The Suffering

Midway. Yeah, you heard me: Midway. Chances are if you are a gamer and were born any time in the last 30 years, you have probably played or at least heard of one of their games. These are the guys that brought us Ms. Pac-Man, Spy Hunter, Tron and Rampage. Without a doubt, they were the fucking GODS of the 80's arcade scene.

Your arguments are invalid.

Then in 1992 they came out with a little something called "Mortal Kombat". These guys were able to make a fighting game so badass that they actually got a kid who hated fighting games (me) to convert and become obsessed with one.

The reason I bring all of this up? I'm not a fan of survival horror. Okay, so far this sounds like a totally random rant but hear me out: If Midway can make a fighting game so awesome that a kid who hates fighting games goes apeshit over it, surely they can make a survival horror that the same kid will also love right?

Challenge accepted and beaten you beautiful bastard.

Well they went ahead and decided to give it a shot. First they took a living legend for the monster designs: Stan freaking Winston. Name sound familiar? It should, Stan Winston is the guy that worked on many of Hollywood's greatest monsters over the past 3 decades.

Some of his contributions include visual effects and creature designs for The Terminator, Alien, Predator, The Island of Doctor Moreau and Jurrassic Park. Also he is responsible for "The Thing", an 80's movie monster that still gives me fucking nightmares to this day.

Of course, the monsters will only get you so far, the next thing one needs to consider is the setting. Best way to describe the setting of The Suffering for all you modern gamers is relatively simple - Batman: Arkham Asylum with a horror twist. The entire game takes place on a prison island. A relatively large place that is semi-free roaming.

This little slice of heaven is called Abott State Penitentiary, on Carnate Island in Maryland. This place has a serious history of pure nightmare juice that you will become pretty well aquainted with over the course of the game as you start off in the main cells/areas inside the prison while eventually making your way outside to see things like: An abandoned village where they had witch burnings, World War II Fort and an Insane Asylum just to name a few off the top of my head.

- insert random joke about toilet humour here -

Ah, now to our protagonist. Torque. We are never told whether this is his first or last name and they never give us more than that. Torque: A man so badass he only needs one name. Torque was sent to Carnate for the brutal murder of his wife and 2 sons. Apparently he smashed her head open, drowned one of the boys in the tub and threw the other one out of a window.

So why should we care about him? Because he claimed he was innocent. But screw that, he is here and that's all that matters. The moment he gets in his cell, all hell breaks loose and it is up to us, the players to get him out of this alive.

How bad does it get? Monsters start appearing all over the island, the prisoners break out, start rioting and playing a little game of "survival of the fittest" and the Warden totally loses his shit, claims that judgement day has come and starts mass executions. Wonderful.

So hardcore that he doesn't even need shoes.

Torque starts off the game armed with nothing but a shiv and balls the size of watermelons, picking up guns and other goodies along the way. But that is all just an excuse for him to take it easy on his enemies because the man himself is a weapon.

As you kill things, a rage meter quickly fills up and when it is full you can transform into "The Creature". Torque becomes fucking death-incarnate, dealing out murder by literally tearing anything he can get his hands on to pieces while looking like he would be right at home beating the shit out of Hellraiser's Pinhead for his lunch money.

The story is relatively interesting but takes a total backseat when compared to the feeling of the game itself. As you go through the game you will sometimes be presented with moral choices that leave you picking good, neutral or evil paths that can even affect how the game ends.

Some are simple enough like: Team up with a survivor to fight your way through an area or kill him and loot the corpse for weapons and ammo. While others are more ambiguous like: Shoot the mutilated guard to put him out of his misery or ignore him and walk away.

You seriously do not want to piss Torque off.

These choices will leave a lasting physical effect on Torque, with good making him look cleaner and overall more human while evil will make him start to take on a paler appearance with his skin looking scarred and decayed and his clothes becoming increasingly dirty to reflect the rotting of his soul.

There are other nice little touches in the game such as blood splattering onto you as you fight, clinging to your body and eventually making you look like Nancy Archer from "Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman" used you as a tampon.

Random screams or sudden disturbing image flashes on your screen will have you jumping out of your seat the moment you relax and all around you there are always interesting things going on such as fights between the many residents of the island or random disturbing events taking place when you least expect it.

One of the moments that made my nearly shit myself.

Speaking of residents, lets talk about some of the monsters. These guys really steal the show, instead of going the lazy route and taking the usual zombies approach, each monster on Carnate is based on a form of execution.

You have the Slayers, based on decapitation: These things have their severed heads connected to their bodies by metal rods while their lower arms and legs have been replaced by giant blades. The Mainliner is based on lethal injections: hunched over creatures covered in syringes that they tear out of their backs to attack you with.

Marksmen are gaint blindfolded husks with multiple rifles attached to their backs as an incarnation of death by firing squad. Infernas are little girls in white dresses that happily greet you before bursting into flames while screaming and throwing fire in your direction.

The hangman is a skinned torso with a sack over it's head that drops out of the ceiling at random, hanging from it's neck by a rope and trying to strangle you. There are a couple others but at this point you get what I mean when I say that this game will have at least one thing to scare the shit out of anyone.

One of the many reasons I play this game with the lights on.

The major characters themselves are also totally unforgettable. You have characters like Horace P. Gauge, a prisoner sent to the electric chair for the murder of his wife. His ghost crops up from time to time flickering in and out of existence with sparks of electricty exploding in every direction, all the while trying to help Torque and convince him to go down a moral path, begging Torque to have the strength not to allow the island to take away what little good he has left in him.

Then there is Hermes T. Haight, a former sadistic guard who was the island's resident executioner. He eventually lost his sanity and commited suicide by locking himself in the gas chamber and has since been haunting the island in a green gaseous form, taking sick pleasure in the suffering of others and trying to guide Torque down a darker path.

Finally we come to Dr. Killjoy, a depraved psychologist who worked out of the Asylum in the early 1900's. He spent years running twisted experiments on patients before simply vanishing. Since then he haunts Carnate, his ghost manifested through old film projectors. He takes an immediate interest in Torque and hopes to "cure" him.

He only wants what is best for you....

I could go on a little longer but I really need to wrap this up. All I can really say is that this game is AWESOME. It's hard for me to use another word to describe it besides being a great game which gives you the feeling of experiencing a truly horrifying situation while still making you feel like a total badass. The controls are tight and well mapped, the graphics are not as good as they could be, but good enough for a 2004 game, the voice acting is superb and the ambience is beyond perfect.

The Suffering was originally released on the PS2, Xbox and PC and though I would normally say that you should get the version for whatever platform suits you best, I am happy to inform you all that the game itself is now freeware and with a quick google search, can be legally downloaded off the net for free. Now you really don't have any excuses. Go get this game. Thank me later.