Horror games sit on a spectrum that ranges from unimaginative to unique. When a new title is announced, every horror fan goes into the trailer with the concern of cliches, overused visuals and tactics, and the typical correlation of “loud sound makes jump scare even scarier” when really it’s just a punch to the eardrum most of the time.
As I saw DarkStone Digital announce The Mortuary Assistant, I was already in the belief that it was going to be full of these fallacies, but since I enjoyed their escape room game, Our Secret Below, I thought it was only fair to give the free demo a chance before presuming the worst. Thankfully I did because this demo showed that this game is taking a route that has quite a few unique aspects to it that I was frightfully and pleasantly surprised to see!
Gameplay
Literally, you will be doing the tasks that a morgue worker handles. As I do not know that field of work in full, the number of aspects included on your task chart definitely seems to check out from what you would expect to be included. However, it is not a standard job nor does this game allow you to experience a standard experience doing this job.
Starting out, you are in your home apartment where you are safe from the horrors ahead of you. This will give you a nice introduction to the story, explaining why you are going to the morgue so late at night and will be there alone when you are the assistant, and then give you the first exploration task of finding your keys. This gives the player time to get used to their movement, interaction, item collection, and menu use controls.
After you leave the apartment and get to the morgue before you head to the back to begin the scares you are given one more collection task that will require direct use of your inventory. This is the collection of embalming room key and your clipboard. Once you have all of these steps done and have a fine understanding of the controls, the excitement can begin.
To get you used to the environment, your first step is to put away the first client that your mentor took care of before falling ill. After you put him away, you must take out your next client that you are to completely do all the steps on yourself. Once you roll her over to the embalming station, the job tasks begin - along with the horror.
As you progress through the steps on your checklist, you will start to get a few weird experiences. These experiences gradually get worse and more direct until it leads you into a scripted version of the horrific events that cryptically begin to put together a story for our protagonist. In hopes of not providing spoilers for this rather short demo, I don’t want to go into all of the details of what happens or what you experience.
This back-and-forth trade of completing tasks on the checklist and having a horrifying experience continues until you go to put the client back in the freezer chamber. It is here that the demo comes to a close.
Expectations
After playing through such a series of events in just a 30-to-60-minute demo, I can only imagine that the game is going to start presenting more and more unique events. If my experience with this developer’s previous title proceeds to reflect what will go on in this game, then none of the random scare events were randomly placed and have their own meaning - down to the chosen character design of the spooky visitors.
There was a hidden puzzle that you can locate in the demo, but are not given any clues or details on how to solve it. The note next to it states that we weren’t meant to find it as well. However, I noticed one of the symbols was hidden inside one of the scripted horror zones. This means we are likely to experience various puzzles that can only be solved as we progress the game around it.
Along with big puzzles like that, there are sure to be small puzzles included. If all of those wild events took place while I was taking care of a single client, I can only imagine how much worse it is going to be when I have two or three more clients to work on. This will provide a lot of opportunities for puzzles, jump scares, and encounters that are sure to be hard to handle.
One main thing I hope they add to the game though is a clip-on light for the clipboard. Having to use the scenery lighting to see what is on your clipboard becomes frustrating very quickly as too many angles cast a shadow over the clipboard. Adding a small permanent attachment that provides light so the clipboard has consistent visibility when being held would be nice.
Verdict
The Mortuary Assistant is definitely designed to take a horror player’s expectations and exacerbate them! Playing through a horror game that takes place in a morgue had plenty of automatic atmosphere horror to it, but the added events and actually unique moments that were beyond expectations made this demo one that was worth the time! I look forward to the full game this coming Spring and having to chicken out every other step of the way.
