The Suffering: Ties That Bind (Surreal Software, 2005) is the action horror sequel that takes the horror beyond the prison and into the streets.
This whole thing is spoilers because that's what I want to talk about. The game does have a twist. And I will ruin it. If that works for you, scroll down.
The key to the Suffering games are how they take the horrors of life and turn them into monsters and people at the same time. Sure, there's a monster covered in needles that symbolizes drug abuse. But there's also a whining junkie you can choose to protect through part of the game. There's a fat police officer body with a half dozen arms with guns sticking out of it representing police brutality, but there's also a progressive warden you can help in his efforts to save inmates from the monsters.
Things feel so muddy and hopeless overall, though. Sure, I save the useless addict so he could kill himself instead of getting killed by monsters. Sure I tried to save my best friend, but he died anyway because it was scripted.
Plus I lost Consuela. I will never forgive the programmers for that. Her husband worked on the island in the first game and was kind of a jerk. But he kicked ass and fighting through some of the last sections of the game with him, earning his trust and respect was one of the best parts of that game. But the event where she is attacked in the game happened off screen and because the game is so abysmally coded that it doesn't even include stereo sound, I couldn't figure out where it was happening to save her. In fact, I figured it was a scripted event and it wasn't even possible to save her. I felt betrayed by the writers, but it was the coders. I should have known.
The game is fairly buggy, especially towards the end. People you have to escort to progress get stuck, forcing many reloads. The game locked up and lost the autosave, losing me a couple hours of progress. Enemies also get stuck, though less often. The melee weapons in the game are virtually useless. This is partly because most firearms have melee attacks and partly because their range is abysmal. Maybe that's just because I played in first person, though. Scary games are much scarier in first person, and Ties That Bind needed a little help in that department.
The Suffering was an action game that had combat in it. The sequel seems to be trying to be scarier in the same way as conventional horror games, by making the combat suck. First off, it's limited to two weapons at a time. And there's never enough ammo, which forces the use of weapons that suck. Seriously, the John Woo standard dual 9mm pistols feel less powerful than swearing. Plus there are sections where the monsters just pour in continuously.
The point of all these nerfs (besides the aforementioned cliché of the weak horror hero) is to force the player to turn into a monster more often. But the monster swings wide, making him likely to kill friendlies, and sucks at range, meaning it doesn't even help to transform half the time. So the combat sucks. It also doesn't help that the game frequently spams you with a stream of enemies guaranteed to run you out of ammo at multiple points. I just can't understand how they could have made the game less fun.
Oh wait. I'm forgetting the "twist". Torque's multiple personality is the bad guy. No evil genius killed his family. He did. But it's telegraphed literally years in advance. Back before the original game was made, people knew who the bad guy in the sequel was. There is actually a boss in the game that taunts you by saying "everything you know is wrong". My heart sank to think I had ever actually enjoyed a game with writers this stupid. I had not only figured out the twist at that point. I was utterly bored with it.
Yeah. I killed my family. There's nothing I can do about it. This whole game is a big phony catharsis for something I had nothing to do with. I've actually played that twist in another game, and it did it much better. Plus, these "facts" contradict the ending I got in the last game. Of course, all that can be explained away by saying that the main character is just insane, but then there's no point to any of it. I'm playing a crazy man who creates psychic monsters out of latent suffering and then tries to protect people from them. It's Massive Head Trauma: The Video Game.
Heh. All this ranting about phony catharsis has been a real one. So now that that's done, here's what's good about the game.
The Suffering series has the best monsters, period. The designs are strong. It's easy to tell what you're looking at. They are attached to human weakness and cruelty in a way that makes them feel like they're our own fault. Plus they're just plain nasty. There was one major exception, a giant worm thing. But whatever. Zombies are just what people use who don't want to try. And most other games seem to just think of whatever is creepy and use that. I guess pyramid head from Silent Hill 2 is supposed to be an exception, but I didn't find it half as resonant as anything from The Suffering or its sequel (big stupid worm excepted).
Final Score
2 of 5
I didn't use GameFaqs at all. I did download a trainer to cheat through the end sections of the game. They were pointlessly difficult on Medium, and there are two levels of difficulty higher than that. Plus I was so fed up with the horrible writing and coding that I just didn't care anymore.
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