Review: The Suffering

The Suffering (Surreal Software, 2004) is an action / horror game about a strange prison island where something turns people (living and dead) into monsters.

The Suffering is a strange hybrid. First off, it's a horror game, but unlike most horror games, the hero is powerful. This undercuts the scary, but I didn't mind. Having to play an FPS with thumbsticks was scary enough.

There are also a lot of scenarios which offer a choice of helping people or killing them. Helping them also helps you as they often know how to find shortcuts or equipment stashes. Killing them is, I assume, fun for some people and a bit less work. I didn't really go that route, so there might be other benefits I don't know about. I do know that saving them earns praise from ghosts of the hero's family (who he was imprisoned for murdering). It's also worth mentioning that there are some bugs with the AI, so I sometimes had to reload the game when someone I was helping would get stuck.

I myself got a little stuck from time to time. There were a variety of reasons for this. Sometimes the blurry visuals would make it hard to see where to go. There was one area where monsters kept spawning forever that I just had to run through, but there were other areas where they spawned a lot, but all needed to be killed to proceed. There was a similar inconsistency with environmental hazards (fire and electricity) which were usually deadly, but not always. The same went for things that were sometimes supposed to be shot, but not always. The game was mostly consistent, but just inconsistent enough to send me to GameFaqs a few times. (I already mention when I cheat to finish a game in these reviews, but I'm thinking maybe I should also record the number of GameFaqs visits I make to give a sense of whether a game's puzzles are more troublesome than fun.) At the end of the day, the puzzles have enough variety and make enough sense that they feel like a worthwhile part of the game, not just padding. Let's move on to the action.

Like I said, I am not a fan of thumbsticks for first person shooters. The Suffering can also be controlled in third person, but given that head shots matter, I found first person much more useful, though even then, every time I shot for the head, I missed having the fine aim a mouse provides. Overall, that was a minor annoyance as the game (on medium difficulty) isn't really hard. You may be picking up on the fact that I'm not praising any element of the game too highly. That's okay, though.

The Suffering is more than the sum of its parts. The visuals were only okay, but they worked. The action was only okay, but it worked. The characterization was only okay but it worked. When it all came together with the variety of settings, the continued revelations about the horrors in the island's past, and the idea that the choices I made would affect the ending, I always wanted to see what would happen next (and went online to purchase the less well reviewed sequel as soon as I finished the game).

Final Score
4 of 5