I was really looking forward to Agony, the 2018 survival-horror game set in Hell. This wasn’t some washed-up-for-dinner budget Hell, this was Hell exactly how I wanted it, wall to wall with flesh and bone and blood and viscera and demons and eternal torment to go around. The idea of a survival horror game set in the best game version of Hell since Visceral Games’ Dante’s Inferno had me excited.
So imagine my surprise when I walked into EB on release day to buy it, only for something completely new to happen: the EB guys checked my account to see if I had a Gold membership, and I braced myself for the inevitable promotional upsell – but then, they actually recommended I upgrade my Edge card (I didn’t) so that I would have more time to return the game if I hated it. These were employees of EB, a subsidiary of Gamestop, a company that aggressively punishes its employees for not meeting insane arbitrary quotas, actively trying to down-talk a potential purchase. They hadn’t played it, but said they had heard nothing but bad things.
I still bought it (even at launch it was quite a low price), but all I could think was, hoooly shit, what am I getting myself into here?
To give some background, I had been looking forward to Agony ever since it had been successfully crowdfunded. The idea of a survival horror game set in a classic bones-and-blood Hell sounded absolutely perfect, to really play up the horrific aspects of Hell rather than the power trip it usually is (Doom etc). To see it get made, and even get sold in physical form through the major outlets, had me really happy for Mad Mind Studios. A crowdfunding success story, right?
I popped the game in and was hit with a day one patch over six gigs.
The game itself was only eleven gigs.
So that happened. I kicked back and read the Spider-Man trade paperback I had scored on the same outing, so no skin off my back, but still, think about that: a day one patch over half as big as the actual on-disc game. That’s never an especially awesome sign.
So I played, and the screen tearing was so bad with every movement that it could actually make someone sick. I didn’t get far because, despite the stellar art direction, the tearing was just insufferable.
I popped the game in again on day two and was hit with a day two patch to the tune of 1.8 gigs.
The screen tearing was still everywhere.
That day, I got as far as meeting the second NPC with dialogue – the ‘don’t become too attached to fire’ guy.
The game then crashed.
A couple weeks later, I came back to the game after another 1.7 gig patch, and found that it actually fixed the screen tearing. Unfortunately, this new update was even worse than before. Firstly, this was one of those horrible patches that delete your progress if you happen to be partway through the game when you download it. In Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, this shit took away my checkpoints and the weaponry and ammo I had accrued to that point.
In Agony, it took away all my save progress and left me with what might as well have been a fresh disc. Why is this a thing now?
As for the gameplay? The eminent distraction that was the screen tearing had hit the road, but in its place, the game janked, hiccupped and lagged for a second or two at a time, nearly every time it needed to do something (picking up an item, talking to someone, loading a new area…). I got as far as the start of the Maze, and when I tried to learn the first sigil, the game crashed.
Hell’s bells, what a nightmare update this was. Annoying screen-tearing aside, the game was eminently more playable before this update. Crashing before you reach the first actual enemy does not equate with playable.
At that point I was prepared to call Agony a botched launch.
Not the biggest botched launch of the generation: that dishonor goes to Arkham Knight in 2015, which unlike Agony, had the benefit of triple-A financing and an experienced team of game-design mavens, and was the big climax for a series that gave us two of the best superhero games ever. On launch day, both PS4 and PC users ran into installation problems that made the game literally unplayable until it got sorted out – at least for PS4 users. PC users were left with a pretty knackered game, so much so that Steam actually bent their own refund rules to allow refunds for the PC version, if I recall. Also, the Collector’s Edition was indefinitely delayed (this was after all editions of the game got delayed shortly before the original intended launch), and the official player’s guide of the game actually spelled the title wrong on the spine. Oh my god, it became a total farce.
Meanwhile, Agony was a crowdfunded indie title developed by a much smaller studio with much less financial backing, so I want to be more lenient. Maybe they were just in over their heads; much like film production, video game production is such an insanely complex machine with so many moving parts all fighting against each other that it’s honestly a wonder that any of these things get produced at all. Pressure is high when coming up to release; I understand the pressing desire to get the game out, especially given it was a crowdfunded game, but the simple and unfortunate fact is that they screwed up.
For years, I contented myself by watching longplays of the game on Youtube. The art direction really is wonderful. Their art team is exempt from all the deep criticisms I’m otherwise leveling; they committed completely to an absolutely lurid vision of Hell that is unflinchingly explicit (moreso in the Unrated version), openly lewd and darkly erotic, absolutely brutal and deeply disturbing – at some points, all of those at the same time.
Making orange juice with the glitchy sub-obtimized oranges we’ve been handed, I can at least take some time to reflect a sliver of the more analytical article I had hoped to get out of this game back before the game’s problems came to define its existence.
I really do think it’s worth looking at Agony’s art design as part of a broader and grander tradition of artistic depictions of Hell. Some visions are ambitious as hell (look he said the pun) while at the same time feeling constrained and conspicuously shackled to the era in which they were made: the earliest film in my entertainment collection is the 1911 Italian take on Dante’s Inferno, starring Salvatore Papa as Dante and directed in collaboration by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro. L’Inferno is in many ways a stunningly forward-thinking film in terms of its groundbreaking special effects, albeit sticking to pretty much the straight-and-narrow in terms of how it adapts Dante’s epic. That is, save for the concessions it makes to what was considered acceptable in its era: almost all the damned we see are men, and all are clad about the midsection.
And when I talk about a “washed-up-for-dinner budget Hell”, I do have specific things in mind – the show Lucifer was great, but its version of Hell really was very…”Network Television-esque”, being both budget-friendly and family-safe, essentially just being a bunch of dark corridors with cells, wherein damned souls were tortured by their own memories. I suppose it’s fine, and it’s thematically relevant, but it doesn’t do much to inspire the dark side of the visual imagination, you know?
Meanwhile, long-running television infamy-basket Supernatural has been all over the map with this – for the first five seasons, Hell was described mostly offscreen as a nightmare of fire and guts and bones and torture much like what we see in Agony, then Crowley took over and turned it into an endless office-building hallway, then in the second half of the show’s life it got its final redesign into an atmospheric, grim dark dungeon, almost like an otherworldly castle of demons and pain. The final redesign allowed them to make it look and feel like Hell, while sticking to the show’s network budget in a way that the oft-inferred version of Hell in the first five seasons probably would have blown right past.
Fast forward from that 1911 Inferno adaptation to Agony, which bills itself outright as erotic horror and isn’t afraid to let everything hang out; even the game’s logo is meant to evoke the imagery of something I shouldn’t need to spell out if you’re old enough to be reading about this game. It commits hard to an aesthetic of flesh and carnality that would have probably gotten you burned at the stake a few hundred years ago, and in doing so, Mad Mind’s art team succeeds all the more at crafting a Hell that feels truly primordial, primal, without boundary as to the visceral nightmares it can and will inflict. (If only the game itself lived up to that promise.)
A few hundred years? Hell, just a few decades prior to Agony’s release, we saw Thrill Kill being pulled from release despite being quite a bit tamer than Agony (or, for that matter, the most recent Mortal Kombat games). And this is the kind of art direction where a self-imposed level of censorship would have absolutely harmed the experience, because artificial sanitization runs counter to everything a Hell like this should stand for. More and more I find myself taken out of the experience when a piece of media goes well out of its way to ‘put up censor bars’, as it were, and even without the Unrated update, Agony’s art design philosophy is to immerse you by never shying away.
For my money, the ultimate expression of a Hell in video games is Visceral’s Dante’s Inferno from 2009 – at least, everything up through Heresy before they clearly started running short on money or time. It creatively expands on the original ideas of the Inferno, like turning Dis – which has the air of an unpleasant but somewhat sparse graveyard in Gustave Doré’s famous engravings – into a truly diabolical-feeling city of burning tombs, and in some cases supplanting original ideas altogether with something more grand, like how Greed, a mere half-canto in the poem without much of a visual element to it, is transformed into a huge, darkly majestic palace of gold and stone, a mockery of worldly splendors, where the damned burn in molten gold.
But the regions of Agony’s vision of Hell that I never saw in my own gameplay are mesmerizing: an illusory forest full of fractals; a replica of ancient Babylon; nightmarish caves and caverns full of gnashing teeth and pulsing flesh. Agony’s art is a bit like if the highly sexualized Lust level of Visceral’s Inferno met with their fleshy redesign of Gluttony.
I’d like to back up and give a one-sentence explanation as to why I prefer this insane, visceral, nasty, brutal, explicit form of Hell over all others in media: I was beta-reading the novel of an acquaintance from the local writing community, the book was about high schoolers facing demons coming out of portals from Hell, and there was some super-explicit stuff in there – and he asked me if it was all “too much”. I responded with the thing that would basically become my universal ethos when it comes to writing Hell:
“If you’re doing Hell, you’ve gotta do Hell.”
I’d probably have more to say about all that if the game itself lived up to its promise, but back to…whatever this piece ended up being instead.
Coming back into it years later, in December 2022, it does appear that – as of version 1.07 – the horrible screen-tearing, framerate issues and rampant crashing have been fixed. While the art direction was always stellar, graphical performance on PS4 still seems off and highly un-optimized, plus it doesn’t appear that console users received the Unrated update, but, at this point ‘playable’ is the bar we’ve set to clear.
That’s right. I held this whole thing back for four and a half years because the game’s dire lack of quality made it unthinkable to do the analytical piece I wanted to write instead.
This time I tried out the Succubus mode, which I don’t recall being there at launch. Think of it as a second campaign within the same general game world, which sees you taking control of one of the Red Goddess’s succubi. Hell being their native environment, she has some abilities the damned don’t have. For example, you can fight the Onoskelis (those demonesses on the cover art with the vagina-dentata faces) instead of just running and hiding, so Succubus mode will be up your alley if you want to explore this world and its stellar-when-it-functions art design but aren’t much into super-tense survival horror. Turns out they’re super easy to fight too – just a QTE and then mash the attack button till they die. Or just press the interact button as they’re running toward you and you’ll seduce them, then rip their heart out.
Given how much of a catastrophe the game was at launch, I appreciate that Succubus mode, something they could have easily chosen to offer as paid DLC, was simply thrown in with a free update. At that point it was honestly the least they could do. (Conversely, there’s no excuse for denying console users the Unrated update, unless it was an ESRB thing where it would have been considered smuggling content that tipped into AO on a game that already had physical releases marked M?)
I got softlocked in the first room of Succubus mode and had to restart because the game failed to load in the triggers for her to leap and grab on to. Great start.
Beyond that I was actually quite enjoying myself for a while in Succubus mode, taking it as sort of an ‘easy mode’ where you could just soak up the atmosphere without constantly being afraid of running into enemies. Normally I play games on whatever the developer-intended ‘normal’ setting is, but in a game with this many technical problems, I just wanted to at long last experience the game’s environments firsthand.
Then I died to a trap and the game froze, forcing a reboot. Great.
That said, years after it came out, I finally found myself genuinely enjoying playing Agony as opposed to simply watching longplays on Youtube, where I could wash up the excellent art design without actually worrying about rushing through and dying all the time.
But it’s still a bad game on an objective level, at least on PS4, and it pains me to say that.
Four and a half years after release and many patches and updates later, the game runs like what you’d expect from a pre-release beta, if that. It’s like a Schrodinger’s box of de-optimization every time you load up the game: are the textures going to be all weird-looking because they didn’t load in correctly? Are the damned souls/Martyrs going to have their skin textures all messed up? Are essential action prompts just going to be missing, thus softlocking you? Is dying and then pressing X when it tells you to press X at the death screen going to crash your game and possibly force your console to soft-reboot? One time I got a trophy that then vanished until the next day when I died, the game crashed and forced the PS4 to soft-reboot, and afterwards the trophy showed up. In some areas I’m missing a skybox, and it’s weird how long it took me to notice it. Etc. Etc.
My journey with Succubus mode came to a very premature end (not even past what would be considered the ‘first act’ of the game) when the key item that is supposed to be in a certain place, according to the video walkthrough I resorted to checking, simply isn’t there in my copy, thus rendering it unfinishable. Given how the game had previously loaded and de-loaded important assets at random, I did give this several different tries over a couple days, and it’s just – yeah, the item just isn’t there. It’s unfinishable. Again, this is four and a half years after release. ‘So broken that it’s unfinishable’ is as good as it’s going to get.
I don’t have a great swell of interest in going back to the main story mode. Imagine the same inexplicable glitches when you’re in what amounts to a horror stealth game where a single mistake sets you back – like a key item just not existing in the game while you’re being pursued by a demon. No thank you. Not subjecting myself to that.
It seems the PC version isn’t like this? The gameplay I’ve seen from that version looks wonderful. Then again, the longplays and walkthroughs I’ve seen of the PC version are likely played on ungodly monster rigs with forget-about-attaining-this levels of processing power on all the highest settings. But the difference is pathetic and unacceptable, in all honesty – the PS4 runs God Of War, for Christ’s sake, so there’s no excuse for the console version looking and running this shoddy. Comparing what I’m getting on my hardware to what they’re getting on those walkthroughs is like that Simpsons gag where Homer is trying to set up a barbeque and comparing his shitty amalgamation of parts in the ground to the perfect photo on the box. “So why doesn’t mine look like that?!”
This is a markedly different situation than No Man’s Sky, which launched in a state that was so astronomically far below what had been promised and hyped up that people weren’t just calling it shit – they were invoking terms like consumer fraud. But the developer made right, working round the clock to bring the game up to code, adding in the things that they’d promised from jump street, and then going so far above and beyond that to ultimately deliver an experience that surpasses the original pre-release marketing. In a way it’s the ultimate redemption story for a bad game that got updated to become not good, but great.
And then you have Agony, a game that was borderline unplayable on release, which almost five years later, has been brought up to the level of…something that still shouldn’t have been released in this state. You can blame a lot of things when a game like this is plagued by problems at launch: a small indie studio biting off more than they can chew, not wanting to disappoint backers with endless delays, first-game jitters – but this far down the line, my options for giving them the benefit of the doubt as creators have narrowed considerably.
Look, I am on the side of indie creators and always will be. That doesn’t mean that all creative teams are created equal. Those one-shot ten-minute indie horror games made in Unity with a bunch of jumpscares obviously aren’t going to compare to Dean Dodrill’s work on Dust: An Elysian Tail and aren’t trying to, but I have to take Mad Mind’s work on Agony for what it is: an ambitious, crowdfunded game with a ton of potential and wonderful art design, which got itself big enough to have a physical release and everything, so I can’t judge it by the standards of some Unity-made oneshot jumpscare horror game on Steam. I have to judge it by the standards of something like No Man’s Sky, another game by a small indie studio that initially bit off more than they can chew but who put in the hours and ultimately made right.
And by that metric, to have the game in this state almost half a decade after launch – maybe I can’t deflect any more. Maybe I just have to accept that Mad Mind are just not that great at this, despite the dark brilliance of their art team. Even for a small indie studio, this has been more than enough time to get their house in order. So I have no choice but to assume that what I’m seeing now really is them at their best, and that is deeply sad.
At the end of the day, Agony is the worst game with the most lurid, psychotically interesting art design. If you’re into this whole uber-grimdark Dante-adjacent blood-and-bones Hell aesthetic as I am, just find a good longplay on youtube, load up some appropriate metal to listen to while you watch, and enjoy the aesthetics without actually having to subject yourself to the janky-at-best gameplay or the absolute nonsense of this PS4 version.
Looking back at this thing I’ve written here, it doesn’t actually feel like something I’d normally post on here. There isn’t much analytical about this – pre-release, you have no idea how much I was hyped to write a really cool article about how Agony plays against type and redefines gamers’ relationship with demons and Hell, depicting it as the visceral nightmare that it is rather than as a setpiece for a power fantasy.
I got a nightmare, all right, but instead all that came out of me is my personal experience with this game being the runaway trainwreck that it is. The art designers absolutely do their vision of Hell justice (just not on PS4), but the programming and QA departments threw this game to the hellhounds. On a scale of 1 to 666, this game is Loona’s dinner.
Pre-release, I had such high hopes for Agony. But you know what they say about the road to Hell…