XBOX REVIEW | The Mortuary Assistant

The thought alone of working in a Mortuary is enough to give me chills. Being a big fan of the horror genre in movies and videogames I had to give this a play. The Mortuary Assistant is primarily developed by one solo indie developer named Brian Clarke who is a long time veteran of the AAA video game industry and has been creating engaging content since 2017 for DarkStone Digital. The Mortuary Assistant first released back in August 2022 on the PC and has now been ported to consoles. You play as Rebecca Owens who is a newly hired assistant at the River Fields Mortuary in Connecticut in 1998. Rebecca soon learns from her new boss Raymond Delver that a demon is attempting to possess her. To stop it, Rebecca must find the possessed cadaver, then perform a ritual to bind the demon, and burn it in the mortuary’s incinerator.

Things I liked!

• Story | I was really intrigued by the plot found here in The Mortuary Assistant. While I am not particularly squeamish at the sight of blood and horror elements, the thought of working in a mortuary does give me slight chills. Having recently watched The Autopsy of Jane Doe for the first time, I was eager to find out more about Rebecca’s story. In total, there are six different endings to discover.

• Graphics | While the visuals are not amazing compared to other games, the fact that this was developed by one person did really impress me. Some of the details with the gory elements were implemented really well. When examining the corpses, there was also a lot of detail.
  
  
• Sound | The sound effects were really spooky and offered lots of jump scare moments, from doors slamming to demons screaming at you. The sound of the storm outside as the rain comes down added to the atmosphere. The voice acting was also really good, from Rebecca freaking out to the sound of the demon whispering in your ear.

Mixed & disliked!

• Controls | I found the controls in The Mortuary Assistant to be very frustrating. All too often, you need to perform a certain task, such as mixing embalming fluid in the pump, but when you gather the chemicals and select the chemical to put into the pump, it will say, ‘I can’t use that here.’ This is a serious game-breaking bug that prevents you from progressing, and all you can do is exit the game and load a previous save, hoping that next time it works ok. As I am playing a few months after release, I would have hoped that the developer would have patched these bugs with an update. I found that uninstalling and reinstalling sometimes fixed these issues for a while. Other issues I found with the controls were that you would press the X button to pull and push the gurney and the A button to pull and push the mortuary slabs. I think it would have made more sense to use the same button for both commands.

• Gameplay | The aim of The Mortuary Assistant is to banish the demon that appears when you first enter the mortuary. To do this, you must listen to the correct tapes in the cassette player you receive, learn the demon’s name, and then burn the correct body. There are three bodies for you to examine. If you burn the wrong body, then it’s game over, and you start again. There is a short tutorial as you begin playing that sets up the story for The Mortuary Assistant. You learn how to embalm a corpse and what each item of equipment does. You have a clipboard with instructions for each part of the embalming process that you can read at any point. After a few successful runs, I rarely had to read the instructions. The embalming process can start to become repetitive, especially when having to restart if the game bugs out. As you play, you will notice lots of paranormal activities happening, from simple things such as the lights going out to seeing a scary-looking figure in the distance.

How long did I play the review before publishing? 12 Hours
How long to beat the story? 2 Hours
How many Achievements did I earn before publishing? 7/25 or 135/1000G
How long to achieve 1000G | 25 Hours +
You’ll love this game if you like these | Visage and The Medium

CONCLUSION

Score: 60/100 –

I really wanted to score this much higher, but the issues I faced with the buggy controls causing me to have to exit the game and then click continue and repeat what I had just done really became very frustrating. Hopefully, DarkStone Digital is aware of these issues and can release an update to fix the control issues I faced, which would then give a much smoother gameplay experience, as I am sure they intended.

I did like the story; the characters and the audio and sound effects were impressive. The embalming process I found fascinating; when the blood was being drained from the corpse, it always made me feel a little sick in my stomach.

Overall, this port should have been so much better, and hopefully in time, these issues will be addressed.