The Mortuary Assistant

How bad could it be?

Indie Horror videogames are more plentiful than stars in the sky, as everyone and their recently deceased grandmother can see the appeal in designing what is ultimately more of an 'interactive experience' than an actual 'video game' what with a carefully designed balance of features and all that junk. Nah, it's so much easier to stick a player in a maze and throw a half-distorted 3D model after them that screams really loud when it touches them. I would call it a hold-over from the runaway success of the Slender games, but the truth is that Slenderman actually had a unique mechanic which makes it stand out from it's successors even today. You had the monster who only moved when you weren't looking at it, however looking at it caused you to slowly die. That's actually a brilliant balance of give-and-take where you're capable of having painfully close encounters without having a bad guy breathing down the player's neck for an entire game. So it's probably safer to say that indie games have learnt from a mixture of the greats, Five Nights, Slender and often a little of PT for good measure. And maybe they'll have a new maestro to aspire to with the release of The Mortuary's Assistant.

Okay, to be ultimately fair the Mortuary's Assistant is still a relatively niche title within the community of horror game fans, but it has done the rounds in that community for being a rare polished treat amidst the sea of honest, but undeniably rough, indie efforts that this genre is so often inundated with. Heck, we got here a game with actual decent quality voice acting, a solid graphical scope for the small scale of the game, a suitably morbid gameplay loop with dynamic puzzle elements and just a bunch of endings. Because if you have a video game with anything less than five endings, the community will reject it as a vile pretender to the horror game throne. That and Souls-likes for some reason. We just can't live without an arbitrary reason to play through the same rough game we just did again, huh. (Ah, I'm not hating on multiple endings. And this game does a decent enough job with them anyway.)

The game focuses on taking over the role as the night-time Mortuary's Assistant, which means pretty much what it sounds like. The player has to work to prepare bodies that will be placed in the wake and then buried, with an eye-popping amount of detail. Aside from the fact that the bodies are all clothed, for everyone's sake I can only assume, there's an excessive amount of realism and detail put into the simulated process of sewing shut mouths and draining blood from the bodies; so much so that it crosses that barrier of fiction into natural discomfort as you address the fact that this is a common set of procedures that happens everyday, to everyone eventually, even you. Some day that slab of lifeless meat on a mortician's slab will be you, getting poked with syringes and the like. And I'm pretty sure that opting in for cremation doesn't save you from all post-mortem poking either; I don't know for certain but I feel like stuffing a body that's still full of blood into a furnace is a disaster just waiting to happen.

But what if I told you that the actual horror of preparing a human body for it's viewing is only the window dressing? Then I'd be lying. No, I'd say it's the morbid duties that are the meat of the game here, whilst the excuse for spooks comes from the fact that the player is currently going through the process of being possessed by some sort of demon and thus is haunted for the entire night. Match that with the actual job ahead of you and there's a surprisingly effective concoction of uncomfortability feeding into scares that then settle you down, but right back into an uncomfortable base state. At least for your first two or so go arounds. You might assume that seeing these two different styles of horror, realistic and fantastical, would work to cancel each other out but no. Either by random happenstance or careful intention; they shake hands together well.

One way in which they do this is through the gameplay puzzle, which challenges the player to identify which of the bodies for the night has been taken over by the spirit of a demon and the name of the demon in question. This means exploring the environment, studying the twitching's of the dead and working under something of a time limit as the demon nears itself to taking over the player's body. This is not a foundation for a modular spooky system, however, this isn't 'single player Phasmophobia' or anything like that. Every demon seems to act exactly the same as one another with the only difference being their name, but such is understandable when the Dev is really using the demons as a vehicle through which to explore Rebecca's past trauma. And in that respect the game does wholly fine. I think from a writing standard it does teeter on the edge of 'overly dramatic fictional character drama', when I think a premise like this could have easily facilitated a real gut-wrenching realistic story of a trodden down human, with all her inadequacies and failures heightened into grand sins through the lens of her supernatural tormentors.

Still, for what's there the dev did a great job laying this out as a narrative of clues, which is one of my favourite methods for video games to tell their stories. I know so many people out there just want their cutscene and explanation, and The Mortuary' Assistant will reward you with clarification if you reach one of it's specific endings, but I love the uniquely videogame-style presentation of a story that needs to be unravelled and deduced through various flashbacks and hints here and there, before the kicker arrives to slot everything together. It's the Dark Souls effect, the more it troubles you to put the pieces together, the more you start to really connect with the pieces as each takes on a life of their own. Of course, that is only slightly marred by the fact that as you take on subsequent nights it won't be long before you really start to recognise the same specific scares, and thus have to witness the same extended story beats. 

Now is it the most scary game in the world? Well that depends entirely on your own subjective view of what you find scary. The game does give a decent number of jumpscares, a lot of which it telegraphs and most of which are tied to a randomly selected sequence of scares, so on multiple runs you've very likely to run into the exact same set up for a scare you now know is coming. However, the game does a better job of using it's already grim set-up to unnerve you with movement out of the corner of your eye, knocking outside where you don't expect it, voices calling for you; everything you'd expect from a decently constructed horror experience. The only problem being in the endgame, when you start to realise that none of these dangers have any substance to them and they just become distractions between you and the only real threat for the night, the ticking clock.

I would consider the Mortuary's Assistant as a pitcher of fresh water dunked atop a genre that has been thirsty for something new for a very long time. If not perhaps a world changer by any stretch of the imagination, the Assistant is still a very solid indie experience put together largely by one very talented developer, which can go quite a way to reminding us all that there's sometimes very special experiences that lie outside the churning machine of big studios with their deeply ingrained patterns on how the world should be run. Would any big studio have funded a game where you go into detail in preparing a body for the morgue? Hell no! And now those of us who have had that unique experience can go about the rest of live with the process of how our bodies are going to be treated after death burned into our psyches to haunt us. What bliss.