The Haunted Hoard: Agony (Xbox One)
Hell is a terrifying place that would be a suitable host for a horror game, but over time, creative works moved on from the flames and endless torture of classical depictions to more personal torments catered to whatever sinful victim is the focus of the story. Agony elects to portray and older idea of the underworld though, not shying away from grisly sights and uncensored nudity as you find yourself helpless in a world ruled by cruel demons. While it can still work a bit of its own creativity into how this manifests, unfortunately the greater torment is to be the one playing Agony due to a plethora of bad game design ideas.
When Agony’s story begins, you are a soul who has freshly found themselves in Hell, and quite naturally the first things on your character’s mind is seeking a way to return to life. You lack any knowledge of who you were though despite being recognized by some of the people in the underworld, but your single-minded quest to escape eternal condemnation has you seeking the aid of a woman known as the Red Goddess. Playful yet sadistic, mysterious yet fickle, her favor seems important to earn while at other moments she seems ready to toss you away despite having grander plans for you that don’t seem to gel well with later revelations. There’s not much story to clasp onto as you bumble your way through hell’s many unusual environments, there being quite a few endings you can achieve although pursuing them hardly feels valuable due to being fairly weak rewards for putting a considerable amount of extra effort into replaying a game that already isn’t too entertaining in the first place.
In this first-person horror game you begin as a weak naked man and even when you do get powers later on by finding things like fruits that let you unlock upgrades, the focus is still not going to be on you having any degree of power. Rarely do you need to truly hold your ground though, as more often than not your survival depends on slipping past dangerous traps or avoiding the attention of demons who will instantly kill you if they get their hands on you. There is some imaginative design to be found in how the demons are designed, creatures like the Chort at first looking like a large muscly horned beast until you get a good look close up and its more a mutated man whose horns are tentacles growing out of its malformed flesh. The creature featured on the game’s box art also has that deception of being a horned beast before you see its face split in half to reveal a yonic set of jaws, and the game not shying away from the fact the tormented souls of hell won’t be given modesty clothes can make gruesome sights all that more effective. There is still some limitations on how far it goes due to needing to avoid an Adults Only rating, but the tormented souls of Hell you find impaled and crucified are a bit more brutal as props in the environmental design because of its willingness to take this artistic direction. At the same time, sometimes the audacity of a moment can almost loop it around to being oddly humorous, but then you’ll see something unnervingly effective like the gnashing human jaws lining a pit of fire and Agony can at least be said to have some compelling aesthetic ideas.
Unfortunately, the world is not compelling in how you interact with it. Avoiding demons is a concern quite often as you head through twisting tight spaces of areas like the icy caverns of lower Hell or the appropriately named Maze of Madness, but how concerning they are varies. Sometimes a pursuing creature just seems to freeze in place and become numb to the world, while other times they doggedly pursue even if you use some of your few tools to shake them like tossing a torch away to distract them. Chorts, despite being terrifying large, are also the most survivable menaces and lose their efficacy when you know your regenerating health can ease the encounter’s danger level even if they smack you across the room. If you are killed though, you are briefly turned into a spirit and given a chance to find a new host, the other tormented souls of Hell your best bet for possession. However, they need to have the bags removed from their heads to be candidates so you run around ripping them off and sometimes being attacked in a fairly bland interaction by the rare aggressive ones. Your time as a spirit is limited so if they’re not near when you are killed sometimes this work is rather fruitless and you have to go back to checkpoints. The game unwisely encourages you to pick the revival system where checkpoints break after three deaths though so you have to retread more of the same ground just so getting where you need to be takes longer.
Over time you come to understand demons well enough that many you can just run past and focus on your objective, but areas are often large and while there is a guiding light you can activate, there’s a lot of ground to cover and moments like swimming through water are needlessly dark and confusing for it. Collectibles are abundant in droves, little statues hidden all over the place that earn you Knowledge that can be spent on buying collectibles you missed, but there are also paintings you need to briefly look at to unlock, fruits to get ability points for powers that mostly just make things a touch easier rather than opening new possibilities, golden limbs to open doors to rooms full of goodies, notes of other people who were in Hell, and many other little things to uncover that clutter up your map. Admittedly, the game would be worse without these as much of the space would probably feel wasted without all these things to grab, but that issue arises from failing to fill areas with compelling challenges. A lot of forward progress is just identifying where you need to go and sometimes doing something that almost classifies as a puzzle. Some doors have sigils you need to draw on them to open them and they are found nearby, but it’s not much of a trial and can even be completed with guesswork. Platforming is fairly present despite being slippery and dependent on a sprint that can sometimes deactivate and leave you leaping to your doom, such deaths not triggering the soul leaving the body either so it’s even more annoying when you miss an edge for a jump that wasn’t really meant to be a test of skill in the first place. Collision detection issues can also make trying to slip past traps a bit more bothersome than it needed to be, but their presence at least means some areas have a sense of peril without needing to resort to the flawed monsters who prowl in an inconsistent manner.
Possessing bodies can be a bit of a problem at times as having your soul leave a body can sometimes leave you facing a different direction while maybe even inside of the demon that killed you so you can’t tell where you are, but you can also eventually possess demons for a fairly disappointing experience. Demons cannot pick up collectibles, interact with objects important for progression like sigils or the hearts and skulls used similarly to keys, and they can end too quickly to really get much done due to a hunger timer that can only be refilled by killing valuable human bodies. It can even be hard to rid yourself of a demon host if you do want to be human again and the game’s become generous with that specific body’s time. Mostly being a demon is just a better option than going back to checkpoint although sometimes you may need to break down a wall with them and you can take a few other demons to make getting around a little safer, but with the demons also not able to see the map in the game’s many twisting and confusing areas, its a power you won’t look forward to using whenever its necessary or available.
Outside of bumbling areas that are often too dark to notice what interesting details there might be before the game starts repeating itself, Agony also offers an Agony Mode where you can play a somewhat randomized challenge where your barely capable character is asked to explore bland rooms without much way to deal with the demons in your path. There are limited time goals here like killing demons and certain rooms that can only be accessed by getting into conflict with a monster you have a poor chance of hurting, and the possession mechanic doesn’t activate on death so you can’t even have a moment to indulge in a mode where a monster’s power could provide more tangible benefits. Succubus Mode on the other hand is perhaps the game at its most tolerable, because the clambering creature with a woman’s torso and head is able to easily cross huge stretches of Hell and hold her own. In fact, her mode is about passing through most of the same spaces you did in the story but without needing to worry about poking around looking for basic puzzles to solve, this mode closer to a half hour experience compared to the story lasting over eight with little interesting plot to break up the ponderous exploration. Succubus Mode is still pretty shallow, more a power trip to help cool you off after the main game gets especially finicky in the finale, but ultimately you’ll walk away from Agony feeling like you did little of note beyond bumble around grotesque sights that occasionally show a bit of artistry.
THE VERDICT: Agony can at least be said to capture the torment one would experience in Hell, its overly dark environments offering weak stealth that is often broken or basic while most interaction required to progress boils down to finally finding your way through a maze or just grabbing the right objects. The possession system is a disappointment since even controlling a demon is often done just to break down a wall, and with a rather weak and unfocused approached to story you’re mostly left scrounging for an occasional compelling sight to make this miserable exploration of the underworld at least leave you with something worth remembering. Succubus Mode is at least a satisfying rejection of the game’s control problems but it’s hardly a salve for all the time you’ll spend sprinting about large areas hoping to find something relevant to making progress.
And so, I give Agony for Xbox One…
A TERRIBLE rating. The demons meant to be the main threat to your life in Agony never seem to have the right level of power. Early on they’ll be positioned in ways that make them difficult to slip past even if you hide and hold your breath as you are encouraged to do, but later on it’s far to easy to sprint by them since areas are often huge and you just want to get to something important instead of acting like you’re really in danger. Glitches can further weaken their efficacy, but what ends up more annoying are moments where a jump goes wrong and you have to do the same empty tasks to get back to that jump that wasn’t even meant to be a challenge. The collectibles at least can distract you from how devoid of meaningful activities many spaces are, Agony not even using its large environments to its advantage to fill with interesting and demented sights. Notes may make the unending torture of people in Hell sound terrifying, but the macabre design grows repetitive or gets lost in odd coloring choices like an area with an oppressive fuchsia tint or just being generally dark even if you mess with your brightness settings a fair bit. The problem with Agony’s grim visuals and embrace of gore is not that it whipped up such sights, but that they are seemingly there to distract from how mundane its gameplay is and how bothersome it is when you are made to engage with flimsier moments like some of the platforming. There are often times where you can even think you’re doing something important like collecting golden limbs only for it to be an optional task that was more interesting than the real goal of just moving towards an exit, since at least searching the area encourages engaging with the world some compared to just trying to find which halls to go down to make your way to the next overly large but not at all compelling space. If there was some true puzzle solving that required considering the environment than maybe Agony could unite its aesthetic focus with some actual engaging gameplay, but at the same time if you do look around too much you’re more likely to notice areas where they forget to completely finish a wall or seal up a crack so you can just look off into an empty void.
Agony is a bore that involves a lot of traversing spaces without that exploration being all that interesting or rewarding, but it does escape the perhaps cliche descriptor of calling the game agonizing. Being set back to a checkpoint in the huge spaces is annoying, having demons vary between being instant kill dangers or mindless foes you don’t even need to worry about makes most of the stealth aspects feel pointless, and having your abilities always feel underwhelming ensures Agony doesn’t have much to offer besides the rare intriguing sight in a game unrepentant about its explicit portrayals of gore and nudity. Obstructions to reaching the unsatisfying ending, no matter which one you pick, are going to more likely be annoying things like bad collision detection or confusing mazes, but at least you can push through it all rather than being mired in the suffering. There are definitely more torturous video game experiences than Agony because they are more demanding, but the failed attempt at thematic helplessness certainly doesn’t work towards building an immersive horror journey and Agony’s flawed interactive elements end up floundering as they are left trying to make up for its empty realization of Hell.