Developer: DarkStone Digital
Publisher: DreadXP
Platform: PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S
Tested on: PC
The Mortuary Assistant – Review
It feels like horror games lately have a penchant to draw us into the deep dark depths of morgues, as we reviewed Autopsy Simulator only a couple of months ago. The Mortuary Assistant is not a new game though, even if the mechanic of letting us experience the mundane tasks related to the profession is similar. DarkStone Digital released this horrifying ordeal back in 2022, but only just brought us a massive free update alongside a console version. The release goes under the straightforward title: Definitive Edition. So this is the perfect time to get our hands dirty working on corpses again. And maybe even get possessed by a demon along the way.
Story
In The Mortuary Assistant, you play as Rebecca Owens, a young woman who works as – you guessed it – a mortuary assistant. While being trained by her boss Raymond, Rebecca learns everything one needs to do to a corpse to prepare it for burial. This includes gnarly stuff like draining all the blood and filling the veins with embalming fluid. While working the night shift alone, Rebecca notices some strange, supernatural things keep happening. Turns out demons are all too eager to possess a corpse and wreak havoc on the living, so it’s up to Rebecca to exorcise them when they try to dig their claws into her ‘clients’. But she will also need to find out why Raymond seems to suspiciously know everything about these demons and how to combat them.
The game is procedurally generated, though it keeps track of what you’ve already seen across playthroughs. This allows for new demons with new scares to pop up whenever you play. Various endings for a run can be acquired, depending on your actions and whether you manage to get rid of the demon(s). There’s also a true ending if you uncover all the needed information.
Graphics
The Mortuary Assistant looks fine for a game made in Unity and the atmosphere is top-notch. It’s not hard to make a morgue at night look scary, though the devs went the extra mile with little details and the lighting to make the place look extra creepy. The Definitive Version did come with an improvement in performance and some bug fixes, since textures not loading and visual bugs used to be more common. We definitely didn’t notice an issue and the game ran smoothly for us. The character models are the only thing that stands out negatively. The extra realistic look is lovely to make the corpses look creepy and dead, but on the living people, they’re a little uncanny valley especially when talking.
Sounds
We also can’t complain about the audio design of this game. There’s actually very little music, as The Mortuary Assistant isn’t shy about letting you soak in the silence. This made some parts of the game very tense. Sound effects were present, including all the gross ones associated with corpses and horrible jumpscare noises. The game also has excellent voice acting which we really enjoyed.
Gameplay
The Mortuary Assistant is one of those horror games that revolves around completing a repetitive job over and over again, while also throwing in some light puzzle solving. These quasi-walking simulators have been a dime a dozen lately, but if the task isn’t too tedious and the scares are good enough, we don’t really mind them. As Rebecca, you have to go through the needed steps of embalming a corpse, which means bringing them out onto the metal gurney, properly examining the body and taking notes, doing the actual medical procedure to embalm, and so on. Everything is easily explained through notes you can look at constantly, so the game is fairly good at holding your hand. While the steps are repetitive, the monotony is broken up nicely by the demons that haunt this morgue.
Creepy things will start happening rather quickly. The scares are very diverse, and range from unsettling noises and small shifts in the atmosphere to straight-up jumpscares. You’ll very often find something lurking in the corner of your eye. We found the horror in this game to be executed quite effectively and enjoyed it a lot as a scary experience. If you’d rather not be consumed by demons, you’ll have to use the notes available on the morgue computer to figure out which corpse the demon is haunting today. The clues can be tricky, so this mechanic can become a pain. But paying attention to small details often does the trick. In the end, you go through the correct ritual as described in the notes and burn the body you think holds the demon to get your ending.
Even if you’re not particularly interested in achieving the endings that fully explain the plot of the story elements, you can replay the game quite a few times and still encounter new scares. For people who actually enjoy the repetitive job of morgue assistant, a new mode introduced in the Definitive Edition lets you embalm bodies endlessly without the game ever ending.
Conclusion
This newest update of The Mortuary Assistant is the best way to explore this narrative and we quite enjoyed it. The scares are top-notch, and the gameplay managed to keep us engaged enough without getting annoying due to the short runtime of a playthrough. Overall, a night well spent.
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