CAT scan style, don’t ever seem to come back out again, hmm… 

For every new level there’s new challenges and new problems to deal with from earthquakes to vomit waves and the constant changing up of what’s going on in the hospital adds for some really interesting gameplay. A problem with the game is the unpredictable AI of your staff who sometimes struggle to go where they’re supposed to be going, leaving handymen ignoring overflowing bins and puddles of vomit and doctors wandering the corridors whilst a queue of sick patients stacks up outside the GPs office. You really do need to keep an eye on everybody at all times by dragging your doctors, nurses and handymen to where they need to be. Fail to keep on top of things and alongside a dirty hospital you’ll have your patients deteriorating health to worry about. A face above each patient’s head as they get more and more unhappy gradually deteriorates into a ghastly skull which means they’re about to drop dead on the hospital floor only to then float to heaven or be ushered into Hell by Mr Death himself. Thankfully the AI is not always frustrating and usually staff will be on their way to where they’re needed before the announcement woman calls out that a doctor or nurse is required in whichever room. 

Your ability to manage your hospital is fine-tuned to the smallest details and you can place everything where you want to be including radiators, plants, drinks machines and benches in the corridors as well as items and machinary in the hospital rooms themselves such as the desks, bookcases and bins. You can manage your bank account by taking out a loan, paying interest of course, and even decide how much to spend on the heating of your hospital and whether or not to give your staff a raise or a monetary bonus. Not only this, you can decide how much patients pay for each treatment or diagnosis attempt such as a stay in the hospital ward or a visit to the ‘Hair Restoration’ clinic. Despite this fine-tuned managing of the books everything is very simple to use and easy to understand and it won’t take much clicking around and reading of the in-game material to figure out how to do everything. As one of those people who doesn’t like reading a whole load of facts, figures and percentages I tend to bypass the many charts in the game and still can get through it quite happily. 

Graphics and audio

Graphically the PC edition of this game is superior to the PlayStation 1 port but that’s not to say either game looks bad. The screenshots used here are from the PC version but below you can see a screenshot of the PS1 edition, just for comparison's sake. Overall the graphics are really quite decent and very clear cut. Everything is colourful, very well detailed and a bit quirky with its own sense of identity in the whole design of the game. It’s a huge step up from the slightly blurry, fuzzy graphical appearance of ‘Theme Park’ and for a 90s game it really is impressive. The voice acting mostly consisting of a female announcement voice which is both funny and good quality as she apologizes to the patients about the amount of litter and chides ‘mad patients’ for being too loud in the corridors. Staff and patients don’t ever talk and tend to communicate with you through alerts at the bottom of the screen and symbols above their head, for example if they’re confused or if they’ve just discovered a new illness or researched/improved a new piece of equipment. Everything is very clearly communicated to you via the graphics however and the camera is very flexible and not at all awkward to use.

For the PC version the music is fantastic; nostalgic and catchy it has upbeat tunes that change track as you play the game so it doesn’t become irritating after a long period of time. Whenever a patient is cured you’ll hear a cheer from an unseen crowd and boo’ing when a patient dies, leaves the hospital or is sent home which adds to the light-hearted and interactive feel of the whole game. 

Overall

This is one of my childhood games that is still so addictive, challenging and fun to play now and, even after completing it, there’s still great satisfaction in starting all over again and pouring hours upon hours of my time into it. It’s just the right level of challenging and even if you find it too easy there’s three levels of difficulty so you can always crank it up a notch and struggle with the demands of the hardest ‘Consultant’ difficulty level. I love the humour in this game and it’s not an overpowering attempt to be funny, it’s just witty here and there from the diseases, to the announcements to the weird things you find becoming commonplace like excessively decorated staff rooms and questionable healthcare practices. The customization options are brilliant, it looks and sounds fantastic and overall it’s just so playable and so memorable that I can’t help but rank this as one of my favourite PC games.

The Good:

• Witty, intelligent humour that also borders on the silly
• Hours upon hours of gameplay
• Addictive, almost worryingly fun
• Nice level of difficulty and can be very challenging
• Lots of different rooms and illnesses keeps things interesting
• Very defined appearance makes it instantly recognizeable
• Memorable music that's really upbeat and not at all annoying

The Bad:

• Patients are always freezing.
• Staff AI can be a little dodgy
• More hospitals would have been good, but only because I want to continue playing

The Score: 9/10 

Last thoughts: "So addictive, even now in 2014 this is so much fun to play and is one of the few micro-management games I play religiously."
Note: If you’re interested I have a list of cheats and codes that will allow you to do extra things like play whichever level you want to play, for both PS1 and PC editions, and some extra bits for the PC edition such as unlocking all research and getting extra money. You can find my cheat guide here.

Playing Theme Hospital on new OS systems:

The PlayStation 1 version of the game is very easily obtained on sites such as Ebay and Amazon but the PC version will give you more trouble on newer systems, that said, it’s not impossible. By using an emulator such as DOSbox you can happily play the game as intended or, alternatively, you can use an open source ‘clone of the game called CorsixTH. This clone still requires you to purchase the original disk but it allows you to play the game on OS’s such as Vista and Windows 7. You can download CorsixTH here.