AGONY Review

When I wrote the review for Agony I did it on stream. I did it after having played and refunded the game on Steam. The issue with Agony is that it was absolute agony to play. My Agony review comes from having just played about an hour of the game, and hating it. I will link here to the gameplay, you can see and hear my thoughts live. Until then, The Agony Review.

Agonizing to play

Probibly worse to watch

Performance

Not going to beat around the bush here in anyway

62FPS with V-sync Disabled on a 144hz monitor?. Ran well on High settings. I lowered the settings because I was streaming. The Unreal 4 engine is good, can’t complain about that.

Story

There is an old saying: ‘Show, don’t tell’. Agony… Agony seems to do neither. The first 20 or so minutes should draw you into the game and its world, give you an idea of what you are expected to do, let you know how you got into this situation.
Wanna know what I learnt in double that time?

1) This is a puzzle game
2) My name
3) I had sex and got people killed
4) How to refund a game on steam.

In 40 minutes I learnt nothing that made me even want to play this game longer than I was. People on my own stream were telling me just how boring this game was to watch and how it sounded. We watched the trailers and they hyped this game up… then Harvey over here fell down the stairs whilst sitting in the bath tub the fail was so epic.

I NEVER refund games on steam. If this game wants to follow a Dark Souls path and hide the story all over the place it can. Provided the gameplay is there to back it up. I will tell you now that holding your breath and hiding from demons for the later half of my playthrough is not fun. It’s far from fun. As a “dark fantasy survival horror” it was laughable in the horror department. The most horror I had was looking away from things going “I’m not getting banned off twitch for this”. As for “Dark Fantasy”.. yeah it was dark… I had to turn the gamma to 75% just to actually see where I was going. I think the “fantasy” part fits into the “Story” of this game – witch was nowhere to be found- and the survival aspect is from surviving through the boring tedious walking simulator-esque gameplay to find the story. Madmind Studio… poor start.

Gameplay

Puzzles guys, expect a fair few of those, I think I encountered like 5 if I include the whole “Hide from the demon” (Who was totally oblivious to stopmy the dinosaur collecting 3 skulls). The game looks Good for an unreal engine 3 game. This is Unreal 4 though, the same engine that powers: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, Darwin Project & Fortnite to name a few. In this list I have tried to pick out Indie games or games not made/published by Triple-A game companies. The textures (even on ultra) did not look very good. The mechanics were somewhat interesting however – If you die you can possess a body of another person to get another chance or even progress past the point you were at if you are fast enough.

Overall

Not that fun in my personal opinion. An interesting concept however but failed to meet all expectations. Apart from boobs, there was boobs.
The story at just under an hour was lack luster in that I knew very little. Nothing was actually keeping me moving forward. The gameplay had 1 interesting mechanic but apart from that nothing new for Survival games (or survival horror). Game did run well though. Overall:

I can’t fault a game on it’s performance if it runs well on my machine. I can fault everything else though. Sorry Madmind Studios. This games promotional material looked interesting. Shame the game didn’t keep me engrossed long enough. Sorry I had to refund.