You'll need to be able to diagnose patients and then cure them of their various ailments. At the beginning of Theme Hospital you are granted a space in which to set up a reception desk and a waiting area, in which to drop staff and lay out rooms and fill them with equipment. To put it all in the language of healthcare, Theme Hospital is not failing and needs no modernisation.Īnd it almost needs no tutorial.
Theme Hospital does not feel remotely like an artefact, despite the toytown UI, the fixed perspective and the occasional lack of transparency into why everyone's so upset (nobody will tell you this, but it's often because the rooms you've built are too small). It is still so easy to get swept along with the giddy thrill of it all. It's not only still entirely playable despite being twenty years old: booting it up today actually provides a welcome return to an era where games were so palpably stuffed with the sheer joy of their existence that there were even jokes wedged into the menus. It is not hard to see why people still love Theme Hospital, Bullfrog's exuberant exploration of death and suffering. Everybody is freezing and everybody is dying and everybody is doing all this standing up because I have neglected to provide benches.
#PLAY THEME HOSPITAL HOW TO#
Radiators stand out starkly in the middle of hallways as if they are art installations, because I forgot how to rotate them in a way that would allow them to hug the walls. It has no fire extinguishers but 25 Kit-Kat machines - the result of a clicking error. It has a vast staff room and a tiny ward - the result of an admin error. To put it another way, welcome to the hospital that I have spent most of this morning piecing together.
(And as such, it's quite a nice antidote to a handful of today's big budget games that seem to want the sexy veneer of current affairs but aren't willing to alienate any of their potential audience - even the neo-nazis.) Theme Hospital is a self-consciously silly game, but it's also one that is intimately concerned with the quality of life as well as its duration. For someone who has grown up with the NHS, politics is an inescapable concern here, from the very start of the game's gleeful opening scene, in which a surgeon walks heroically into an operating theatre and readies a chainsaw, before refusing to operate when the patient's credit card is declined.Įven when you ignore the strange landscape of private medical insurance, Theme Hospital can't help but make you think about the real world, because healthcare remains the ultimate political cat-toy, cherished and knocked about by the whims of people who ultimately don't rely on it very much.
One of the miraculous things about Theme Hospital, seen from these early weeks of 2018, is how confident it is in navigating the political ramifications of its milieu. (Obviously, it would be years until my sister and I discovered that Jeremy Hunt had been watching us through a window the whole time and nicking all of our management ideas.) And when our careful negligence was done, we would hand control over, so that the new player could inherit an embattled shell of a thing: understaffed, underfunded, and utterly under-appreciated. And then? Then we would step away and let the simulation run for a good long while without any more input from us. We would employ excellent doctors and excellent nurses, and knock up a ward, a staff room, a toilet block.
One of us would take the reins - an easy enough level, say Sleepy Hollow or another one of the early stages - and would build out the basic skeleton of a working organisation. Home from university, my sister and I had a very particular way of playing Theme Hospital. Obviously, I'm talking about healthcare administration. Years ago, holidays belonged to my only true passion.
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