On Steam, “Project Hospital” is on sale: It is a realistic hospital simulation. Those who purchase the DLCs can also deal with Corona. A positive side effect: The solid economic simulation provides a foundation for understanding how a hospital operates.
What kind of game is this? “Project Hospital” is a hospital simulation. Compared to the well-known representatives in the genre, it is significantly more serious: There are no fantasy diseases like in Theme Hospital; instead, patients must be diagnosed and treated.
Project Hospital was released in 2018 on Steam and has 88% positive reviews. Currently, the game costs €12.50 on sale on Steam. With DLCs, the price increases to €25. Among other things, the Corona pandemic comes into play here.
The game offers a campaign and several scenarios. However, the centerpiece is the sandbox mode, where you build the hospital of your dreams.
At the beginning, you fight against humanity’s great enemy, athlete’s foot
This is how Project Hospital plays: It is a classic economic simulation with some role-playing elements: You hire doctors, technicians, nurses, and janitors, who can improve and have certain traits that you should consider when hiring: One prefers to work in the morning, another is a night owl, and the nice night nurse is unfortunately an alcoholic.
You must intervene and take medical action repeatedly: A typical scenario is that a patient complains of “itching,” which is such a general problem that your novice doctor is overwhelmed and asks you what examinations he should conduct. Testing for a potential fungus in the laboratory is often the right solution here.
However, the main focus is on the construction aspect of the hospital: You need to plan the departments solidly, optimize pathways, and schedule shifts so that you spend as little money as possible while also minimizing patient casualties.
This is what the fight for a patient’s survival looks like
This is what makes the game appealing: Like in any classic economic simulation, Project Hospital is about optimizing processes and building an increasingly complex system.
While you start with only a few doctors treating athlete’s foot, sprains, and back pain at the beginning, you will soon open new departments, acquire ambulances, and unlock increasingly difficult cases, up to pneumonia. Once you manage the first intensive care units, an operating room, and specialized departments, the game becomes more complex and exciting.
The side effect is that you at least gain a rudimentary understanding of how medicine works and how individual examinations provide more and more facts about a case.
The “normal exceptional situation” is that a patient is already in the intensive care unit, and most of his symptoms are treated with medication, but there is still an unknown symptom that is blinking. A blinking unknown symbol, represented by a blinking eye, indicates: “You don’t know what it is, but it could lead to the patient’s collapse and death, and it needs urgent treatment.”
The player must decide which examination is necessary and determine whether to acquire an expensive specialized device for the case, like an MRI.
A typical decision in Project Hospital is:
- Should I buy a new intensive care unit for that one emergency that urgently needs a bed, even if it puts me in debt?
- Should I transfer that one patient?
- Do I risk leaving him in an examination room for a few hours, hoping a spot will open up at 8 AM the next morning?
Even real doctors praise Project Hospital
This is what the reviews say: Project Hospital has very positive reviews on Steam. However, there is regret that the game has not been further developed since 2020. The steep learning curve is also mentioned:
“Great game if you enjoy controlling a lot of things”
A player with 186 hours in Project Hospital writes: “Great hospital simulation. If you ever want to manage a hospital and control its individual aspects, then it fulfills that wish.”
A review by a German doctor with 570 hours in the game states (via steam):
As a doctor, I have some professional knowledge, but I was very pleased that a hospital simulation has been released that takes a realistic approach. Similar genre representatives like Two Point Hospital with their fantasy diagnoses have always deterred me in advance.
Overall, it is a great, interesting, and exciting game – medical professionals will certainly also enjoy it, as long as they can overlook some inaccuracies here and there.
The medical professional makes it clear, however, that some concessions to realism must be accepted. Some important specialties are missing. However, he praises that the first medical department available in the game represents well how to deal with unselected patients :
Like in real life, the player must distinguish here between trivial issues and potential emergencies.
The game provides insight into the debate on hospital reform
This is the bonus effect of Project Hospital: Anyone who follows the political situation in Germany knows that there has been a significant debate about the profitability of hospitals in recent years.
I don’t want to say that playing Project Hospital makes you an expert in the debate and allows you to speak right away. But the game at least provides the foundation to understand the core of the debate:
- Should complicated surgeries that are only performed once a year be carried out in every provincial hospital, or is it better to refer such cases to the state capital?
This is a question that the player of Project Hospital will also have to deal with.
Another effect is that, after playing Project Hospital, the next time you need to go to the hospital, you might better understand what is going on with you as a patient.
From a player’s perspective, Project Hospital is a solid economic simulation that has been polished and made appealingly complex after 7 years on Steam. I can definitely recommend it now on sale: Here are 5 strategy games you can get in the Steam Spring Sale for under €10 that will keep you engaged for a long time.
