Don’t you just hate being asked “Where do you get your ideas?” Putting that to a professional creative is like asking a machine operator which specific finger is the best one to press the on button with. I don’t know if people are expecting some kind of trade secret. “Oh you found me out. At night I plunge an obsidian dagger into the heart of a she-goat and use its blood to inscribe a prayer to Mother Hecate, and in her wisdom I am blessed with the knowledge of how best to draw parallels between everyday objects and sexual organs.” But whatever, here’s one creativity tip for free: if you can’t think of an interesting new idea, just take two proven concepts, force them to live together like two spiders in a jar and wait until they’ve either killed each other or come up with a mutually acceptable chore schedule. As was the case with The Mortuary Assistant. No sooner had I coined the concept of the “post-Dad game,” or game based around simulating a routine workaday task with some extra spice of fantasy or skill challenge to liven it up like a blob of Marmite on wholemeal toast, than someone had the idea to combine it with first person escape the room indie horror games.
And if there’s one genre where you badly need a unique hook to stand out – a metaphorical hook, Mr. Indistinct Home Invader, put that stupid thing away – it’s escape the room indie horror games. Browse Steam and itch.io for a while and you’ll soon see there’s no bottom to that well. You could set an indie horror game in every room of the San Francisco Downtown Hyatt and still have enough left over to do Fisherman’s Wharf as well. First impressions weren’t great with The Mortuary Assistant when it shows up with the usual generic poorly lit realistic environment and character design straight from the shit that comes free with the modelling software, you’re in an enclosed handful of rooms as a storm rages outside, Halloween store mannequins keep appearing briefly at the windows and by all the damned drinking problems of Stephen King protagonists do you have to open drawers a lot. Every new room, beeline to the nearest wooden desk and start opening and closing drawers like a savvy customer in a second hand furniture shop looking for ways to haggle a discount. But there’s more to it than pedestrian keyhunts and reject Slenderman fanart flicking the lights on and off.
The first thing we do in The Mortuary Assistant is learn how to assist a mortician, funnily enough. Well, I say “assist,” it’s more like “do all the bloody work while they sit around playing Doodle Jump.” You’re trained in the lengthy checklist of tasks required to embalm a body, and then right after the contract’s signed and your first night shift starts and you can no longer get the refund on your hilarious “Crack open a cold one with the boys” T-shirt the mortician rings up and goes “Oh by the way one of the bodies is possessed by a demon and they’ll kill you if you don’t do all this extra stuff I didn’t mention byyyye! Don’t call back, my phone’ll be off because I’m at my support group for people who are absolutely bloody useless.” So now we’ve got another checklist: figure out which body’s possessed, figure out which specific demon is possessing it, do a special thing that unpossesses it and if the demon ever makes you hallucinate a roomful of blood and people you’ve betrayed just try to, you know, humour it. And therein lies the game. So the first and most important question: is this horror game going to actually scare me, or just do the usual knockoff horror shit of making weird faces suddenly appear and go BOO and then giggle like a nine year old catching you out with the whoopie cushion.
Well, it’s undeniably unnerving. I guess the main character forgot her contact lenses today because she’s always putting her face like three inches from the corpse when she’s working on it and as I’m gleefully pounding nails into its jaw feeling like I’m stuck in an iron maiden with Mick Jagger my brain’s going “It’s gonna come to life. It’s gonna come to life. Or we’re going to start making out. Whatever breaks the tension, really.” But it never does come to life, or it never did for me, and then you turn around to pick up your scalpel and fucking Sadako from the Ring runs back inside a closet and call me a do it yourself laundry service because I just wet my pants. Thankfully the game never does the Paranormal Activity thing of suddenly and loudly banging two saucepans together to mark the jumpscares, it’s mostly just, turn around and there’s a corpse and the corpse disappears with no further comment. The game is at its most unnerving when it’s fucking with you in subtle ways. The faces at the windows, the flickering lights, the sound of distant laughter, the salty whiff of poorly held in urine – oh sorry that one was me. But every now and again it throws out one of its unsubtle hauntings, like the ceiling flies away and suddenly you’re in a phantasmal corridor full of hanging bodies that look like you.
And my first reaction to those is always “Oh what a relief,” which I doubt was the intended effect. ‘Cos it’s releasing all the tension the subtle effects have been building up, isn’t it. Glimpse a face in the dark and there’s still ambiguity. “Was that Sadako from the ring? Am I being fucked with?” Then suddenly she’s sitting on your chest trying to tuck your nose hairs under your eyelids and you’re like “Yep, I’m being fucked with.” See, the game’s designed to be replayed over and over to see all the endings, randomizing demon names and which corpse they’ve potentially mortgaged, but it loses effectiveness rapidly when you start figuring out the workings. There’s always going to be four or five big hauntings along the course of the shift and after a while they’re just an unofficial part of the checklist. File the report, wire the jaw, mix embalming fluid, hallucinate dingy apartment and receive harrowing reminder of former life as a heroin addict, lunch. And all the effect is lost if it’s a haunting you’ve seen before. Hi, dingy apartment, yeah, I know the drill. Here’s the tube, here’s the heroin, ghost lady in the bath, oh golly gosh what a harrowing sequence, are you done? Can I finish sticking tubes in this dead cunt now?
My wincing asshole damnation by fine praise summary of The Mortuary Assistant would be “a very brave attempt.” It’s certainly scary for the first few hours. I like the mechanics of the puzzle. We’re supposed to finger the possessed corpse based on which one seems “the most” haunted, and the vagueness of that makes it impossible to be certain. Hm, the upside down cross tattoo seems pretty damning, but then again the other one was getting really fucking chatty on the slab, guess we’ll flag them both maybes going into the swimsuit round. That plus the random subtle scares means there’s always some effective tension no matter how much you’ve seen before. But it’s not the sort of horror that stays with you and the unsubtle hauntings induce more eye rolling tolerance than terror after a while. Grandma’s outside the window asking to be let in again. Oh piss off, nana. I’m trying to find the stapler. There’s also a few very careless bugs, still. I ran into one where the game kept failing me for getting the demon name wrong even when I was certain it couldn’t be anything else. And that didn’t feel right, so I toddled off to the Steam discussion forum and sure enough this was a known bug. One way to fuck with our heads, I suppose, but all the immersion was stone dead after that. There’s no going back after you’ve shoved the haunted house backdrop to one side and demanded to speak to the manager.
