The first step in being a good mortuary attendant is holding your mouth. There’s a soft thud as the nail-gun-like device in my hand fires a metal rod into the corpse’s gum line. Upper part Y lower jaw, of course; more hits. Step two follows: sew the mouth closed. The teeth come together stiffly when I connect the new pins with metal wire and twist them to take up slack. All the work stays behind those colorless lips, so when the molars finally snap together and I pry my fingers out of the corpse’s dry maw, the mouth falls into a passable imitation of a peaceful smile.
Step thr- what was that noise? I look up from the body, looking around the darkness of the mortuary with the annoyed agitation of someone trying to convince himself that he’s more embarrassed than scared. He is raining and after dark, with moonless rain drumming relentlessly on the window. For a moment, two of the drops run across the panel, side by side, and catch the light from the surgeon’s lamp above me, turning them into a crude facsimile of white, staring into eyes peering into the black, But that’s just my treacherous imagination. at work.
I pick up the trocar, a device that looks like a foot-long iron syringe, and prepare to clean the excess fluid from the corpse’s abdomen. In the hallway behind me, something laughs as if enjoying a private joke. When I look at the glass again, the drops are gone, but the window is open and a cold breeze rushes through the room.
exorcise is good for you
Cards on the table: The Mortuary Assistant is quite scary. Created solely by developer Brian Clarke, the game has a fairly simple, yet effective premise: you’re a young undertaker named Rebecca who joins the obviously haunted mortuary of River Fields, and is dropped into the embalming fluid when it turns out that demons are running rampant and hiding in the corpses. Someone has to do something about it, and fast, before the grim horrors try to make the leap into, say, the tempting body of a troubled morgue worker.
Instead of going full Doom Slayer or blowing up Proton Packs, Rebecca’s approach is a bit more cerebral. She finds out what demon hides in the bodies, in which body it inhabits, and then perform an exorcism and cremation on the offending corpse. Oh, and the other dead people still need to be prepared as usual, because you’re just a relentless professional, even when hungry demons are trying to split your soul.
Take too long, exorcise the wrong body, or mess up the ritual by misidentifying the demon, and you’ll be the next corpse on the rattling stretcher. And while this is happening, creepy, yet largely harmless little events happen around you, serving as a constant reminder of your impending doom and providing insights into Rebecca’s rather grim history.
Stalking nine to five
I admit to having my issues with The Mortuary Assistant, mainly on the mechanical side of things. The detective demon deduction is a great idea in theory, but the clues often feel arbitrary. You’re not following a complex train of logic and reasoning, but just waiting for the game to deliver the information when it seems ready. And considering that the timer implicitly advances in the background, that’s not a good feeling, as it’s less than productive.
Speaking of which, I wish I had more of an idea of how long I have until I succumb to total demonization. The game provides a pen and pad, ensuring that freestyle doodling on it will reveal how much of your spirit has been chewed up, but most of the time I’ve tried it, it just came out as gibberish and crooked shapes I had no idea. how to interpret. . Let’s see, according to these post-its, I’m… half a backwards penguin closer to possession than I was twenty minutes ago. Hurrah!
sometimes dead is better
But you rarely notice any flaws in the thick of things, elbow-deep in a dead man’s gizzards as you nervously glance over your shoulder for oncoming horrors you know damn well you don’t really want to see. The game’s biggest scares and backstory scenarios aren’t too bizarre, but when it gets subtle and quiet, The Mortuary Assistant can be terribly off-putting: a shifting shadow, a glimpsed silhouette, a movement at the window that defies all explanation… It’s much scarier when you take your foot off the pedal and let your imagination fill in the blanks, sometimes even reminiscent of Phasmophobia in its cruelty.
I also like the very forceful and uncompromising presentation of the embalming process. I have no idea how accurate it is in real life, but the macabre practice of preserving corpses and literally drawing blood from bodies helps keep the macabre nature of the game consistent without being overly dramatic. When the best thing that can happen to you is the opportunity to rearrange the anatomy of a murder victim without being bothered, you know you’re in a very bad situation.
The Mortuary Assistant has its issues: it’s fairly short, a bit rough on design and graphics, and marred by occasional glitches, but it nails the atmosphere and moment-to-moment experience so superbly that I’m willing to forgive a lot of that. The electric jolt of seeing a shadow peering down a hall, or hearing a crackle of movement in my ear gripped me every time, and she’s contained enough with the scares that the tension palpably rises between them. Give The Mortuary Assistant a try if you’re interested in puzzles, atmosphere, and the chance to organically ruin at least one pair of underpants.
Looking for something even scarier to play? look at one of the best horror games which you can download today.
