On Steam, “Project Hospital” is on offer: this is a realistic hospital simulation. If you buy the DLCs, you can also deal with Corona. A positive side effect: The solid economic simulation conveys a basis about how a hospital works.
What kind of game is that? “Project Hospital” is a hospital simulation. Compared to the well-known representatives in the genre, it is much more serious: there are no fantasy diseases such as in Theme Hospital, but patients must be diagnosed and treated.
Project Hospital was released on Steam in 2018 and has 88 % positive reviews. The game in sale currently costs € 12.50 on Steam. With DLCs, the price goes up to € 25. Among other things, Corona pandemic comes into play here.
The game offers you a campaign and some scenarios. The heart is the sandbox mode in which you build your dreams’ hospital.
Project Hospital – Trailer for the management game in the style of Theme Hospital
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In the beginning you fight against the great enemy of mankind, the foot mushroom
This is how Project Hospital takes place: It is a classic economic simulation with some role-playing aspects: You hire doctors, technicians, nurses and caretakers, they can improve and have some properties that you should consider when setting: one prefers to work in the morning, the other is a night school and the nice night sister is unfortunately alcohol.
You have to intervene again and again and be medically active: A typical scenario is that a patient complains about “itching” and that such a general problem is that your beginner doctor is overwhelmed and asks you what examinations he now has to carry out. Examination for a possible mushroom in the laboratory is often the right solution.
However, the main focus is on the construction aspect of the hospital: it is important to plan the departments solidly, to optimize walking paths and to fill layers so that it spends as little money as possible, but also kills few people.
This is what the struggle for the survival of a patient looks like
That makes the game so appealing: As in any classic economic simulation, Project Hospital is about optimizing processes and building an increasingly complex system.
While you only start with a few doctors at the beginning and treat foot fungus, strain and back pain, you will soon open new departments, get ambulances and freed more and more cases until pneumonia. If your first intensive stations, an operating room and specialist departments run, the game becomes increasingly complex and exciting.
The side effect is that at least rudimentary you understand 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 that most of his symptoms are treated with medication, but there is still an unknown symptom that flashes. A flashing unknown symbol, represented by a flashing eye, means: “You don’t know what it is, but it can lead to the collapse and thus to the patient’s death and urgently needs to be treated.”
The player must decide which examination is necessary and make the decision whether he will buy an expensive special device in the event, like an MRI.
A typical decision in Project Hospital is:
Even real doctors praise Project Hospital
This is what the reviews say: Project Hospital has very friendly reviews on Steam. However, it is regretted that the game has not been further developed since 2020. The steep learning curve is also mentioned:
“Great game, if you like it to control a lot of things”
A player with 186 hours in Project Hospital writes: “Great hospital simulation. If you ever want to lead a hospital and check the individual aspects of it, it fulfills this wish. ”
A review of a German doctor with 570 hours in the game says (via Steam):
As a doctor, I am not entirely disregarding, but I was very pleased that a hospital simulation appeared that follows a realistic approach. Similar genre representatives such as Two Point Hospital with their fantasy diagnoses have always put me off in advance.
The bottom line is that it is a great, interesting and exciting game – medical specialist staff will certainly come to their fun if you can pinch an eye here and there.
However, the doctor makes it clear that you have to accept cuts in realism. So some important disciplines were missing. However, he praises the fact that the medical department available in the game is well presented by how one deals with patients who are not previously selected:
As in real life, the player has to distinguish between the trivial and potential emergency
Game gives an insight into the debate about hospital reform
This is the bonus effect of Project Hospital: Anyone who pursues the political situation in Germany knows that there has been a big debate about profitability in recent years.
I don’t want to say that by playing Project Hospital you become an expert in the debate and can have a say. But the game at least gives the basis to understand what is essentially in the core of the debate:
This is a question that the Project Hospital player will also deal with.
Another effect is that the game of Project Hospital, if you have to go to the hospital, may rather understand what is going on as a patient.
From a playful point of view, Project Hospital is a solid economic simulation that is now polished and appealingly complex after 7 years. I can definitely recommend you in sale in any case: Here are 5 strategy games that you get in the Steam Spring Sale for less than € 10 and will be busy for a long time