Suffer the Night (PC)

Calling back to the original Slasher era of horror movies in the 80’s, we had titans like Friday the 13th, Halloween, and 100’s of others lesser known characters. The era was synonymous with gratuitous violence and nudity. Some claim Tainted Pact’s Suffer The Night throws back to this era, Mr Tops is knocking at the door anyway, let’s go see what he wants.

Suffer the Night is a first person horror adventure, set in 1989 we play as Stacey, a horror illustrator who’s visited late night after some spooky goings on. Without spoiling, we follow Stacey in her misadventures throughout the night with Mr.Tops. The story has a bit of a unique perspective, as it’s split into 3 different sections, the first we stay in the comfort of our own home, with the player having to do a few simple errands to get used to the control, and we spend quite a bit of time on the in-game computer.

The games writing is pretty standard, the story moves at a decent enough pace, and the computer usage within the narrative is a welcome addition, I felt by the time I got to the final third however, I think I’d already had enough. The middle section slows the pace down quite a bit, even with the addition of a few new gameplay features and weapons, the pace and tension could have been a bit stronger. Despite it’s claims as a horror game, the first act fully delivers with some really creepy bits, however once we progress these take a back seat to more exploration and “puzzle solving”.

Speaking of which, the puzzles in the game aren’t anything to write home about unfortunately, a few end up being very basic, in either pressing buttons in a certain order, finding hidden switches, or moving past some spikes in a certain time. As a positive they are quite varied, but these are nothing we haven’t done in many other games. Most of these puzzles rear their heads towards the latter part of the game, and do bring a little variety to the table.

With a lot of horror games we find quite a bit of lore which isn’t necessarily easily found, which is exactly the case here. Suffer the Night has a good amount of collectable discs, which contain additional lore providing a good bit of meat to the story and the origins of the villain Mr Tops, who we can safely say looks slightly like the Babadook.

There’s a bit of combat also towards the end of the game, however this is limited to 3 games, 1 melee and 2 guns. The enemies we fight, don’t really put up much of a threat until you meet some ghostly foes, yet these can be dispatched quite easily. You’ll also be given a tool for finding hidden items, which will help you find enemies, items and switches.

Visually everything’s perfectly fine, there’s some really nice art at the start inside Stacey’s home and the digital art within the computer looks real nice, but once we move on, visually everything seems a bit drab, even when we move to the third quarter of the game, the colour palette changes however it all seems a bit copy and paste, with no real variety.

Audio also seems to be a bit sub par, with most of the sfx sounding ok, but the last part of the game has a single repeating track whilst most of the exploration is ongoing. This is obviously a bit of an earache as you spend a good chunk of the game in the last section.

It’s a bit of a shame with Suffer the Night, as Mr Tops looks like he has a bit of potential to be a good villain, but the game struggles a bit with a lack of scares and an identity crisis for 2 thirds of the game.