Agony | Xbox One | Review

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A runaway crowdfunding success story, Agony and its grotesque realisation of Hell recently made it to market with the help of nearly 4,000 passionate backers. While there are plenty of grisly sights to quench the thirst of the gore hounds amongst them, anyone looking for anything more than the modern interpretation of a cheap video nasty will be sorely disappointed.

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by Sam Sant

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@SlamShotSam

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Developer: Madmind
Studio
Publisher: Madmind
​Studio
​Platforms: ​Xbox
​One, PS4, PC
​Players: 1

Initially refused rating due to graphic scenes of rape and infanticide, which were cut to secure an 18 certificate, Agony revels in controversy. It places gore, nudity and satanic symbolism on a pedestal in a desperate effort to shock, but its for none of these reasons that the game is deeply offensive. Awful menus and loading screens adorned with what look like poorly cut out JPEGS offer an immediate indicator of what’s to come, proceeding to drop you at the gates of Hell with the task of seeking the Red Goddess and a hard pass on eternal damnation along with her.

Madmind Studio’s hellscape is hideous in both an intentional and unintentional sense, constructed of bloody bones, entrails and malformed limbs that are poorly realised on a technical level. Despite the familiar, biblical interpretation of the setting, there’s undeniably some intriguingly disturbed imagery to ogle when environments aren’t obstructively lit. You’ll probably need to crank up the gamma setting to comfortably traverse Agony’s dark and winding corridors, unattractively washing them out in the process.

While areas are interconnected and peppered with secrets, everything looks so samey that it’s exceptionally easy to get lost. This is frustrating enough in itself, but once you also account for the sluggish walk speed and highly limited stamina supply, simple traversal becomes laborious. Hell feels labyrinthine in the worst way, making a punishing early venture into a literal maze the point at which many will likely throw in the towel.

That’s also where Agony remembers to shoehorn in its weak, wider gameplay mechanics, incorporating simple puzzles and, frankly, dreadful stealth. You can’t engage demonic denizens in combat, aping the likes of Amnesia and Outlast, but the vagina-faced foes can’t hope to instil the same helpless feelings of dread. They’re pretty thick (in terms of intelligence) for starters, easily distracted with flaming torches and evaded simply by crouching and holding your breath, though that’s not to say they aren’t deadly if you get careless.

Anyone looking for anything more than the modern interpretation of a cheap video nasty will be sorely disappointed.

Sneaking slows the trudging pace to an absolute crawl, which means you’ll inevitably get bored and make a run for it, almost guaranteeing that you get spotted and face swift murder. After succumbing to a screenful of bare busters, your soul leaves the body and you’re presented a window of time in which to possess a lesser thrall and pick up where you left off. Possessions are automatic on easy difficulty, but require input on normal and send you back to the last poorly-placed checkpoint in the event of failure.

Finding and eating Forbidden Fruit - or Fanny Smith apples, as we call them for reasons you can probably extrapolate - allows you to acquire and upgrade skills that’ll at least give you a better chance at survival. That’s assuming you actually want to extend the trip, mind, as masses of alternate endings and a couple of additional modes - one offering endless procedurally generated challenges and the other the chance to replay the story as a succubus - did absolutely nothing to tempt us into holding the controller for any longer than absolutely necessary.

You might think all that seems a tad harsh, but we haven’t even touched on the crippling technical issues yet. Agony’s frame rate is choppy at best, glitches prevented us from making progress on a few occasions, and the audio is completely bust. Diegetic sounds emanate from the wrong directions, while ambient effects and voice overs constantly cut in and out and jarringly loop back on themselves; missing dialogue makes the unengaging narrative harder to follow than it should be, but, more egregiously, deprives you of relishing every syllable of the hysterically awkward scripting and delivery.

​Let’s not mince words here: Agony is a sub-par, early access product masquerading as a finished release. Patches can only hope to make it stably abysmal, as opposed to plain broken, so you should absolutely avoid the unnecessary agony it’ll so ironically impose upon you.

Pros

• Environments are occasionally interesting
• They didn’t steal the Kickstarter money

Cons

• Totally borked audio
• All shock value & no substance
• Moves at a gruellingly slow pace
• Tedious stealth sections
• Hideous visuals

2/10