Working the Ward
Hysteria Hospital: Emergency Ward allows players to choose between a female or male nurse. After selection, and a brief cutscene depicting your graduation from med school, you’re off to a small hospital in the southeast to begin your career. The premise is simple: patients come into the hospital and you must keep them happy by getting them from the waiting room to treated and out the door as fast as possible.
The hysteria is controlled from an angled top down perspective. From this view you see your character, the patients, the doctor, the prescription desk, the ambulance, and any other purchaseable objects you might have. To begin with, there is only one floor and a very mangeable stream of patients to keep track of. Players advance through seven or eight stages per hospital, with increasing demands for patients treated and money earned.
The game is entirely controlled by the stylus, which you use to indicate where you want things moved. Moving patients and your character in the most efficient way possible is really the core of the gameplay. You’re up against a ticking clock, and the impatience of your patients, who have a heart icon next to them that drains as they become increasingly dissatisfied with your (lack of) service. Should their icon expire, you’re treated to a brief angry animation and a bit of dialogue like ‘you call yourself a doctor?!’, as they disappear. Each lost patient or patient that you have to drag and drop into the ambulance because you don’t have the equipment to care for them, is money and time lost.
Of course, you won’t know what a patient needs (and therefore if you can serve them), until you have them examined by the doctor. So, for any patient that pops in, you have to quickly drag and drop them over to the doctor to be examined. Doing so brings up the patient’s heart/patience meter, and pops up an icon above their head as to what they need next. This icon will show a picture of an X-ray machine, a quick treatment bed, a hospital bed, a CAT scan, a steamer, and several other, increasingly wacky treatment devices.
Once their need is known, you have to move them to the equipment or send off in the ambulance. Keep in mind that anytime the patient is not getting care, their meter is draining so it takes constant attention to keep them pleased. As you can surmise, if you don’t have the equipment to serve them and you send them off in an ambulance, you’ve still lost precious seconds during the examine, but the exam is the required first step.
Dropping a patient off at a CAT scan or X-ray machine or anywhere else doesn’t mean that they are done and ready to pay. As the nurse, you have to run over to the prescription desk, grab their prescription and take it over to them. Several seconds are again drained here, and if they were using a bed or quick treatment table, you have to change the linens used before the bed or table are useable again. This also takes a few seconds and requires you to not only tap on the object, but to also then carry the linens over to the laundry. On the other hand, machines will sometimes require repair before they can be used — requiring more time and on the fly planning.
As you can tell, the hysteria in Hysteria Hospital develops rather quickly. The ‘campaign’ mode spans seven hospitals and more than sixty levels, or you can try the Endless Mode. In my experience, the first eighteen to
twenty stages are straight-forward and very beatable the first time through, but missions in the third hospital in Minneapolis introduce other challenges that really ramp up the difficulty. Whereas before you managed only a single floor, this third hospital introduces a second floor which adds a signifcant amount of complexity. This second floor also gives you more room to purchase more equipment, which you do in between stages.
What’s the Plan, Man?
Keeping track of time and doing on the fly planning is how the game is played. Most of this is done right in the heat of the action, but in between stages a management screen comes up dispaying your funds. You can use these earnings to increase employee salaries, buy (and sell) equipment, and change your uniform color. Increasing salaries is important because it helps your hospital run smoother; for example, by increasing the salary for Maintenance, your equipment breaks down less.
Buying equipment is as essential as handling salaries, and not everything you buy is directly related to patient care. Some items — like vending machines, water coolers, and plants, are there to help keep the patients more patient which gives you more time before they get upset and leave. Having the right equipment means you’re able to treat more patients without having to send them off in the ambulance which makes your whole operation run smoother.
This management screen is a nice plus to the gameplay, but even the best equipment is useless if your performance on the floor isn’t up to par. When not dragging and dropping patients from one point to the next, players control their character, the nurse. As the nurse, there is always some other place that you need to be — either dropping off dirty laundry, picking up a prescription, or riding up the elevator to another floor. I think the best thing O-Games did in this regard is let you mark your next two stops in advance. For instance, one of the most routine strategies is to change the linens, drop them off at the laundry, and pick up some meds at the prescription desk. You can plan all three moves by just tapping on the bed, which then begins a three second delay as the nurse changes the linens. Immediately after tapping the bed, just tap the laundry cart and the prescription icon, and your character knows to do those two stops next. Given that the pace of the game is so frantic, after that last tap for the prescription, you’re already doing something else with your patients. That your player can go ahead and do two extra motions in advance is just very helpful and a good design element.
As far as presentation quality, Hysteria Hospital is basic, but certainly functional. I thought the HUD was well designed in that it gave you all of the information you needed and was placed on screen well. Your counters, patient needs, and equipment and prescription status are all well presented, too. The sound does okay; it’s a basic effects package with a forgettable soundtrack and very repetitive dialogue, but it works. Lastly, one odd point to make is in the manual; I was looking in the manual to reference something about the game and the final page of the gameplay description page just cuts off; the back of this page just shows the credits. This is more odd than a real problem, but I thought it worth mentioning.
Overall, Hospital Hysteria: Emergency Ward is a deceptively addictive title at first, but after a couple of hours its level of difficulty and sense of reward become unbalanced. Certainly planning out the most efficient strategies is somewhat fun at first and rewarding, but as the difficulty ramps, it gets frustrating and easy to put down. When it’s no longer steady progress, you just come to realize that there are plenty of other games to play and more satisfying things to do. There is no story or characters to become attached to, making the game just that much easier to put down and forget. It’s one of those titles that might take several months to complete because you’ll hit a wall, get tired of it, find lots of other things to play, and only then might you give it another chance. Historically for me, I normally don’t get back to games like this and they end up getting shelved. Still, if the game interests you, it’s out for the Wii and PC as well so you might look into those more robust versions too.