GENRE: Survival Horror
PUBLISHER: Focus Interactive
DEVELOPER: Madmind Studios
PRICE: £39.99

Hell, in the traditional sense, is supposed to be a punishment, a squalid pit of torture depravity and anguish. The problem that Madmind studios Agony has though, is that the sense of punishment their Infernoesque hellscape imbues in the player extends far past its disturbing visuals – playing it feels like penance for all your gaming sins. 

In Agony, players take on the soul who wakes up at the gates of Hell with amnesia – the one thing he does know is that if he can find the Red Goddess he will be able to reclaim his memories and leave perdition. Thus, begins a long arduous journey towards redemption.

Agony’s version of hell is probably its only redeeming feature, an unholy bastard child of Dante Alighieri and HR Giger, it’s the kind of place that the Marquis de Sade would love to holiday in, a stinking gothic nightmare literally constructed from the bodies of the damned held together with the blood of unbaptised babies. Trapped, wide-eyed and screaming for eternity.   

Which is why it’s so disappointing that the characters and game contained within its marvellous macabre environments are so mind-numbingly tedious. 

Let's start with the demons, ever play Doom? they come from the exact same playbook except there are fewer varieties of them and you can’t pump them full of shot, just cower in the dark until they inevitably find, and kill you.

Meanwhile, the female variants are basically fanged dominatrices with their boobs out. While the Red Goddess comes off as a blood-soaked stripper giving, with dialogue that wouldn’t be out of place in a porn movie, delivered with just as much subtlety and skill. 

The problem is that its attempts at ‘pushing the envelope’, particularly in its approach to sexual themes come off as juvenile and tawdry. 

Meanwhile, the myriad of tortured husks shambling around hell have no character, they’re just well, there. Movement is slow, even for you, bumbling around, you can run, jump, pick up torches and try to hide, and that’s about it.

It’s the Outlast school of horror with none of the pace or tension if you encounter an enemy you can try and sneak past, hide or run away. However, the gits almost always find you, hiding spaces are sparse, and turns out demons have supernatural powers of hearing and are quick on their feet to boot. What’s more, once you are caught most enemies will kill you outright, and thanks to a truly idiotic checkpointing system it’s easy to lose over an hours work, hellish, yes, fun no.

In hell, though death is not the end, and you have the chance to possess another shambling husk and carry on. But first, you have to take off their black shroud which protects them. However, you can only do this while you’re alive, and the game doesn’t make it particularly clear that this is the case. You are then given 10-15 seconds to remember where they are, through the game’s maze-like levels, with incredibly limited vision. 
Fail to do that and it’s back to the last checkpoint which are all needlessly hidden away and requires you to sacrifice a soul to in order to use them three times. Die more than that and the game kicks you right back to the beginning.  Fortunately, you can turn this off, and I would recommend doing so for the sake of your own sanity. 

On the plus side, later in the game, you can start to possess demons, but their only power seems to be to stop the player from being killed – making the sneaking sections completely pointless and flipping the difficulty from unfeasibly punishing to ridiculously easy.    

These issues are compounded by the fact that the levels are vast and navigating them is incredibly difficult. There’s no map, and the game’s compass often doesn’t know where to go either. I understand that hell is supposed to be a horrific cage that no one is supposed to escape from, but the gaming equivalent of that just doesn’t make for an enjoyable experience.

When you’re not getting lost, throttled to death, or having to replay vast sections o the game, the bulk of the action comprises of irritating scavenger hunts for grotesque keys to open doors or hunting for sigils in the environment to open up the next area. Both tasks require vast amounts of backtracking and the second a lot of trial and error, as just finding the sigil isn’t enough, you need to find the right one, and you often don’t know which one it is until you get back to the door. Einstien once said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, Agony exemplifies this and then some. 

Then there are the technical issues - on PS4 at least, (and I tested this on a Pro too) Agony suffers from constant screen tearing and incredibly long load times, which only make its myriad of other issues feel all the more glaring.  

Agony's biggest failing though is that it manages to make Hell boring, it turns out that if you fire grotesque imagery at a player long enough, they get bored of it. The crushed children and weird sex acts just become ho-hum, when faced with having to wade through more vitriol to find another key to unlock the next tedious gameplay section.

Ultimately, Agony really is an apt title for this abomination, but maybe that’s the point. Madmind purposefully created a game that's such a pain to playthrough that you remember you need to do some laundry, take out the bin and that you should probably call your mother, enriching the souls of those who play the game. 

That, or it’s just awful.