When Cain uses his pyrokinesis to light his hands on fire, his punches do a lot more damage. Game Info Publisher Monolith Developer Monolith Genre Action Origin U.S. Number of Players 16 Net Support YES Accelerated YES Release December 1999 Minimum Requirements P200 MHz w/MMX 32MB RAM 4MB Direct 3D compatible video card 8X CD-ROM Win95/98 Here's what happens when you use your power too often. You're going to have a hard time living this one down. This new era voodoo priest has all kinds of ways to make you hurt. Home sweet home. I wonder why they make you sleep in a special bed next to a tank of liquid nitrogen?

Sanity takes place in a world where a small percentage of the population has begun to develop psionic powers. These powers come in many different forms, but they're all very powerful and they all carry with them a similar downside – everyone who has them slowly goes mad. As you might imagine, the idea of a group of super-powered humans walking around who might potentially go ballistic at any moment doesn't sit too well with the government, so they create a special task force to keep an eye on the psychically able citizenry. Unfortunately, in order to battle the tremendous power of this new threat, they have to use agents who have psionic powers of their own. These agents have it doubly bad - they're feared and mistrusted by their employers and hated by the psychics they must subdue. You are Nathaniel Cain, a pyrotechnic who has just come off of probation after setting fire to a mall while in a psionic rage. Over the course of the game, your job will be to stop several super-powerful psionicists who have gone over the edge while trying to figure out just how you and the others ended up this way. The answer may take you places you don't want to go…

In actual play, Sanity resembles a cross between Diablo and Sanitarium. Using a very simple interface, you use your mouse to move around the world, select different abilities, collect objects and talk with different people. The game world is filled with all sorts of different objects, all of which behave just as you would expect they would. These objects are also used to keep the story moving and to act as tools and atmosphere. For example, each level you are given your assignments by the cell phone that you carry with you. If you need to interrogate someone, you can just start hitting, or show them the badge or gun that you carry with you in hopes of intimidating them.

Unfortunately, that gun isn't going to be useful for much else. Most of the characters that you'll be going after are super-powerful villains with psionic powers that will protect them from standard gear. In order to defeat them, you'll need to master your own mental abilities and acquire new techniques. The game pretty much revolves around these different mental disciplines and they can help your character fight, solve puzzles, or move to otherwise inaccessible locations. As a pyrokinetic, your powers at the beginning of the game revolve around the mastery of fire. As you gain more skill with this ability, you'll be able to sling fireballs, light your hands on fire to deliver a burning punch, protect yourself with a wall of flame, or even summon up a demon to lay into your foes. Each of the ten enemies in the game have their own mental techniques that reflect their own state of mind and culture. We got a peak at a voodoo initiate who could summon zombies and sling death spells, a Lovecraftian professor who slings mystic energy and summons up all kinds of horrible things, a 900 number psychic who reflects her interest in Egyptology by summoning up mummies and calling down the fury of the sun god, and a computer freak who could hurl bolt of pure digital energy. While you search through the different levels of the game, you'll get the chance to learn the powers of the villain associated with that level and can carry them on with you to your next mission. Finding new powers will also unlock them for use in any of the game's three multiplayer modes.

The way Sanity keep you from using your powers indiscriminately is pretty ingenious. In addition to a standard health bar, your character has a sanity bar. Different powers will use up different amounts of psychic energy and will gobble up a little bit of your sanity accordingly. If your sanity ever reaches zero, you're character will go crazy and start flinging around his powers everywhere. While he's like this he'll be very difficult to control as well. If you keep using up sanity, your head will expand and eventually explode leaving a bloody mess and an incomplete mission. Fortunately your sanity slowly builds itself back up while you're not using your powers, so if you find some place to chill out for a little while you'll be fine.

As stated earlier, Sanity will feature both a cooperative multiplayer mode where you'll team up with a friend to take on the single player missions and two different modes of deathmatch. The cooperative multiplayer mode will automatically detect how many different players are teaming up to take on the game and will modify itself so that it remains challenging by boosting the numbers and strength of monsters in different levels and by creating new puzzles that can only be solved by several players helping each other. The first deathmatch mode lets you pick a certain number of psionic talents to start the game with in a sort of Magic the Gathering kind of deck. This enables fans of different techniques to duke it out and try to sort out which is the best. The last mode brings players into the deathmatch arena 'naked' and they'll have to scour the levels looking for power-ups that will give them access to new abilities.

One of the coolest things that Monolith showed us is the ability of the game to support new powers and effects without requiring a patch. After the game is released, Monolith will continue to create new abilities, posting them on their web site for fans to collect. Since the art for the effects is already built into the game, players who collect these new powers will be able to use them in matches with other players who won't be able to access them unless they too go get them. The developers are tentatively planning to give out a few unique powers to players who win tourneys or contests.

The game is still in its early stages and doesn't have AI or most of the levels finished yet, but it does look pretty intriguing. We'll keep checking back with the development team as work on the game progresses in order to keep you abreast of how things are going.

-- Trent C. Ward