The Mortuary Assistant – Review

Honestly, I’m surprised I didn’t have nightmares after playing The Mortuary Assistant late at night. In the opening sequence, players are cautioned that the game is based on real-life paranormal experiences and that they should seek help from a religious institution or paranormal investigators if they begin to experience any strange phenomena or a significant shift in their own or other people’s behaviour. Already on edge before starting The Mortuary Assistant, I felt a chill run through me as I read the opening message.

Player exploration and item discovery occur in both the morgue and Rebecca’s apartment. In the first scene of The Mortuary Assistant, we hear Rebecca Owens discussing her internship at a funeral home with her grandmother. Rebecca seems dedicated to her work as an embalmer, but her grandmother is understandably concerned about the paranormal occurrences she has heard of at the morgue. Rebecca’s embalming skills appear to be adequate throughout the tutorial, but her instructor eventually dismisses her. The following evening, however, she receives a call to come into the office, and while there, her mentor fills her in on the situation.

Rebecca has a demon attached to her thanks to an extraterrestrial force; she needs to know the demon’s name in order to cast it out. Players learn about the exorcism process from cassette tapes and use the items Rebecca left behind to become a mortician’s assistant and supernatural investigator in their pursuit of the demon. As the night progresses, Rebecca’s embalming experiences grow increasingly disturbing, and players must work quickly to identify the demon’s vessel body and learn its name before it can possess Rebecca. Despite the game’s potential for frightening moments, it also features a humorous element that can provide a welcome break from the horror. Food is on display in her apartment, and the descriptions on the cereal boxes made me laugh.

When I first stayed in the mortuary to embalm three bodies, a thunderstorm rolled in, adding to my sense of foreboding with its rumblings and seemingly supernatural occurrences. There was a minor hiccup where I accidentally brought rain inside by opening and closing the back door during a downpour, but this was fixed when I went to the front door.

Players will be on edge due to the foreboding atmosphere created by the weather and the morgue’s design and exploration. Players may sense danger in the air as they explore the corridors leading from the lobby to the embalming room, and then from the embalming room to the body storage and incinerator. If you’re quick enough, you can catch it yourself sometimes.

One of the most fascinating and revolting sequences involves the actual embalming of the bodies. A nice, thought-out addition to the game is the fact that the bodies on the gurney have varying skin tones and body types, each of which can be treated. Embalming and storing a body is a multi-step process that requires players to make realistic incisions and listen to gruesome noises. Once the initial shock has worn off, the embalming routine can be followed with relative ease; what makes it challenging is the demon’s interference in Rebecca’s mind.

There are three indications that a spirit is near. The lights will start to dim and brighten briefly. The phone will ring, but no one will answer. Not the Hash-Slinging Slasher after all; you have the wrong spirit. The demonic entities depicted in The Mortuary Assistant are, in fact, very real and extremely frightening. The lights will actually flicker, people will become possessed and start moving or talking, there will be things lurking in every corner, and aggressive, random knocks on doors or windows will make you jump.

The Mortuary Assistant’s intricate design and variety of endings are two of its strongest points. Players need to pay attention to both the major and minor scares in order to exorcise the right demon, or else they risk dire consequences. There are new scares in store for you with each morgue shift, but they are never obvious or cheap. In particular, the first playthrough scared the living daylights out of me due to the game’s gradual buildup of tension. In addition, as you progress through the game, you’ll uncover more of Rebecca’s backstory and the morgue’s origins.

The Mortuary Assistant is fantastic, but there were a few problems that emerged. Having to physically pull the rack out of the wall to get or return a body to its compartment was a bit complicated and frustrating, but the mechanic of pulling and pushing the gurney with the body down the hall was fine and worked to add some suspense. Instead of requiring the player to physically move the mouse to perform the embalming actions, it would have made more sense to have them click once to activate the shelf’s in or out motion.

The game’s characters have legible subtitles that appear when they speak, but some possessed dialogue, such as when the demon speaks through a body or when Rebecca thinks she hears someone say something in an empty room, was left without them. My usual reliance on subtitles meant that I missed some of the more chilling lines and threats, which was a bit of a letdown.

The Unity engine, on which the Mortuary Assistant was developed, is capable of producing some truly terrifying visuals when the time comes. However, when talking to a living person, the facial animations often seemed a bit choppy or too fast to match the pace of the conversation. Since there aren’t many opportunities for players to interact with one another while working in the morgue, this shouldn’t have too much of an impact on the game, but it still came as a surprise the first time it happened.

As far as I could tell, all the issues I encountered while playing The Mortuary Assistant were either very minor or had no real bearing on the game itself. The cast list in the credits overlaps so that no names are visible, for example, and the word “match” appears as “mathc” at one point, but these issues are easily fixedable typos.

You’ll be on the edge of your seat throughout The Mortuary Assistant’s roughly 5-hour play time, and you can easily return to play more shifts to find out more about Rebecca, the demons, and the morgue’s history. The Mortuary Assistant is the perfect game for you if you have what it takes to face your fears of the morgue and put them to rest by correctly embalming bodies and completing logic puzzles.