Agony Critic Reviews

If you like horror, the macabre or the notion of taking a personal voyage through Dante’s Inferno with a touch of Gigeresque visuals… this may be up your alley (or down your abyssal chasm).

Fortunately, the exquisiteness of such a raw and visceral infernal representation overshadows all the technical and game design problems. But when the gameplay becomes so insistent that it manages to break the horrible enchantment, it's trouble.

Agony is a good horror/stealth game, for sure the best representation of Hell ever seen in a game. Although if the visual impact is amazing, many of the mechanics don't work as they should, making the game at times too frustrating or difficult to explore.

Agony is a game of insane contrasts, both fascinating and embarrassing. Therefore I still don’t know whether its developers are geniuses or amateurs and although I believe it deserves a relatively high score, I actually cannot recommend it unconditionally.

At the end of the day, though, Agony exists with too much dissonance to be a completely enjoyable game. For as much as I liked the visual and audio designs, and they really are pretty great, the actual gameplay is just too frustrating and dull too much of the time. I think there’s a place for games that place style over substance, but Agony doesn’t quite stick the landing.

Agony is a game I really wanted to love and visually, the game looks rather impressive, even some of the early gameplay moments feel well crafted and fresh, yet, as a whole, Agony just doesn’t hold up against other games of the genre — at best, Agony feels like a lovechild between Red Barrel’s Outlast series and id Software’s 2016 Doom reboot, and at its worst, Agony feels like a game that probably needed a few more months in the crucible before inviting us all to join it down in Hell.

If you are predisposed toward the infernal if you enjoy the gory and the journey this game might be for you. If you are looking for solid gameplay and perpetual darkness is an issue, then you will see more devils than this vast hell can hold.

With a hint of art, this is a borderline horror trip through hell, with boring tasks and technical problems.

Agony is a survival horror adventure game with disturbing and grotesque visuals that sadly doesn´t match the high expectations we had on it. Most of the game mechanics are too frustrating, clunky and repetitive, but it also gives us freedom of exploration and shows a good level design. A game for the true hardcore fans of horror games.

It is dark, gritty, scary, explicit and daring. But it also is buggy, unbalanced, sometimes outright unfair and technically not as sound as it good have been.

Agony is the best video game representation of Hell ever created, but it's the only thing the game has got going for itself. With its lack of gameplay direction, poorly explained mechanics and bad pacing, playing Agony can be a hellish experience, and not for the reasons the development team intended.

A really great idea for a horror game, but it simply fails to deliver. Boring gameplay, bad voice acting and a lot more.

Despite the cuts, plenty of controversial stuff did make it into the game – for example, there’s a sinner who uses a baby like a mop. But here’s the thing: while unquestionably disgusting, it’s not scary. And coupled with lackluster gameplay mechanics, Agony quickly becomes a chore.

Many problems while descending into hell: The horror-adventure ist neither technically nor gameplay-wise well-engineered.

Agony does not quite reach the expectations we had for it. However, its ambiance and portrait of hell are quite disturbing.

A truly inspired and horrific depiction of Hell, attempting to prop up a mechanically nonexistent survival/horror early prototype for a game. Even the toughest of pentacle carving black metal fans will have a hard time pretending that they actually enjoyed and ‘got’ Agony.

The vision of hell introduced in Agony rivals the excellent final level of Painkiller. Unfortunately the game set in this wonderfully warped world isn't very interesting. For each upside there's at least one serious shortcoming. This controversial and ambitious game turned out to be dull and rather boring.

Agony is an ambitious game; it sought to give gamers an experience that they had never had before, which it does somewhat deliver, and I have to credit its developers for even the attempt. But this final product just doesn’t feel finished; this is more like an Early Access game – full of promise and great ideas but just lacking in content, polish and attention to detail.

I can't recommend this game as the payout of eye candy isn't worth the time you have to put in slogging through hell behind the eyes of a depressingly slow husk of a dead man.

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.