The Playstation 2/Xbox/GameCube generation was one that really helped evolve the horror genre. Silent Hill 2 and Eternal Darkness were landmark games, but it was probably Resident Evil 4 that is most known for moving the genre forward. Released in 2005 and directed by the great Shinji Mikami, RE4 was praised for moving the genre away from the clunky controls of the previous generation. But there was another game that was released prior to RE4 that not only melded horror with more action-oriented movement, but also implemented several other gameplay elements that would soon become popularized.
The Suffering was developed by Surreal Software and released in the spring of 2004. The game casts the player as Torque, a death row inmate who fights to survive when the prison is attacked by horrific creatures. The game ended up selling well, over 1.5 million copies, and was credited with bringing publisher Midway back to prominence. Despite the fact that this success allowed the developers to make a sequel, The Suffering: Ties That Bind, the game remains largely forgotten by most, and the franchise has been dormant since 2005.
Resident Evil 4 certainly popularized the more actiony version of horror, but The Suffering brought faster controls to the genre almost a year earlier. It definitely had a bit of the early-console-shooter feel, but still managed to make the player more mobile than other horror games, even allowing you to play in first person mode. RE4 tried to keep some roots of older survival horror games, forcing you to stay in one place while shooting, but The Suffering did what games like Dead Space would eventually do and allowed full movement while gunning enemies down.
While the extra mobility may have taken away some of the tension that came from being forced to use tank controls, the creature design added it right back in. Since the game takes place in prison with a sinister past, all of the enemies were designed to reflect either execution methods or atrocities that happened there. The creature designs are truly iconic, which shouldn’t come as a surprise because of the involvement of Stan Winston Studios.
To aid in the combat, there was also an “Insanity Meter” that filled up with each kill. Upon filling the meter, Torque turns into a hulking monster letting you tear apart your enemies with vicious melee strikes. Attack-related meters like this ended up being very common, but it felt particularly in line with the themes of the game. Torque has a (possibly) violent past, and this monster is a very straightforward interpretation of the concept of “inner demons.” There’s also a very smart risk-reward system in your transformed state: your monster’s health bar is constantly draining as time goes on, and you don’t change back in time, you die.
One of the most highly regarded innovations in the game is a morality system. Morality was something that was not new to games, tons of CRPGs like the early Fallouts had moral choices that were far more complicated, but The Suffering was an early adopter in the mainstream console space. At the very beginning, you find out that Torque is on death row for murdering his family, a crime that he’s not even sure if he committed. As you go through the game, you’re presented with binary moral choices about how to treat NPCs. A demonic voice tries to move you to violence while your wife’s voice encourages you to show mercy. How you react ends up coloring the ending of the game, which reveals Torque’s guilt or innocence.
What this Schrodinger’s Cat-like situation creates is something that circumvents a problem seen in a lot of games: ludo-narrative dissonance. Often times in games, the character will be acting one way, but once control is given back to the player, they will make choices that contradict the character that has been set up. One of the most famous examples of this is in Uncharted, where Nathan Drake cracks wise through all the cutscenes, but murders hundreds of people during gameplay. There’s a disconnect there that doesn’t quite line up and causes problems for the player.
With The Suffering, your character intentionally remains a mystery until the game sees how you play. If the initial setup of the game established your innocence, then you made the choice to murder NPCs, this may cause that dissonance, but instead the game allows YOU to make decisions that will color the history of the character, making it all fit together tonally in the end. Silent Hill 2 had this to some extent, where it tracked how played to determine the ending, but all of the elements of The Suffering perfectly line up with this more overt version of a morality system, making for a tight, consistent package.
The direction they took with Ties that Bind ended up being very disappointing. I would have much preferred if they had made the franchise more of a thematic anthology than just following Torque to a different location. Doing something more akin to the Bioshock to Bioshock Infinite transition would have been an interesting way to explore the franchise, as the theme of testing a morally ambiguous character by running them through a psychologically intense location is a strong anchor for a franchise. Hopefully, whoever holds the rights figures out a good angle to take and brings The Suffering back in a bold way, as the mainstream horror genre has evolved into the type of game this was 15 years ago.