The Suffering Full Version

The Suffering is a psychological horror game from a bit over a decade ago that features tons of dismembered bodies, creepy looking spawns of the underworld and a whole lot of mature vocabulary. It also submerges you into a story that has plenty moments in which you ask yourself how much of what the protagonist sees is real how much takes place in his mind.

It’s been awhile since its release so analyzing the graphics now wouldn’t be fair. However, as far as game design goes, The Suffering is pretty good. Almost every room you go through is different from the previous and that’s a good thing since it makes the action feel less linear.

Since the atmosphere in a horror game makes all the difference, The Suffering focuses a lot on making everything as brutal as possible. Right from the beginning of the game you will see several people getting sliced into half, impaled and killed in all kinds of gruesome ways. It sounds horrible but since the graphics are nowhere near capable of being detailed, the gore level that they deliver will mostly cause a slight ‘ouch!...’ reaction.

There are plenty of animation mishaps that come off as slightly amusing and the fact that the audio glitches and shuts down at times considerably reduces the seriousness of the game.

An appealing aspect of The Suffering, if we can define it as such, is the design for the spawns of evil. If you’re a fan of Silent Hill monsters, you’ll definitely like the ones in this game. Even if they have almost polygonal design, humanoid creatures with blades instead of arms and legs that can move about like spiders are still creepy.

Along the way you will have to deal with voices that flood your mind in certain moments of the game, and you’ll get a considerable amount of flashbacks that are meant to help you piece together the true story while also confuse you a bit more.

To wrap it up, The Suffering is a good example of a game that successfully combines narration, plot, action and gameplay to deliver something memorable. Unfortunately, that would have been appropriate in 2004 because by today’s standards, The Suffering has enough content that makes it a cliche.