Hell sucks. To what degree it sucks depends on what source you’re using. Dante’s Inferno tells of the various circles of hell which range in severity from merely living in an inferior version of heaven to being covered in excrement and whipped by demons. The Christian hell is a place of fire and pain, and other religions have their own underworlds. Agony‘s hell distills all the worst parts of the legends of hell and the afterlife into one of the nastiest places ever portrayed in video games, and for the most part, it looks incredible.
Peel back the flesh, bone, and blood veneer though, and you’ll find that apart from visuals Agony has a severe problem. Unfortunately, what makes a video game a game is not just the visual, but what you can do and how you can do it. This inverted paradise is a treat to look at, but the real question is if the visuals are worth the chore of actually having to deal with playing the game. Unfortunately, Madmind Studios would have been better off just relying on the visuals to carry the game instead of what we ended up with.
Agony Review: Blood and Willies
Since the driving force behind playing Agony is to see the next brutal setpiece this game feels more like the Dark Souls of walking simulators. The environments of this game are a spectacle of depravity and violence. All of hell is made out of the blood, meat, and bone of the damned. Agony showcases a world where violence is a constant and demons continuously torture and destroy the souls of those damned to spend eternity in this godforsaken (literally) place.
There’s plenty of intestine ripping and weird genital stuff to keep any fan of the macabre on the edge of their seat. Agony really turns it up to 11 as far as raw grotesque imagery goes, maybe more so than any other game to date. Just when I thought I’d seen it all, there would be a scene with demons using unborn (imagine newborns with old man faces) as mortar for bricking a wall by just piling them up and slamming rocks on top of them.
The thing is, though, that after the 8-10 hours the game takes the beat, it all gets pretty dull. There’s only so many succubus orgies and impaled bodies you can see before you’re inured to the whole thing. Agony certainly has variety in its carnage, but not so much in its theme. While I was impressed with the entrails, viscera, and raw violence, by the end the constant reds of exposed muscle and darkness of creepy caves built out of bone and sinew wore out their welcome.
The sexual content wears out just as fast. We’re still at the point where a mainstream(ish) game showing graphic sexual content is still quite rare, but around the twentieth time, you see a demon boob or some poor sod’s wrinkled winky before he’s bashed to bits you’ll be rolling your eyes. There was some small controversy around the game portraying sexual violence, but it’s done in a way that is almost comical. Perhaps it’s the terrible voice acting and lip sync, but what’s supposed to be shocking fades to the background as only another part of the circus of Agony‘s hell.
Agony Review: We’re in Hell, Now What?
While the visuals pop, the story does not. You’re a lost and nameless martyr of one sort or the other, and you’re looking to find the Red Goddess as she is somehow able to help you escape from hell. There’s some forgettable lore told through journals and other writing in the game, but for the most part, you’re just moving ahead based on the vagueries of finding the Red Goddess.
The Red Goddess, who you meet several times through your journey, is maybe the most devastating aspect of the game’s story. She’s supposed to be portrayed as desirable, but the “sultry” vocals that are supposed to be alluring just make her come off as an enthusiastic phone sex operator. She’s an over-the-top character in a game full of over-the-top everything, and she doesn’t work at all as a goal post in the game. I might want our intrepid and shriveled hero to make it out of hell, but I didn’t really want to have anything to do with her, and that made the final goal of the game a real trudge.
Typically I might be more lenient with a story set in a location as otherworldly as this, but hell and the various other underworlds of world religion may be the most written about subjects in human history. When it comes to pre-existing lore, you can’t get better than hell. There’s so much to go on just from the Divine Comedy alone. Unfortunately, Agony‘s hell doesn’t have quite the character of Dante’s portrayal and is instead a very one-dimensional place with very one-dimensional inhabitants.
Instead of exploring something interesting like the War in Heaven where Lucifer was cast into hell or having multiple circles for different sinners, the whole thing seems kind of samish. Some of hell is caves made of bone and flesh, some of it consists of forests of tangled growth filled with the suffering damned, but all of it speaks of a singular kind of violence and damnation. Given that there seems to be at least some crude form of society in Agony‘s hell (which isn’t really expanded upon) we get very little in the way of intrigue, just boundless horror, and chaos.
