Sanity: Aiken's Artifact

About

You play as Agent Cain in a sci-fi shooter where psychic powers come at a cost. Fight enemies using fireballs, telekinesis, or summoned creatures but every ability drains both health and sanity. Overuse your skills and you’ll either die or snap into a gibbering wreck. The single player campaign tasks you with infiltrating a radical group while multiplayer lets you clash with others using similar risk-reward mechanics. Monolith’s take on psionic combat leans into tight resource management. Players juggle three main "totems" of abilities each with distinct playstyles. Despite a Metacritic user score of 7.1 the game maintains a 78% completion rate on PC suggesting its punishing difficulty hooked many. Set during the early 2000s it blends Dreamcast-era visuals with a story about brain-enhancing serums and rogue psychic hotlines. The sanity mechanic remains its most memorable quirk 25 years after release.

Storyline

Several decades before the game starts, a world-renowned genetic engineer named Doctor Joan Aiken discovered a way to utilise the unused portion of the human brain via a serum. The serum would give the user psychic abilities, or "talents", which could manipulate the world around them, for example levitating or shooting a bolt of lightning. Talents were split into collections called totems, and each Psionic specialised in the use of one totem, others even founding their own. Aiken became the founder of the Science totem. When the game starts, Cain has just been suspended from the DNPC following an incident with Priscilla Divine, leader of the Eye of Ra (a radical organisation who wish to destroy the CoT project for ethical reasons) and founder of the Sun totem. He is eventually recruited back and tasked with infiltrating the Eye of Ra, who have been operating under the guise of a psychic hotline, and apprehend Divine.