Agony Reviews
Appropriately named for all of the worst reasons...
Stay the Hell away.
Agony proves that, like beauty, horror can be only skin deep. With gratuitous amounts of violence and masochistic overtones, this blood-soaked adventure is not for the faint of heart. But while its bold and detailed environments depict Hell in the most nightmarish ways possible, even the fantastically obscene sights and creepy sounds become mundane and dull by the end of its series of repetitious mazes, unimaginative item hunts, and weak stealth gameplay.
Agony is, true to its name and intentions, a hellish experience. My excitement for the game was quickly quashed behind bugs, crashes and unbalanced gameplay, failing to live up to the potential of the game's core ideas and outstanding visual design. I hope that I can travel back to Hell following some substantial patching but, as things stand, Agony is torture in all the wrong ways.
Agony is a sea of bugs and a complete disappointment in almost everything - from plot and levels structure to characters and controls.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Bellow its subversive appearance, Agony is just a mediocre title. It fails to capture the very essence of a successful survival horror game : an experience that combine a terrifying setting and interesting gameplay mechanics.
Review in French | Read full review
Agony's vision of Hell is breathtaking but its tedious gameplay and plethora of bugs hold it back.
Agony has a solid foundation, but Madmind fails to build on it in any meaningful ways. Some gorgeous visuals are bogged down by poor game design and tasteless sexual content.
We've seen plenty of stalker horror games in the past (Amnesia being perhaps the best example), but a combination of bugs and absolutely dismal guidance from the game makes this one a very painful grind to work through, filled with trial and error deaths and far too few checkpoints for this kind of gameplay.
Undercooked in all the key places, Agony is just a 10 hour trip through increasingly edgy content that isn't actually fun to play.
Unfortunately, Agony stumbles off the starting block and, despite a valiant later effort, is never able to make up lost ground. In this case, a poor first impression irreparably mars the experience, despite measurable improvement in many of the fundamental design principles as the game wears on. The art and audio is striking, but the project may have benefited immensely from less ambition, and the hope is that, should Madmind have a second chance, it will create a more focused and cohesive title. Agony is not great, but it is far from the irredeemable abomination the media has painted it as.
Inconsistent enemy A.I., a bad story, and lackluster environments come together to create a grueling slog of a game
Agony is one of the biggest disappointments this year. Its excellent atmosphere is butchered by frustrating and repetitive gameplay and an abysmal technical performance
Agony is a mess, both in the gameplay and the presentation. Boring game with a high level of meaningless cruelty.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Some say money is the root of all evil. Madmind Studio appears to be one such video game developer that reached too high when creating Agony. This extremely graphic and sexual game set out to shock players the day its initial Kickstarter campaign launched. The most shocking thing is how dull Agony is.
Agony proves that setting is only one component needed to make an excellent horror game.
Hell itself comes to video games, in the form of disturbingly explicit imagery and unbearably dull gameplay.
Despite some glorious and gruesome horror imagery, Agony doesn't have much else to offer.
As its name suggests, playing this at times is painful, void of fun, and a chore that could've been avoided had a lot more care been put into it.
Agony is not a good game. It feels as if the developers just gave up after such a long development cycle. Filled with bugs, boring and infuriating stealth and chase sequences and repetitive puzzles it's very hard to find anything to enjoy in Agony.