By Sean Ewing
People play scary games or watch horror movies because they want to be scared. It’s easy to make people scared at night, in a dark parking garage. It’s a different type of scare though, that can make people uneasy in the middle of the day. This is the type of fear that The Suffering brings, and it does it better then almost any game or movie before it.
The Suffering tells the story of a prison inmate named Torque. Torque is on death row. He is transferred to Abbot Prison on Carnate Island off the coast of Maryland. Quickly, things go from bad to worse. Horrific creatures are everywhere, and they brutally kill and torture any living thing they run across. Torque gets a chance though, and you control him as he fights back, and simply tries to live.
Of course there is more to the story. Torque is in prison for the murder of his wife and two kids. However, he does not remember it. He blacked out everything that happened that day, so no one knows what really happened. Torque remembers bits and pieces of it, and he remembers more and more as you play through. This is where the innovative aspect comes in. What happened that day with Torque’s family is influenced by how you treat other people in the game. If you save the humans you find, you’ll get a flash of your family at a picnic laughing and having fun. Stab or shoot an innocent though, and you’ll get a disturbing scene of your dead wife or kids screaming at you.
The graphics in the game have a gritty, dark feel to them that suits the atmosphere very well. Everything looks fine, but it’s the characters and creatures that really show a lot of polish. Nothing else looks great, but nothing looks awful either. All of the areas have great ominous touches that will definitely spook you out though. For instance, one scene sees Torque walking through a room, only to find a telephone. He picks up the receiver and hears his children screaming “Daddy what have you done? Why did you do it?” Then the screen will flash to a quick cut of a child lying face down in a pool of blood, then snap back to torque who stands in a room now covered in blood. Moments like this abound in The Suffering and it’s times like this that you understand how disturbing and scary this game can be.
Midway put a lot of work into making this game a great cinematic experience without having many cut scenes. The whole game plays out like a great horror movie, the controls are very easy to pick up and Torque is very easy to control. A very innovative and useful aspect is the ability to switch between first and third person at anytime, and both modes control perfectly.
Torque is a really interesting character, because he is what you make him, but regardless of hero or villain, he is a badass. He doesn’t say anything, so it’s up to his expressions and body language to tell you how he’s feeling. This is done exquisitely though, and it feels natural. One of the particularly evil spirits shows up to talk some trash to Torque, who crosses his arms and sneers at the creature. There are countless little touches that also convey the feeling that Torque is a badass in every sense of the word. The way he kicks open doors, the way he reloads his weapons, almost everything he does just paints him as a tough guy in the vein of Bruce Campbell or John McClaine from Die Hard.
This game is obviously not for the faint of heart, but if you can handle the buckets of blood and gore, The Suffering is a cinematic experience that is scary enough to rank with any movie, and it plays so well that it rivals any other adventure game. In the end, Midway’s first Survival Horror effort shows even the big boys like Resident Evil and Silent Hill how it is done, and has created a horror classic that no fan should be without.
Final Grade: A-