Okay so overall thoughts on the new indie horror game, Suffer the Night by TaintedPact Games. I saw some clips of it on TikTok and decided to check it out
It's got an interesting premise and fun characters, but kind of suffers from an identity crisis during the second and third acts. Heads up for spoilers below the cut.
The game starts you off with a mysterious top-hatted man appearing at your doorstep and giving you a game on a floppy disc, with his only instructions being to play it, or else he's going to break into your house and murder you. It's a simple yet effective premise that gets straight to the point.
The entire first act is just you playing through a text-based horror adventure game, while the hatted man stalks you from outside the house, taunting you in a fun little sing-songy voice and occasionally reminding you to keep playing. There's a button designated solely for looking over your shoulder while at your computer too, something that's freaked out basically every let's player who noticed it.
With the way this first act is set up, and how the demo is also presented, it kind of leads you to assume this is going to be the entirety of the game. You're trapped in your house, forced to play a game through to the end, while fending off a powerful and mysterious threat. But then you beat the game, get got by the hat man, and then it goes through a pretty large and drastic shift in mechanics.
You wake up in a gothic, Amnesia-like area with musty stone walls and mutilated bodies, where it's revealed that after Stacey signed the book at the end of the game in the first act, she has now been transported into the world of the game itself where the hatted man, who we learn is called Mr. Tops, has total control over. Now, you must survive Mr. Tops' gauntlet of challenges he's set up for you, and gather the items you need to make your way to his domain and defeat him in order to escape.
It's at this point where the identity crisis kind of kicks in for me. The tense, atmospheric horror you might have experienced in the first act is now replaced with puzzles you need to solve, obstacles to overcome, and enemies to either avoid or kill with weapons you pick up along the way. Not a necessarily bad thing if you like this style of horror, but it's very different from the first act like I said. You also go from this gothic horror setting, to a creepy carnival playhouse, and then back to gothic horror with a dose of cosmic horror right at the end. All of which are not bad subgenres of horror, but they are a bit thematically jarring when crammed all into one game.
The third and final act features Stacey confronting Mr. Tops, where he reveals that he put her through all those challenges in order to claim her body as a new vessel, through which he'll use to supposedly wreak havoc on the real world. Stacey refuses, which leads to the final boss fight between her and Mr. Tops.
This is also just kind of a 'me' thing, but I found Mr. Tops' final boss form once again a bit thematically jarring.
The bat wings and scythe are cool, but they don't really fit very well with the rest of his appearance in my opinion. I feel like maybe black raven wings and longer claws could've fit a little bit better, but again that's just personal preference.
Stacey defeats Mr. Tops and stabs him with his own dagger (honestly a very badass move) and goes to finally escape the game world. It's here where, if you've collected all the Tarot cards throughout the game, you can unlock the good ending where you find the original developer of the game, who tells you can destroy the game's source code and delete everything. Follow his instructions, and the game and everything within it will be erased from existence. Stacey wakes up the next morning in her house, and smashes the game's floppy disc under her foot.
If you don't have all the tarot cards, or just choose to not delete the source code, Stacey will still escape back to the real world, but it's soon revealed that Mr. Tops essence still lives on within her, and she mutates into her own monstrous form as a living vessel for Mr. Tops.
So yeah like I said at the start, I think the game is strongest during its first act. I personally found Mr. Tops to be the most intriguing during that part, where we still don't know who he is or what his true intentions are. Learning more about him kind of kills that intrigue in my opinion. It's kind of like if we learned who the Happy Mask Salesman is from Majora's Mask and why he does what he does, a lot of the fun of that character comes from what we don't know about him.
But yes overall, not a bad experience. I'd probably put it at 7/10 like a fair number of other reviewers are. If you want to check it out yourself it's available on Steam!
