REVIEW

Agony Review

by Luke Walsh, June 12th, 2018

Agony is game which takes the fun and fears out of Hell and throws you into the hellish twisted world of its own making. Every part of the game is home to unimaginable horror but in the best possible way. Sadly, this game is also pretty hellish to play.

The game starts as you are a new resident of the underworld that wakes up at the gates of hell with the usual lack of memory. Instead of being sentenced to the usual torment for all of eternity, you are able to roam the corridors of Hell and look for an angel of hell called the Red Goddess who is the only one who can help you regain your lost memories. From here the journey begins as you dive into the survival game, like others there’s no combat.

Hell is a massive achievement in this game as it looks dreadful in a good sort of way but on the other hand extremely disorientating. The floor is made from the rotting flesh of humans and the walls are decorated with the mangled still alive naked corpses of other tormented souls. It’s problem though is navigating it becomes hard as the maze-like design does not help with the survival elements of making sense which way you need to go next.

Enemies, on the other hand, are not as well design and stand out because of it. Female demons are just naked for the sake of being naked and have sharp teeth or claws with everything on show for all of Hell to see. The same can be said for the Red Goddess who is also dressed in pretty much nothing with her bits out in a gruesome display of what you believe is genitalia.

The same can be said for most the humans who are down in Hell, they have mainly mangled corpses that are barely in one piece, yourself included. For this reason, you shuffle along without really being able to run or jump with your main action being able to pick up torches so that you can see in the darker areas of the fiery place call home.

Without weapons, your main tool is being able to sneak past your enemies, with the option later on in the game to be able to sneak more quietly with a powerup. Even still, the game’s monsters are unforgiving when it comes to being seen or heard. No matter how good or slow you are, they somehow always, always seem to find you. Hiding spots are hard to find or not where you think they should be and there’s very little HUD that enables you to keep tabs on your location in relation to the enemies on the hunt making it near impossible to navigate without bumping into some sort of creature.

Monsters come in a few different varieties, where most of them can take you out in a single hit. There is a checkpoint system but the save points are very scattered meaning walking into the wrong place will mean you’ve lost over an hours progress. The way around this, however, is the one magical ability you have, your soul can vacate your current shrivelled body and move into another before permadeath sets in.

You’ll need to find a vulnerable human in the maze which is not easy and only have about 10 seconds makes it quite a big task. If you then can not find your next meat suit the Red Goddess will keep you in Hell but throw you back to your last checkpoint. Each checkpoint resembles a mirror where a soul needs to be sacrificed to use it, but have fun trying to find them as they are usually deep in a level ridiculously hard to locate.

This is further compounded mainly because Hell is such a vast place and there’s no real steer on what you should be doing next. The game never really explains past trying to find the Red Goddess how you continue to progress. It’s not further helped by the fact the gameplay is quite dull, where sneaking and controlling enemies is pretty much the whole game wrapped in shock and cheap tense moment to try and make the same mechanics “exciting”.

Sadly, the only redeeming quality of Agony is Hell itself as it does look menacing but the rest of the game is hard to navigate, with no real direction or story and unfairly difficult with enemies that could hear a pin drop with checkpoints too far apart making you want to turn the game off when you die and lose too much progress.