The Mortuary Assistant Review (PS5) – While I play my fair share of games on the hardware, I’m not much of a PC gamer. Some games come around that make me curious enough to jump on my computer, while others make me wish they were on PS5. Thankfully, The Mortuary Assistant didn’t catch my eye until last year. Thanks to my backlog, I couldn’t get to it until the PS5 version was announced.
Unfortunately, though, I wish I had just played it on PC.
The Mortuary Assistant Review (PS5) – Clunky Controls Haunt This Ambitious Title
Dead Work
The Mortuary Assistant is an interesting concept. Sure, making a mortuary haunted is an easy choice, but having to work in it is a welcome element. Rebecca has been working at this mortuary, River Fields Mortuary, for a couple weeks now. You pick up Rebecca’s story as she talks to her grandma in a diner. Her grandma warns her about River Fields, but Rebecca dismisses them as normal social fears of the concept of death.
However, unlike the last few weeks, this shift is her first shift alone. Naturally, it’s the graveyard shift. Head mortician, Raymond, sees you around the morgue as a tutorial and then leaves you to your work. As you go about your business, strange events start happening. Naturally, they’re small things at first, like a window closing or a shadow disappearing in the distance.
As you process more bodies, bigger events pop up. This is when the pieces of the puzzle start coming together. A demon holds sway over this mortuary, and it’s up to you to figure out who the demon is through observation of the bodies and the happenings around you. Early on, you learn that Raymond already started research on the demon, trying to determine the identity of the demon. His research consists of different runes and explanations with them. You then apply that knowledge to what you find on the bodies to catch the demon in a possession and dispatch it.
Work Is Scary
This premise affected me in a way I did not expect. I have worked for the last 20 years, doing several different kinds of jobs. I know full well that self-defeating drive to keep going to a job and doing said job, no matter how badly it affects me. Money keeps me alive. In a way, The Mortuary Assistant emulates that sensation.
In order to do your mortuary work, you have to suffer through all kinds of creepy and dangerous happenings. You see them get closer and more aggressive, but you still know you have a job to do. So you do it, hoping that the process gets you to the outcome you want. There are no illusions that this is anything but a game, but the effect that comes with its gameplay loop is oddly effective.
Just the idea of being compelled to complete a day-to-day job that vividly wants to destroy you is both hyperbolic and relatable. That touch of realism adds an obligation to endure the horror that other games just don’t create. Granted, this is more of a personal response to it, but the effort put into concept still deserves recognition.
That said, the game isn’t anything groundbreaking when it comes to visuals or sound design. Details still remain vivid, though, even if they lack the level of realism found in big budget titles. With that said, the developer definitely put extra graphical detail into the more intense models. I mean, just looking at at the opened mouth of a corpse proves unsettling on its own. Manipulating and preparing those corpses for burial and cremation adds to that effect.
Clumsy Inputs
Play The Mortuary Assistant for more than 5 minutes, and you already know this game was made for PC. I say this because the controls lack much quality optimization. Moving around the mortuary and picking things up works just as expected, even if a bit on the clunky side. The problems start when working on the corpses.
For instance, the game shows a slider for certain actions, like sewing a mouth shut. The slider leans at specific angles to match the movement, making the directions theoretically self-explanatory. However, getting the movements to register takes some finagling. The actual movement needed to move the slider never matches it, and moving between multiple sliders makes it even more challenging.
When trying to move one slider, your cursor moves to the other slider. While far from ideal, the cumbersome controls can get the job done after a bit of fiddling.
The biggest neglect with bringing The Mortuary Assistant to console has to be menu navigation. All of the heads-up displays in the game consist of real-world objects in some form or another, like a clipboard or a computer screen. A highlight cursor appears around an icon or a piece of writing, and you move that cursor from icon to icon.
With each patient, you take notes on your clipboard and then plug those notes into a computer. To do that, you select the information, then move over your cursor to the icons on the computer screen and find where that information goes. Then, you click that space to enter the information in the computer. This on its own proves a tedious routine, which oddly enough feels like a simulation of the work itself.
The problem with this is the lack of intuitive movement of the cursor between icons. In order to back out of a screen, you need to move the cursor to an X in the corner of the window to close said screen. This sounds simple, but the game more often bypasses the X and moves the cursor to a different icon or menu altogether.
While specific to multi-menu situations, this problem still persists in other menus. When managing your inventory, the cursor itself is hard to see. The highlight shows barely any difference to the borders of other icons. Thankfully, the game won’t let you use something you can’t use in a situation. Still, the overall cumbersome nature of navigating menus with a controller holds this game back quite a bit. In a way, it can be acclimated to, for the most part. After all, the game’s overall pace never forces you to move too quickly. Still, not everyone has the level of patience to struggle through that experience.
Perhaps using the joystick as a mouse could have been a better control option or at least an option.
Victim Of A Lackluster Port
Knowing that one person created The Mortuary Assistant both explains and justifies some of the shortcomings of this port. With the right audience, all of that can be forgiven. Considering the concept and what it sets out to do, horror fans should still try out this game.
Although, the finicky controls and menu navigation, which are both fundamental to the gameplay loop, bring down the experience a great deal. Without a doubt, there’s a cool horror concept here. If you play on console, though, you will have to suffer through the controls.
Review code kindly provided by publisher.
The Mortuary Assistant is available now on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series, and PC.
Review code generously provided by PR.