Agony is a Walking Sim/Puzzle game that has us play as a damned soul that has been flung into hell. What you’ve done to get there or even who you are is completely a mystery, but the fact remains that we now find ourselves in a truly chilling version of hell. Without so much as a syllable to our name, we nonetheless have an inexplicably clear goal to seek out the Red Goddess that rules over these tormented lands. Right off the bat, we are presented with a simple puzzle that has us collect a number of still beating hearts to unlock a door. That perfectly sets the tone of what to expect from this title, a ton of fetch quest like objectives through confusing level design and wading through intense darkness that will quickly have you tweaking your gamma settings as to allow you to see your surroundings.
Before I, unfortunately, have to tear this game apart, let’s talk about its greatest strength. It’s environments. This is a sick and demented place containing tons of horrible imagery, that goes several steps above what many other titles depicting hell would have. Smashing babies with rocks and many other such cruelties against infants, torture victims unable to die left to twitch in agony for eternity, as well as very creative uses of morphed body parts to create pretty much everything around you. Not a pleasant place to find yourself in, to say the least, though I found myself constantly stopping to take a screenshot of these artistically grotesque vistas and gawking like if I wasn’t just as likely to meet a vicious end by several of the roaming demons that can kill you in a single blow.
You have no forms of attack and the only way to have a chance of survival if spotted is to huff it as long as your decaying lungs can permit you to. Not very far as it turns out, you have around 5 seconds before you get fatigued and won’t be able to do much more than walk around as if on a stroll on the beach. There are some hiding spots that can cause them to lose chase, though they are mostly found at the beginning of the game and are oddly absent from a large portion of the title afterward. Your best bet is not to get detected in the first place by making use of the crouch button and one that lets you hold your breath as to not allow them to detect your presence. All well and good, but the spastic AI doesn’t help matters as they turn around and move at a whim, while at other times refusing to budge an inch. You can toss a torch to distract them in theory, yet the distance at which you hurl it is so short that putting a demon into an alert state makes the situation more dangerous.
Their line of sight, whether the cover of darkness helps at all, and other factors never become clear. It is needlessly uncommunicative in many aspects, despite how important and critical to the experience it may be. An example is perhaps one of its most unique features that gives you the ability to possess others. As stated you are a damned soul, yet you contain no flesh of your own and in turn are able to possess those of broken spirit or weak wills. Being viciously murdered is hardly a big deal for our character as he can possess another poor sod and be on his merry way. Your potential victims are generic NPCs called Martyrs, that usually do nothing more than sit around and spout the same dialogue from a very small selection all throughout your journey. Hardly something that will arouse any guilt from using them for your own needs, but the problem here is that you are never told various key factors of this mechanic.
So you find your temporary host split in half and are suddenly out in your spirit form with weird sigils flashing on your screen. You find some people that you inexplicably can’t possess and after some time you find one you can. Now you have to deal with a strange mini-game without any explanation as to how it works, and I honestly didn’t figure out until guides popped up days after having played through it. Luckily for all of us, there is an ‘Easy Possession’ option in the menu to completely avoid that still terrible system, but will have to put up with a far too long animation. It can be particularly troublesome when there is a demon around as it takes quite a while to enter their body and the bloody camera is spinning around the entire time, making it hard to gather your bearings of the environment and is all too easy to get insta-killed as soon as you are given control.
The demons will completely ignore the Martyrs until you are in them, which kind of makes sense given they may be attracted to your soul until you remember all the cut-scenes where they tear NPCs apart just for the fun of it. After that sudden revelation, one can’t help but feel annoyed as those same demons practically trip over Martyrs, neither without a care in the world and as soon as they get a sniff of you, immediately go back to being deadly creatures. This was such a missed opportunity, imagine tossing a torch towards an npc to attract attention and sneak by as a demon noisily feasted upon him. And since they essentially function as extra lives, there could have been a risk/reward mechanic to help them from risky situations for our own selfish needs. Instead, we got stationary NPCs whom we need to take off the sacks on their heads, which stop you from possessing them somehow. That fact was also never explained, so if you ever wondered why you couldn’t possess someone, there you go, it was the piece of thin fabric all along.
When you are ripped from your mortal host, it can be tempting to rush things as your soul will not last forever and there is a strict timer. The important thing to know is that said timer is more like an energy meter as it only lowers when you move, making rushing around blindly a needlessly risky ordeal. It is far better to take your time and survey your surroundings for another body. This is made even more important as when in your spirit form, you can now see flying octopus-like creatures that will consume your soul if you get near them. That will result in a game over and set you back to the last checkpoint, which I’ll get into more detail in a moment. Stupidly enough, missing a jump will result in an insta-death too, while every other way to destroy your body is perfectly fine and gives you a chance to possess another. Despite being a non-corporeal spirit, you can not pass through solid objects either and need to find some clear path to your victim before your soul dissipates.
Now to how the checkpoint system functions. They come in the form of these mirror-like objects that look like it could be one of the many other forms of strange collectibles scattered around, and as you may have guessed by now, are given no indication as to what it actually is. You are given up to three deaths before your last checkpoint becomes inoperable, though you can set it to have an unlimited amount via the options menu. The way they are placed around the levels feels completely random. There are moments when you will be stumbling over them, one after another, while on other occasions you can go without a checkpoint for quite a bit of time. Furthermore, any progress you’ve made from “puzzles” or story segments will be retained, meaning you have a straight path back to where you failed. Which leads me to ask what is the point then? All you will be doing is making your way back. That simply seems like its entire purpose is to artificially pad the amount of time you’ll be playing it and does the game no favors.
In fact, I’d describe every single factor that involves actual game-play to be padding. It was like if they desperately wanted to avoid being compared to a Walking Sim and added in a bunch of monotonous busy work and poorly implemented ideas. There are two types of what I hesitate to call ‘puzzle’ types. One has you collect a certain amount of a specific object, simple enough, and the other has you find symbols written across walls then finger paint them into a rune in the hopes that they open the door. At first, you have a clever way of knowing which symbol is correct as statues point in various different directions with only one telling the truth. That idea is soon thrown out the window and the only way to know which symbol is correct is by trying them out one by one. So it becomes less of a puzzle and more of a scavenger hunt with them becoming much more difficult to find as well.
One of the biggest disappointments has to be your ability to possess demons later on. It is such a cool idea with an extremely flawed implementation. You can run for an infinite time, kill lesser creatures, and navigate around far more efficiently, however, there is a big catch. Much like being in your soul form, you’ll have a limited amount of time to use it, and in this case, even staying still will not stop the timer from ticking down. The amount of time you are given is far too little and the only way you can do to gain more is engage in some killing, though typically the only thing you can kill are Martyrs. That is incredibly counter-intuitive as demons can not interact with anything such as puzzles, collectibles, or activate checkpoints. Their only purpose is to break down the rare wall and possessing them is entirely pointless. If there are no Martyrs around without that accursed bag around their head, you may as well restart since a demon cannot so much as remove it.
It could have still been a useful feature if we could leave our bodies at any time and possess a demon that is wandering dangerously close to your body, but that is sadly not the case. We can only leave our hosts in very specific and rare areas or via its death. And I haven’t even gotten into the frequent glitches that make this experience even more of a chore. There are multiple instances where when I was in spirit form where I suddenly could not move whatsoever and was forced to restart. Multiple areas had collision issues causing me to get stuck in the scenery and repeatedly jump to try to get myself free. The game would occasionally lock itself to 30fps, which from my testing seems to happen if your frame-rate ever falls to the mid-thirties. It doesn’t matter if you have vsync on or off, it will still occur and cause you to enter the menus time & time again to fix it.
We’ll be here all day if I continue to mention all the issues I had and the flaws of the gameplay, so let’s move on to the story, shall we? It is equally as sub-par as everything else and has a surprisingly boring villain. Shockingly so in fact. You’d think with the incredibly creative and disturbing environments, we’d receive an equally sinister villain. Nope. She is neither threatening nor inspired from a personality or design wise perspective. Considering she is your entire motive to move forward and the only character outside of a certain painter later on, this is quite an issue, with the final nail in the coffin being her bad voice acting. Throughout the entire campaign I felt two emotions, frustration and crushing boredom. The worst part was that the environments which were what attracted me to this title in the first place, start off amazing and only get better later on. It has so many impressive views just begging for your attention, and while I do want to go back to view them once more, not even the multiple endings it has will ever convince me to do so.
Once you finish the campaign, you will unlock a new mode in where you can replay the story as a succubus that actually features different scenarios and paths-ways. She can leap through the air to reach previously inaccessible locations, has multiple ways to kill people such as a magical voodoo-like heart she can jam her finger into, and other unique quirks that make her far more fun to use. There is another mode called Agony which randomizes a level together and allows you to compete via leader-boards as you attempt to get through it and try to complete secondary quests. On top of all these extra modes, you have a ton of unlockable things ranging from concept art, model viewers, and comics. It is clear that the developers actually put a ton of effort into their game, which makes it all the more unfortunate that I spent the majority of this review bashing it. As sad as that is, I simply can not recommend Agony. When one imagines what it would be like to travel through hell, you’d typically think of fear and pain, not tedium & boredom.
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