With all the things that can feasibly go wrong, the promising ideas that are heartbreakingly jettisoned (for either time or budgetary reasons), and the stresses that come with meeting a looming deadline, it’s extraordinary that anybody manages to get a video game released.
Irrespective of how well the end result turns out; you have to appreciate that a staggering amount of effort goes into every single title we play. It’s even a tall order for AAA companies, who typically have hundreds upon hundreds of employees toiling around the clock, equipped with the very best resources that money can buy.
So, when a solo developer manages to see one of their projects through to completion, we ought to get a Vatican-appointed commission to stop by and declare it a bona fide miracle. You’ve got to be extremely driven (or borderline insane) to shoulder the responsibilities of programming, art design, level design and narrative direction all by yourself. And though it may not be mandated by any studio heads or executive taskmasters, it’s inevitably going to require an awful lot of crunch.
Keeping that in mind, Brian Clarke (AKA DarkStone Digital) deserves to be commended for launching The Mortuary Assistant in any state whatsoever. Other than receiving some help with QA testing and the promotional side of things — courtesy of publisher DreadXP — this is his baby through and through.
The fact that it even resembles a finished product, never mind one that has flashes of brilliance, is a testament to his sheer talent and dedication. Unfortunately, the game is also very rough around the edges, marred by various performance issues and bugs.
Before delving into those technical shortcomings, it’s worth acknowledging that The Mortuary Assistant is great at its core. It’s unnerving, terrifically paced, narratively involving and mechanically inventive. In fact, when it’s all working as intended it’s genuinely one of the best indie horror games to have come out in recent years.
You play as Rebecca, a college graduate with a mortuary sciences degree, who is looking to get some practical experience in the field by taking on an apprenticeship at her local funeral parlour. Laughing off warnings from her doting grandmother, she disregards all the silly urban legends that have been linked to River Fields Mortuary (it’s rumoured to be a popular site for occult activity), and enthusiastically heads out for her first day on the job.
Upon arrival, the boss gives you a whistlestop tour of the place and shows you where to find all the tools needed for embalming a corpse. After that hasty induction is dispensed with, he then supervises your first ever attempt at processing a dead body.
Suffice it to say, it’s a very grisly undertaking — with you wiring shut the jaw, peeling eyelids open to insert prosthetic caps, making an incision in the jugular vein and draining fluids from the abdominal cavity — but it seems to be going rather well.
However, you can’t shake the feeling that something is just a little off here. Windows appear to open of their own accord and chemical bottles quite literally fly off the shelves, apropos of nothing. Your employer insists that there are perfectly mundane explanations for these weird phenomena, yet he also seems quite eager to rush you out of the building and sends you packing after only a few minutes.
Foolishly, you decide to ignore this mounting pile of red flags and turn up for a graveyard shift the very next evening, raring and ready to go. That’s when things swiftly turn from bad to worse.
The second you step through the reception door, your boss locks you into the mortuary and reveals that you are being targeted by an eldritch demonic force. Naturally, Rebecca’s first instinct is to assume that this is some sort of bizarre hazing ritual for the new girl, but it doesn’t take long for her to realize that the mortician is being deadly serious.
He’s even left a series of detailed audio recordings for you to play, explaining the steps for banishing this malevolent entity before it’s too late. In a nutshell, you’ve got to consult a paranormal encyclopedia (that will help you identify which demon is currently stalking Rebecca) and then thoroughly examine each of the bodies in cold storage, to find out which one is harbouring the supernatural curse.
Once you’ve figured out who you are dealing with, you must then perform the appropriate exorcism to rid yourself of the wicked spirit in question. Yet should you make a mistake, or needlessly dillydally with your investigation, then you will be vulnerable to possession. And then it’s game over.
The premise is sure to grab you right from the off, as it’s doing a lot of interesting things. For a start, it’s fun to see a horror title where you defeat evil, not through combat or stealthy evasion, but through an extended puzzle instead.
Using a combination of audio-visual hints, veiled sigils that can be exposed by flamelight, and the information gleaned from your mortuary reports, you must race against the clock to whittle down a list of possible demonic suspects. Like you’re playing a demented game of Clue! You can even go down a surprisingly deep rabbit hole by consuming the exhaustive lore that’s been documented on a special in-universe website, if you want to properly acquaint yourself with the enemy.
Finding the right demon and their host body is a compelling mystery the first time around, and it doesn’t lose its appeal on subsequent playthroughs either (despite the fact that you are mostly doing the same thing on a loop). It’s similar to how you can enjoy repetitious matches in games like Dead by Daylight or Among Us, even though the basic rules don’t change, because the specifics do.
Speaking of which, Clarke’s innovative “Haunt System” is The Mortuary Assistant’s secret weapon. For a more comprehensive breakdown of how this works you can check out Bloody Disgusting’s interview with the developer, but it essentially randomises the story events, changes the demon you’re up against and mixes up the scares, so that no two playthroughs are ever the same.
Its influence could be as minuscule as deciding when the lights will flicker in the examination room or where identifying marks show up on bodies. On the other hand, it could fundamentally alter the entire course of the narrative. For instance, in one playthrough you might be hounded by a pale creature (known as The Mimic), while in another you could be taken on a psychological journey through Rebecca’s devastating past or be tormented by the souls of her dead relatives.
The ingenious system keeps you constantly on your toes, preventing you from being able to memorize the puzzle outcomes or anticipate the frights. There are indeed a lot of variations for you to experience and you will absolutely want to keep coming back for more.
On that note, the replay value is also bolstered by Clarke’s keen ability to get under your skin. He knows just how to orchestrate an effective horror sequence and does so with admirable restraint. You won’t find any cheap jump scares here, as the developer goes in the polar opposite direction. Instead, he subtly hides creepy moments throughout the game right under your nose, many of which can be easily missed if you’re not looking hard enough.
Malign faces will appear in the background of photographs, scrawled notes will taunt you into committing suicide, rictus ghouls will silently materialize over your shoulder, and naked cadavers (with prosthetic caps eerily obscuring their eyes) will peer at you through rain-drenched windows.
You’re almost incentivised to go hunting for these macabre easter eggs, as some of them are really clever. During one shift, I went to have another listen to the tutorial voice notes (for a quick refresh on identifying the correct demon), only to discover that the audio recording had been replaced with a harrowing message from beyond the grave.
In addition to this, Clarke has mastered the fine art of the “Dread Scare”. If you’re not familiar with this term (coined by Kitty Horrorshow) it’s basically when a game coerces you into doing something that more genre-savvy players know will end badly — like investigating a strange noise, meddling with suspicious objects, or venturing into darkened environments.
In the case of The Mortuary Assistant, there are several instances where you will have to work up the courage to approach skeletal hands that are beckoning you into dimly lit rooms or walk down corridors that are blocked by menacing wraiths.
Then there are those duties you’ve got to perform as part of your 9-5 at the funeral home. Puncturing needles into a dead person’s gums and hooking up tubes to their internal organs is obviously unpleasant. Not to mention, there is the intensely gruesome trocar procedure, rendered here as a graphic minigame that is guaranteed to turn stomachs.
However, you’ll be surprised by how fast your visceral reaction to these things dissipates and you’ll soon be working your way down the checklist in a kind of autopilot. If the goal was to make you feel like a desensitised professional, whose job makes them numb to all the guts and gore, then Clarke did a bang-up job here.
After a while, the embalming process becomes a perversely satisfying routine and a welcome distraction from the more distressing supernatural encounters. So much so, that the fan community has already requested that a ghost-free simulator mode be added, letting you get on with the corpse perseveration tasks unmolested.
With all that said, The Mortuary Assistant has the makings of an outstanding horror title. Alas, it also feels like I’m constantly battling against the game itself to enjoy it, thanks to a litany of technical issues that have yet to be sorted.
It goes without saying that the problems I am about to describe are based on my own subjective experiences and that you may well avoid most of them. Indeed, I sincerely hope that’s the case because they can be very disruptive.
I’m rarely able to complete a shift without running afoul of some game-breaking bug. Among other things, contextual interactions have stopped working for me altogether, audio has played at a comically-accelerated rate, and the inventory menu has failed to display.
Meanwhile, I’ve spawned into empty voids on numerous occasions, gotten stuck in perpetual loading screens, ran into T-posing ghosts, had to reset the game when key story events didn’t trigger, suffered multiple hard-crashes and, worst of all, lost all of my progress. That last point has been the ultimate deal breaker for me, as I’ve now how to repeat my first shift at least half a dozen times and cannot bear to go through it again. To his credit, Clarke has been valiantly fighting fires and acting on feedback since launch, with new patches coming out every single day, so hopefully this part of the review quickly becomes obsolete.
As it stands though, I can only talk about the experience I personally had, and it was a very choppy one. Maybe I’m just profoundly unlucky.
Yet it’s worth reiterating that, when the bugs are taken care of, this will a very special game that deserves your attention.
The Mortuary Assistant is available now.
The post ‘The Mortuary Assistant’ Review – Narratively Involving, Mechanically Inventive, and Technically Flawed appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.