The Suffering

Written by Byron Blunk on 3/29/2004 for PS2  

It may have taken the company awhile but Midway is finally back on to the path of success. There was a long period of time when the perennial developer was putting out subpar games that weren’t worth the CDs that they’re printed on, but that time is no more. One of gaming’s oldest developers is showing the industry that it still has a few tricks up its sleeves and the latest such Ace is The Suffering, an interesting game that blends together elements from survival horror and 3rd person shooters to form a unique and entertaining adventure.

You start out with a pocketful of questions and you search for answers as the game progresses. In the beginning you’re treated to a cut scene of a new inmate who’s headed into his cell on the death row of an island prison. As he walks down the aisle a number of the other prisoners begin to converse on the newcomer and the crime that he committed. It turns out that the stranger murdered his wife and kids in cold blood and has been sentenced to death. It’s a pretty open and shut case, right? Well not exactly. Before anyone else can continue their profanity-laden tirades an earthquake hits and you see the prisoners get picked off by some unseen creatures. Chaos ensues and the stranger, Torque, is able to escape from his cell and hopefully from the hell that’s unfurling around him. Along the way he’ll learn more about himself as the gamer learns more about the evil that’s infesting the island prison and the inner demons that plague our hero.

You may think you’ve seen sick and twisted but you haven’t met the demented minds at Stan Winston Studios (responsible for the creatures in the Aliens and Predator franchises). Instead of designing a bunch of hokey demons he decided to craft each one of his creatures around an execution method. So you’ll get monsters that specialize in hanging, the firing squad monster and the ever creepy lethal injection monster. What’s best about the game is that I never really felt like I was on the offensive. The atmosphere had me genuinely creeped out so I was essentially petrified whenever I saw an enemy. I was kind of like that kid who ran out into the middle of the street to retrieve his ball only to stare into the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. I was momentarily petrified and instead of making the first move I was merely reacting to their movements. But like most shows the novelty wears off after a little while and you begin to see through the little tricks. While the game is pretty creepy in the first couple of hours the fright begins to wear off and the game begins to boil down into a standard 3rd person shooter with demons, and that’s when the game begins to falter, but just slightly.Midway’s latest offering is creepy, not necessarily scary, but definitely creepy as hell. There are a ton of startling depictions plenty of frightening imagery but it just doesn’t lead for a very scary game. Yes some of the scenes are unsettling but most of the time it just doesn’t pay off. You can tell that these guys are all great storytellers. There’s plenty of foreshadowing before you come in contact with your next foe, but it doesn’t quite pay off in the end. When you walk into a cell block filled with hanging bodies, some of them cut off at the torso, you’re expecting a menacing creature that’s capable of killing you with one charge. Instead you get this weird demon that comes out from the ceiling and tries to choke you with a noose before disappearing. The same goes for the blade monster, the game’s first foe. There’s so much more that could have been done with the creature but instead it was turned into simple melee fodder.

Even though the game has a pretty above average amount of action for the survival horror genre it’s done quite well. This is also the best combat system that we’ve ever seen in a game of this type, mainly because it doesn’t operate on some hokey static camera premise or a clunky control scheme that makes you feel like you’re driving a boat on land. Midway developed a fully capable engine and it leads to some pretty intense combat sequences. Utilizing a dual-analog stick system players control the character’s movements with the left analog stick and the vantage point with the right analog stick, kind of like a WASD keyboard and mouse setup that most PC first person shooters like to employ. This affords you a highly intuitive control scheme that’s great for combat and effective for the game’s creepy premise as well. The Suffering is one of the rare titles that has a compelling storyline and the gameplay to match.

Your assortment of weapons is pretty limited but that’s to be expected seeing as how the game takes place within the confines of a remote island prison. You’ll start out with a massive shiv and then move your way up to revolvers, a tommy gun and the always standard shotgun while your secondary arsenal features Molotov cocktails, flashbang grenades and TNT. You can regain health by picking up bottles of health which essentially work in the same way as the painkillers in the Max Payne games. Those of you who haven’t gotten over your fear of the dark will be happy to know that Torque finds a flashlight early on in the adventure. It runs on a limited supply of batteries but the game spreads them out quite liberally so you won’t have to worry about being left out in the dark.

When you’re not punishing the tortured souls you’re solving some Resident Evil style puzzles, only Capcom could wish that it were this clever and realistic. All of the puzzles make amazing sense and require only a few brief bouts with logic before you can find the solution. They’re simple yet inventive and won’t really insult you too much. Towards the end of the game you start to encounter a number of projector related puzzles but those solutions are pretty realistic too. Even though you’re essentially destroying or blocking the path of the projector each time you’re doing so in a wide variety of ways. They never really reach the brink of tedium either, every solution always makes sense and you don’t ever have to do those lame fetch and retrieve puzzles.

You’re able to play the game in first and third person modes but it’s obvious that the game was designed as a 3rd person shooter from the start. Control never feels natural in the first person mode and the sensitivity is too twitchy to allow for precise aiming. It’s a nice addition but it never quite feels intuitive. I’m sure that a number of you out there have input the 3rd person code into a lot of your favorite first person shooters out there. Remember how un-natural that felt? Well it’s sort of like that, just the other way around.Abbott State Penitentiary is as dark and foreboding as you could ever wish for a prison to be. There’s a necessary layer of grit on everything that lets the player know that this prison isn’t just a vacation home for murderers and jaywalkers. You might also be glad to know that the game doesn’t’ take place entirely in the confines of the prison as you’ll be able to travel all over the island. Your adventures will take you to a number of places including a decrepit old house, a rock quarry, a lighthouse and the prison yards. All of the places are appropriately creepy but the exteriors aren’t quite as scary due to the amazingly clear visibility. There’s something amazingly scary about wandering into a completely dark room but it’s quite so bad when you’re going into a well-lit prison yard. Most of the characters animate and fit in quite nicely with the atmosphere. There are a few weak points in the game’s artistic design but the game generally looks pretty good as a package.

One of the most underrated elements of a survival horror game resides in the audio. Although you never quite appreciate it when it’s there you really tend to notice when it’s deficient. Thanks to the use of Dolby Pro Logic II you get a number of effects that are filtered out through your surround speakers. It’s pretty creepy to run down a hallway only to hear sound effects resonating from the rear speakers. It’s unsettling and it really takes you by surprise every single time you hear it. Some of the voice acting can fall into the category of generic survival horror fodder at times, but it’s realistic enough to save itself from becoming campy and laugh-out-loud funny.

Depending on whether you choose to help or torture the NPCs you meet along the way, you’ll unlock one of three endings. While they’re all varied and offer different reasons behind Torque’s suffering, they’re wholly unsatisfying and don’t really wrap up the package. There are far too many questions that are left unanswered and the ones that are answered aren’t done so convincingly. This offers you little incentives to go back through the game to look for little nuances that tie into the ending, mainly because there aren’t any. Overall you’ll get about 10-15 hours out of the game, depending on how well you play.

When it comes down to it The Suffering is the first game of the year that I finished because I wanted to but not because I had to. It kept me hooked from start to finish with its frantic visuals, compelling storyline and frenetic action. Yes, the game succeeds on the basis of some tried-and-true elements, but it’s the original components that really make this game worth playing. Pick it up if you’re in the mood for the year’s first excellent adventure.