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 off 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 off 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.