Agony

Perhaps Agony wasn't the biggest scam of a game in 2018 but it sure did manage to get a lot of undeserved attention. Judging by a handful of comments I've seen, some people also mistook it for another, still upcoming game called Scorn, and were then doubly disappointed.

One of 2018's worsts

Agony is clunky and it's ugly. It's not scary despite what its hellish setting might suggest. But the worst of all: it's fucking boring. Agony's biggest selling point is its explicit sexual and violent imagery, which then got censored for release on top of everything. An UNRATED version of the game did eventually come out though I can't say if it added any real value to the game.

The only good thing about Agony is that it is a complete game that can take hours to beat. It doesn't appear to have major game-stopping bugs either. That only makes it all more perplexing however -- why did a group of people shit out such an uninteresting piece of excrement yet see the effort to make it a working product?

Survival agony

In Agony you're trying to get out of hell. Your only hope is a mysterious Red Goddess character whom you hopelessly chase after. There's no real story beyond that and the game doesn't have anything interesting to say either. It does have a few different secret endings and I'm slightly curious of what they are, but since seeking them out would require playing the game more, I think I'll pass.

I don't know exactly what genre I would put Agony in. It has too much game to be just a walking simulator. Survival horror would work, I guess, even if the game doesn't really have any horror in it (excluding the frustrating gameplay) and survival mechanics are bare-bones at best.

You can hide in holes and corpse piles, hold your breath, grab torches to light the way and later even take a swing at some of the enemies. Movement speed is painfully slow but at least you can sprint.

Dying doesn't necessarily require you to reload a checkpoint: your spirit can float around (for a while) to possess another body. However, most of the time the mechanic only ends up feeling as frustrating as being Crippled in the Borderlands series when enemies hide, denying revival by a kill. Many of the martyr bodies you can possess also need to have had their hoods removed beforehand. Sometimes doing that makes the martyr attack you, forcing a repetitive QTE struggle. It's janky -- like about everything in the game.

Collectathon

Agony goes by rather fast when skipping on what seems to be the main feature of the game: gathering collectibles. But if you reckon picking up hundreds of golden statues spread around the levels to unlock artwork and such on the main menu is enjoyable, there is definitely content available here. Few locked treasure rooms require more thought to get into are thus somewhat more engaging. Still, I'd trade the collectibles for proper gameplay.

After you've beaten Agony once, you unlock succubus mode in which you play as a demon. The mode is mostly the same maps with slightly differing routes and fewer special events. The mode goes through much faster than the main game as the succubus moves quicker and doesn't need be as careful around enemies, though they can still kill you if you don't end them first.

Agony runs on Unreal Engine 4 but rarely looks so. Lighting is often terrible; either it's too dark or there's too much contrast. Level architecture isn't impressive (with few exceptions) and there tends to be an overabundance of visual detail going on. Jankily moving enemy models stand out from the environments.

It's just impossible to get immersed in Agony, to find it entertaining or compelling. One could joke about a game called Agony being an agony to play. If that's intentional (I doubt it), janky gameplay is definitely the wrong way to go about it. It's always bad when the player feels their interface with a game is unresponsive.

Madmind Studio announced a separate spin-off game for the succubus few months back. I think they have real potential to make something good this time. I don't see why a full-on action game in the setting couldn't work. They just have to work on removing that jank really really hard. Polish and more polish. Maybe a more interesting soundscape too.