Players will begin their journey as a tormented soul within the depths of hell without any memories about his past. The special ability to control people on their path, and even possess simple minded demons, gives the player the necessary measures to survive in the extreme conditions they are in. By exploring the hostile environment and interacting with the other weary souls of the hellscape, the hero will soon understand that there is only one way to escape from Hell, and it will require a meeting of the mystical Red Goddess.
Released on
Genres
Reviews View More
L'agonia è la mia
Prometio mucho , ofrecio poco
TLDR: I'm a real sucker for dark and otherworldly immersive settings, and Agony is probably the one of the best games I've played at delivering that. But in every other way it's a discarded crack pipe filled with human shit.
Full review: I feel I have to defend Agony a bit, because I did get a non-zero amount of enjoyment out of it. I love the visuals in this game; it's pure, straight up Revelations-tier fucked up Christian hell. There are a few times here and there where it crosses the line into trying too hard to be edgy (any time there are fetuses on screen, for example), but for the most part I was absolutely sold on the intricately detailed and beautifully realised setting; it's probably my favourite depiction of Hell in a video game, and not for lack of competition. The music and sound design are decent too, and do lend the overall game some depth of atmosphere. The creature design is mostly decent too (although giving lots of the demons jiggling human titties was... a decision). It's not on the level of something like Scorn in the aesthetic department but, to me, it's not too far removed from that level.
Everything else though... well. If not for the aesthetics, this would easily be the worst game I'd ever played. I would comment on the story but I have no idea what it was because the writing is next-level abysmal, and not at all helped by some truly abominable VA. This confusion and unclearness trickles down throughout the gameplay itself as well; I never had any idea what my in-game goal was at any time (beyond something as granular as 'get to the bottom of the pit') or why I was doing it. When I turned my brain of and just started saying 'ok' to the game's directions, this became much easier to play. Even then, though, I frequently had no clue where I was actually supposed to go to proceed; the game has an inbuilt 'point to the next objective' button but A: this has limited uses (although you can opt to make it infinite in the options) and B: it almost never works in any of the more confusing areas where you'd actually need it.
I never had any clue what was going on with any of the 'puzzles' either; the sigil puzzles, for example, just consisted of me brute forcing them by trying every pattern I'd seen on the whole level, and I'm not even sure that that isn't the intended strategy. Agony also has a tendency of putting invisible kill planes and teleport planes (i.e. 'cross this and instantly return to the area origin' planes) in random places, sometimes just randomly in the path being given to you by the objective-finding spell. More than once I worked out the way I needed to go was behind a teleport plane, spent 10-15 minutes frantically looking round the area for any other way to proceed, found nothing but then discovered that something I had done in that time had caused the barrier to de-spawn for some reason and the game hadn't thought it'd be a good idea to let me know.
The controls are sloppy and stiff and don't at all mix with the irregular-but-regular-enough-to-be-annoying first-person platforming sections. It runs like absolute ass in some of the more detailed regions and it's pretty buggy to boot; the camera loves clipping through things in soul mode, and I managed to softlock myself out of bounds at least twice. And in some areas they even manage to undo the good work they've done on aesthetics by layering ugly and distracting filters over the whole screen and messing it all up.
So yeah, I guess the word I'd use to describe Agony at the end of the day would be 'nightmare'. It's an absolute nightmare of a game, in ways both intended and unintended. It's definitely a bad game overall don't get me wrong, the sheer brokenness here is inexcusable, but I really don't think it deserves the magnitude of scorn it has had poured upon it, and I'm willing to give it some decent extra marks for pulling off (visually at least) such a haunting and infernal setting.
Full review: I feel I have to defend Agony a bit, because I did get a non-zero amount of enjoyment out of it. I love the visuals in this game; it's pure, straight up Revelations-tier fucked up Christian hell. There are a few times here and there where it crosses the line into trying too hard to be edgy (any time there are fetuses on screen, for example), but for the most part I was absolutely sold on the intricately detailed and beautifully realised setting; it's probably my favourite depiction of Hell in a video game, and not for lack of competition. The music and sound design are decent too, and do lend the overall game some depth of atmosphere. The creature design is mostly decent too (although giving lots of the demons jiggling human titties was... a decision). It's not on the level of something like Scorn in the aesthetic department but, to me, it's not too far removed from that level.
Everything else though... well. If not for the aesthetics, this would easily be the worst game I'd ever played. I would comment on the story but I have no idea what it was because the writing is next-level abysmal, and not at all helped by some truly abominable VA. This confusion and unclearness trickles down throughout the gameplay itself as well; I never had any idea what my in-game goal was at any time (beyond something as granular as 'get to the bottom of the pit') or why I was doing it. When I turned my brain of and just started saying 'ok' to the game's directions, this became much easier to play. Even then, though, I frequently had no clue where I was actually supposed to go to proceed; the game has an inbuilt 'point to the next objective' button but A: this has limited uses (although you can opt to make it infinite in the options) and B: it almost never works in any of the more confusing areas where you'd actually need it.
I never had any clue what was going on with any of the 'puzzles' either; the sigil puzzles, for example, just consisted of me brute forcing them by trying every pattern I'd seen on the whole level, and I'm not even sure that that isn't the intended strategy. Agony also has a tendency of putting invisible kill planes and teleport planes (i.e. 'cross this and instantly return to the area origin' planes) in random places, sometimes just randomly in the path being given to you by the objective-finding spell. More than once I worked out the way I needed to go was behind a teleport plane, spent 10-15 minutes frantically looking round the area for any other way to proceed, found nothing but then discovered that something I had done in that time had caused the barrier to de-spawn for some reason and the game hadn't thought it'd be a good idea to let me know.
The controls are sloppy and stiff and don't at all mix with the irregular-but-regular-enough-to-be-annoying first-person platforming sections. It runs like absolute ass in some of the more detailed regions and it's pretty buggy to boot; the camera loves clipping through things in soul mode, and I managed to softlock myself out of bounds at least twice. And in some areas they even manage to undo the good work they've done on aesthetics by layering ugly and distracting filters over the whole screen and messing it all up.
So yeah, I guess the word I'd use to describe Agony at the end of the day would be 'nightmare'. It's an absolute nightmare of a game, in ways both intended and unintended. It's definitely a bad game overall don't get me wrong, the sheer brokenness here is inexcusable, but I really don't think it deserves the magnitude of scorn it has had poured upon it, and I'm willing to give it some decent extra marks for pulling off (visually at least) such a haunting and infernal setting.
Pep's Season of Spooks - Game 12
Fuck me, this really is as shitty as everyone says.
Madmind Studio were so busy trying to come up with extreme, edgy, sadistic ideas for their vision of Hell that they clearly either forgot or didn't care about making a decent game.
Yes, all the graphic violence and nudity (turned up to 11 in the Unrated version) is probably pretty shocking for players who aren't used to horror... for the first 10 minutes. Then all you're left with is a horribly dull, buggy walking-sim with the occasional stealth sequence to add frustration to the boredom.
The few hours I spent playing Agony pretty much comprised of:
- getting stuck on the environment
- wondering what the fuck in the environment was causing me to take damage
- looking away from the poorly animated scenes of sex, r@pe and torture (of which there are only around 5 reused constantly throughout the game)
- cursing the horrible checkpoint system as an enemy bugs out and teleports to me, instakilling me
I've seen some people defending Agony by praising the visuals, and I genuinely have no idea what they're talking about. To me the environments were so ugly (not in the intended way), and the awfully-animated cutscenes had a habit of glitching and going blurry.
After checking Steam I saw that Madmind have clearly taken advantage of Agony's reputation since they've released Succubus since (even though this game has a "Succubus Mode"?), which I can only assume was made for anyone who didn't jerk off enough to this game. They also have another three games coming up. Please don't buy any of them. Their entire MO is simply shock value and not actually making good games.
If you have to, just play Scorn instead.
Scary Rating dogshit/10 - Overall Rating dogshit/10
Fuck me, this really is as shitty as everyone says.
Madmind Studio were so busy trying to come up with extreme, edgy, sadistic ideas for their vision of Hell that they clearly either forgot or didn't care about making a decent game.
Yes, all the graphic violence and nudity (turned up to 11 in the Unrated version) is probably pretty shocking for players who aren't used to horror... for the first 10 minutes. Then all you're left with is a horribly dull, buggy walking-sim with the occasional stealth sequence to add frustration to the boredom.
The few hours I spent playing Agony pretty much comprised of:
- getting stuck on the environment
- wondering what the fuck in the environment was causing me to take damage
- looking away from the poorly animated scenes of sex, r@pe and torture (of which there are only around 5 reused constantly throughout the game)
- cursing the horrible checkpoint system as an enemy bugs out and teleports to me, instakilling me
I've seen some people defending Agony by praising the visuals, and I genuinely have no idea what they're talking about. To me the environments were so ugly (not in the intended way), and the awfully-animated cutscenes had a habit of glitching and going blurry.
After checking Steam I saw that Madmind have clearly taken advantage of Agony's reputation since they've released Succubus since (even though this game has a "Succubus Mode"?), which I can only assume was made for anyone who didn't jerk off enough to this game. They also have another three games coming up. Please don't buy any of them. Their entire MO is simply shock value and not actually making good games.
If you have to, just play Scorn instead.
Scary Rating dogshit/10 - Overall Rating dogshit/10
The exception for this was so high since I saw it in 2018, that now that I have this game. I'm just going to say one small thing, is shit.
No