The Suffering (2004)

The Suffering begins on Carnate island, where you take the role of Torque a convicted murderer on death row for killing his wife. You start by witnessing weird things happening, evil takes shape in physical form and starts attacking everyone and everything. You are packed with guns and your anger that fills in with each monster you put down. Once you are ready, you transform and start slaying everything but you have to be careful. Killing innocent will get you the bad ending.

This world much like most Stephen King books, will tell you its story through the Archive system where you will have background lore for monsters and places you visit. Characters that you help or not, will talk to you and offer you through their few dialog lines more than you need, to understand Torque's psychology, place in the world, themes, history. This is a dark psychological horror game that will show you how our inner demons look like from the outside.

Morality system: You don't know how well you do until you do it. You can kill someone by mistake, offer your help but fail or succeed. At the end of the game depending on your journey you will get the good or bad ending.

During your journey i find it interesting that you have flashbacks about what you think happened but only at the end you will find out. While you silently play, a flashback will occur, intrusive sound accompanied but few seconds of you remembering your past. The heavy breathing during the game, those footsteps, that sound when you take form. Really well done. This deserves a remake, or at least a remaster. I am curious how someone will re imagine those creepy, hellish monsters with today's graphics.

Level design is beautiful, lots of zones / areas to explore. Enemies are manifestations of what happened there. A beautiful story inspired by SH. Well crafted and well written.

The creatures in The Suffering are representations of capital punishment. We get told this explicitly in the game's archive, accessible from the menu, and narrated in a wonderfully hammy southern US drawl by one of the game's side characters. In contrast to Silent Hill 2, whose creatures echoed the protagonist's inner turmoil, but in an unspoken and implicit way, The Suffering's blunt approach to symbolism is its best and defining quality. It's a clumsy and kind of tasteless, but it does give this otherwise mediocre grindhouse slog a bit of charm.

The game has a few other ideas. You can transform into a monster, and it's stupid and bad. There's a loose moral choice system of committing or not committing murder at various junctures, narrated by the good and bad side of your conscience. It's the wrong context for this sort of non-dilemma and likewise feels a bit pointless. More successful, are the visions of your murdered wife and child, appearing like ghosts in the environment, that haunt you throughout the game. These moments are clumsily written and but their execution is sometimes quite effective.

There's an unresolved tension between whether the game wants to be about the prison and its convoluted lore or about its protagonist, and even when it's focused on the protagonist, it can't decide whether it's about the player's version of the protagonist, giving us agency and choice, or telling a specific story. It occasionally works, though, and even in the majority of moments when it doesn't, it's camply amusing.