The Suffering

Midway's recent plunge into the world of mature gaming comes in the rather disfigured form of The Suffering. It's an action-horror romp, with equal parts gunplay, bloodletting, cursing, and deviant behavior, perhaps explaining the dismissal of working title The Snuggling.

Players step into the shoes of hard-edged psychopath Torque, who has been imprisoned for a murder he may or may not have committed. A demonic outbreak takes place inside the prison and a game is born.

Suffering succeeds largely by virtue of its decidedly grim atmosphere and solid mechanics. Throughout the journey, one is confronted by a series of situations wherein Torque's forced to choose between right and wrong: waste valuable time and health helping save a feeble, annoying, self-serving but ultimately pitiable security guard or pop a cathartic shotgun shell through his face and get on with it? Torque's fate rests in the players' hands—their actions govern the future by way of the past and determine whether the antihero did, in fact, butcher his wife and kids.

Perhaps in spite of the developer's best intentions, Suffering falls on the more corporeal side of the horror genre, with psychological tension taking a back seat to lots of monster bashing. Torque occasionally dips into well-presented flashbacks, bringing to light pieces of the intentionally vague story line through apparitions of his family, Nazi doctors, and corrupt wardens. It's above-average stuff, certainly, but spotty writing and voice acting pothole the story. Still, despite its flaws, Suffering remains an enjoyable and surprisingly compelling blastathon.

And who could overlook Suffering's feel-good line of the year? "Will you shut the @!?# up, you baby-raping, sodomizing sack of sh*t!"

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Xbox Nation.