Very rarely do you get a game whose title accurately describes how it feels to play it.
Agony
Developer: Madmind Studio
Price: $30
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
Agony has you playing as some dude who definitely did something bad to deserve being in hell, as every NPC you encounter will remind you. Your goal is to meet up with the (definitely evil) Red Goddess who you hope will offer you a way to escape hell since it’s not too fun of a place to be. This is the basic setup the games builds for you, but it’s so paper thin that it’s barely there. Anytime an NPC would start spitting nonsense exposition that usually didn’t have anything pertinent to the plot, I found it really damn hard to care. To make matters worse, the voice actors are simply atrocious, with some of the flattest delivery I’ve experienced in a game in a good while. There are also countless journal entries scattered throughout the game and I hit a point where I just stopped picking them up because the game never even tries to give you a good reason to become engaged in the story it’s trying to tell. Not like it was trying very hard to begin with.
What’s perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the game is how uninspired its setting is. You’ve absolutely seen every demon or environment design that’s in this game in countless other forms of media and you’ll honestly struggle to pinpoint an original idea. Statues of people in explicit sexual positions are everywhere, the demons are all nude with mixed gender parts, bones are scattered all over, and there’s a healthy sprinkling of blood and gore all over. In other words, it’s a pretty boring interpretation of hell. I always get excited to see new interpretations of hell, because it’s free reign to pull out some really clever ideas, but when your version ends up feeling less inspired and shocking than 2010’s Dante’s Inferno, you really missed the mark. The way the game presents itself is also in a manner of almost smug confidence when showcasing a scene that’s meant to be shocking but instead comes off as incredibly tame compared to its peers. To make matters worse, the game is almost comically dark, possibly to obscure the unbelievably poor model detail. Some areas are so dark it makes traversing them a nightmare, as you try to remember which dark hallway it was you just went through while trying to find the tiny, darkly colored skull you need to solve the puzzle while also being hunted by the equally darkly colored enemy. And note, I’m saying this with the torch equipped. Lose that thing and suddenly it’s pitch black and your option is to either reset a checkpoint to where you had a torch or blindly run around until you can find another. Some areas force you to lose your torch and stumbling through the darkness is just a teeth grinding experience.
At its core, Agony is a stealth game, just not a very good one. Being a human, you stand no chance against the demons that stalk through hell so your best bet is to avoid them completely. Demons thankfully have piss poor eyesight so you can toss torches to distract them or hold your breath to conceal your location. There are also spaces to hide from enemies but I never once made use of them since I never had a demon walk by one to require its use. These options rarely worked however, with many enemies still spotting me when I held my breath and them almost never reacting to me tossing my torch. When these attempts at distracting enemies usually failed, I’d end up just sprinting past them. I should stress that I tried to sprint through levels, since your character has the stamina of a chain-smoker on the last legs of their life.
What makes your character special is that when you die your spirit can still move around the area for a limited amount of time and possess another human body. But to possess a human you first need to remove the bag covering everyone’s head which is clearly the latest fashion trend in hell. Your time in the spirit realm is very brief however, so you have to quickly find a new body before your time runs out. On top of that are these tentacled, bacteria looking creatures that inhabit this realm that are pretty much there to stop you from going too far in an area. They become increasingly frustrating when you’re trying to look for a new host to inhabit only to get grabbed and eaten by these creatures that have a magnetic reach that would make Modern Warfare 2’s knife-lunge blush. Now instead of trying to set a good atmosphere and keep a good pace the game instead has you running around removing bags from everyone’s head. When my first instinct upon entering an area is scanning for humans to remove their bags so I have respawn points, then the immersion in your game has taken a huge hit. In a game like this, being immersed is absolutely integral for its enjoyment.
Eventually you’ll gain the ability to also possess demons which you’d think would open the gates of fun, but it doesn’t. Demon powers aren’t ever explained and due to the incredibly clunky movement controls running around as them is even worse. Fighting other demons rarely goes the way you expect where sometimes you’ll be able to take them out, or other times you’ll endlessly whack at them seemingly doing no damage whatsoever. Demon possession is a mechanic that should give brief bursts of excitement as you finally get to have the upper hand on the creatures you’ve been hiding from, but instead it’s just another aspect of a game that just isn’t fun to play.
Being in the same vein as something like Amnesia, the puzzle segments are also just the absolute worst. Agony isn’t interested in making you think very hard to solve its puzzles, instead it’s content in testing your patience. You’ll do things like run around an area looking for skulls to place on an altar or search for a symbol on a wall that you need to paint on a half finished rune. The second one is especially exasperating since the game will usually toss at least half a dozen potential symbols in an area and since you can only have one “memorized” at a time you basically have to run back and forth from each one hoping you got the right one since there’s no rhyme or reason as to why the solution is what it is. Agony will repeat these segments almost back to back and the worst part is that you just have the awful stealth segments to look forward to once the puzzles are completed.
I know hell is supposed to be the ultimate form of torture and suffering, but I’m pretty sure the real thing is more polished than this game. Expect to repeatedly get stuck on geometry, see models wig out, animations to not look right, glitches, enemies to not behave correctly, framerate issues, and some highly questionable vision cones. Moving around just feels awful and it becomes worse when you’re expected to perform these brief platforming segments. Many a time I got caught on some part of the environment which caused my character to get stuck and slide off the surface, forcing a restart to a checkpoint that’s always just far enough away to be frustrating. The game also refuses to explain how anything works. I’m not the kind of guy who needs constant hand holding, but the game never explains that you need to remove the bags from human heads to be able to possess them; that’s a revelation I had to come to myself. The game doesn’t even make any sort of announcement or big show of the moment you gain the ability to possess a demon. Your goal in an area is also vaguely explained which isn’t helped by the poor level design.
When you’re finished with the campaign there are two additional modes to sink your teeth into if you really want to be a masochist. The first is succubus mode that (as you can expect) allows you to play through the campaign as a succubus demon. It’s a bit of a power fantasy mode where now you’re the one on the offensive, instead of hiding from monsters you’re actively seeking them out but honestly the thought of trudging back through that campaign is torture enough. The other mode in the game is called agony mode and there’s a bit more to it than the previous one. This is a highscore focused mode where you’re tossed into randomly generated environments with tasks such as finding a certain amount of items and making it to the exit without dying. When you do reach the exit you have the opportunity to release a demon and go back through the area to accomplish objectives that only a demon could do like killing a certain amount of demons. It’s interesting to say the least, but if you’re not a highscore junkie then there’s not much incentive to deal with the clunky mechanics of the game a second time.
The Final Word
The horror isn’t there for Agony, but the frustration sure is with a game that’s more interested in trying to shock you with its derivative aesthetic than crafting an enjoyable horror experience.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 1.5 out of 5 – Terrible
