These days there’s a great sense of trepidation when video
games go to Kickstarter for funding, games like Shovel Knight, Superhot, and Divinity:
Original Sin managing to achieve what they originally promised and even
surpassing it, yet we’ve had titles like Godus, Mighty No. 9 and Yooka-Laylee
who were victims of their own hype, eagerly anticipated but not quite achieving
everything they promised, and then there’s Star Citizen which was successfully
funded in 2012 and is still yet to
see the light of day.
The latest in the line of crowdfunded titles, Agony is a
first-person survival horror set within the depths of hell, you play as a
tormented soul with no knowledge of your past, desperate to learn who you are,
why you’re there and how to escape, you make your way through several disturbing
and treacherous environments, avoiding
enemies, solving basic puzzles, and finding collectibles to your eventual
meeting with the all-powerful Red Goddess, in the hopes of learning the truth
and gaining your freedom from the underworld.
There are no shotguns, chainsaws or BFGs in this nightmare,
the most powerful weapons in your arsenal here are your ability to possess
other martyrs down there with you, should you find yourself in the unfortunate
situation of having been caught and killed by one of the many Onoskelis demons
in your way, your spirit leaves your corpse and can then inhabit another
martyr’s body, allowing you to continue onward and hopefully, upward.
Should you manage to deftly avoid the Onoskelis with
strategic breath-holding, hiding, or my own personal favourite, running away in
a blind panic, you’ll find yourself in small areas requiring less stealth and
more brains, with brief puzzles needed to be solved, finding and sacrificing
human hearts or skulls, or drawing the correct sigils in blood to complete symbols
and unlock the path ahead, they’re not too taxing and help to ease you slightly
after the more-tense stealth sections.
Throughout your stroll through the underworld you’ll come
across notes left by other martyrs, usually confessions of sins from their
previous lives, insight into the Red Goddess and her buddies, and often subtle
information about the journey ahead, other hidden items include statues,
paintings, and Forbidden Fruits, unlocking viewable gallery items, opening
secret chambers, and gaining additional skill points upon their discovery, it
does whiff of collecting for collecting-sake, but it does encourage paying a
bit more attention to surroundings.
Whilst the fruits might not look the most appetising, seeing
as they’re basically apples with vaginas on them, they’re very in keeping with
everything else around you, the locales you wander and sights you behold are
like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch fever dream, walls made of flesh,
flowing rivers of blood, floors littered with bones and viscera, and walls adorned
with mutilated bodies, some alive, others not so much, every inch of this
twisted hellscape is genuinely creepy and disgusting, and it isn’t just the scenery,
the other inhabitants down there with you are none too pleasant either.
Whilst your fellow hell-dwelling martyrs are often
just malnourished and disfigured, it’s the gruesome Onoskelis and other demons
that you’ll spend your time doing your best to avoid, the Onoskelis make up the
bulk of the nasties you come across, at twice your height, with cloven-hoofs,
breasts, and a horned-vagina with teeth for a head, avoidance of these is essential,
despite being essentially blind, they are easily attracted by sound and fire, so
tip-toeing past or distracting them with a burning torch is the best course of
action, else fear meeting them close-up and their claws inside you like some
sort of gruesome ventriloquist’s puppet.
Other ugly beasties include spiders comprised of the
discarded limbs of sinners, the wall-crawling, seductive and manipulative Succubus,
and the four-armed, three-eyed, skull-headed, winged Baphomet, and that’s not
even the whole rogues’ gallery of bizarre and dangerous creatures in Agony,
fortunately you won’t always find yourself at a disadvantage against them,
because as you progress your possession abilities improve, with your soul being
able to leave your body and eventually take over an Onoskelis, the devil-like Chort,
and even playing as a Succubus in a separate mode once you’ve completed the
main game, adding a much-needed extra element to the gameplay, breaking up the often
slow and tedious moments when you’re wandering around in basic martyr form.
It’s not that the sights and sounds around you aren’t well
realised and unique, and when your interest is piqued as you enter a new area
and are shown a scene that gives you a taster of the bigger picture going on
within the story and the world around you, it’s just that there isn’t much more
to do past that, you walk, you hide, you walk some more, solve a little puzzle,
the balance of style over substance does lean more towards the former, enjoyable
but bordering closely on being a chore in parts.
From the outset you’re not given much more guidance than, follow
the Red Goddess, you’re told what the controls are, but it doesn’t tell you
why, I was over an hour into playing before I found out that interacting with
the martyrs with bags on their heads, removed the bags and meant I could possess
them if I died, or elsewhere you’re not even informed of an option like holding
your breath to hide, discovering this for myself even further down the line and
realising that if I’d made it this far without it, did I really need it?
To give Agony and its development team credit, since its
release the patches they’ve put out have improved the game greatly over what it
was like on day one, and I don’t personally believe it deserves some of the
stick that people are giving it, for a team of just nine people they’ve
achieved more than what some big studios knock out with ten times that, it’s
not a bad game, nor is it a great game, it’s alright, but what it does do is bring
players into a wholly unique vision and new experience, and if some of that
vision features hideous monsters with malformed female genitalia for heads,
then so be it.