When it comes to my childhood, there were three video games which captured most of my attention: The Sims, Sim City 3000 Unlimited and Theme Hospital. The latter, developed by the now defunct Bullfrog Productions in 1997, struck that nice balance of simulation elements (building your hospital, managing patients etc), challenge, and being quirky and entertaining to play. Theme Hospital has managed to stick around for two decades now, still being available through Electronic Arts’ Origin Service, and even receiving open source remakes such as CorsixTH. But there is a new development team entering the small world of hospital sim games…
The independent video game studio Oxymoron Games have recently unveiled their newest development project: Project Hospital. While it is still early days yet, initial impressions indicate that this is a promising spiritual successor to a game I loved playing growing up.
In Project Hospital, you are set to become “an aspiring architect, a successful manager and an ace doctor at the same time”. As an architect, you will be able to design your hospital and tweak every detail should you wish – or just use one of the pre-defined models offered. As a manager you can “contract different insurance companies to gain access to patients with more interesting medical conditions.” And as a doctor you can use the equipment you have built to “perform examinations, laboratory tests and use various equipment to solve the diagnostic puzzles”.
While I will be interested to see how they pull this off, but they also note that players will be able to “learn about real world diseases and injuries and how to diagnose and cure them”.
No release date for Project Hospital has been provided to date. However I would expect to see even more about this hospital sim coming to light over the coming months. In the meantime, check out some first images of the game below:
You can check out Project Hospital’s official website HERE.
