Mastermind Studios clearly had a vision for their first title Agony, a grimy, gory and nasty view of Hell unlike anything you’ve ever seen. On this front, Agony is a success. Each frame and set piece moment from this game exudes its bloody and disturbing art style to a tee. Unfortunately, art style only goes so far and nearly every other aspect of Agony is poor. The gameplay is frustrating and never feels rewarding, partly due to its slew of bugs and glitches.
You play as a newly fallen wretch who inhabits the landscape of Hell and have forgotten everything about your past life. In order to gain back your lost memories and escape, you must find the Red Goddess. Often it feels like the story is barely present and, when it is there, it’s confusing and even hard to follow what’s happening. On top of that, the voice acting is pretty poor, and takes you right out of any hellish immersion you might be feeling.
The main gameplay of Agony can be summed up as running, hiding, and hoping to not get caught by demons. This loop becomes extremely frustrating for numerous reasons right off the bat; save points are few and far between, and getting killed can be a huge setback. Getting caught and killed usually feels extremely cheap and leaves you thinking “How did it even see me?” over and over again. Despite the game’s reliance on hiding and stealth, it gives you few ways to actually hide other than trying to run and turn corners, hoping to be out of a demons sight line. Death isn’t always the end though, as you do have a chance to posses the body of another poor wretch, a mechanic that is poorly explained and at times difficult to achieve due to not even being able to find a host to posses for long stretches.
Agony does succeed in creating its own nightmarish version of hell. Flesh, blood and bones litter the landscape, along with plenty of violent and disturbing imagery of mutilation and torture. Nothing is held back, and you’ll be sure to see plenty of naked, dismembered wretches and demons along the way. Those seeking out disturbing and disgusting visuals will not be disappointed. Unfortunately, this is disrupted by how even the visuals are tainted by the darkness of this game. In order to simply get around the environment, we had to turn the brightness way up, making the game look washed out. Hell should be a dark place, but this was too much.
Recommendation: It’s sad because it really feels like Agony was on to something with its visual design. Though it may not be for the faint of heart, the visuals presented are bold and creative, leaving you wanting to see more of the nightmares ideas the developers came up with. This only goes so far, as about every aspect of the actual video game includes something that is poor or mediocre at best. In this state, we can’t recommend this game to anyone, because even playing through on easy just to see the world would be too tedious and frustrating.
*Agony was provided to the reviewer by the publishing company but this fact did not alter the reviewer’s opinion*
Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.
