The recent renaissance of horror games has led to all manner of new experiences both large and small finding success on livestreams and let’s plays. For a while there, it seemed like every week brought with it a new horror game that was taking Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok by storm. Two years ago, The Mortuary Assistant was most certainly one of those games.
Now in 2024, The Mortuary Assistant: Definitive Edition is here on PS5 with added lore, a new embalming-only mode, new haunt events, and a seasonal event in February, along with the promise of new achievements, bodies, and performance improvements. Does this embalming simulator with a dash of the demonic stick the landing, or is it dead on arrival? Let’s find out.
A Unique and Gripping Horror Experience
The Mortuary Assistant: Definitive Edition is a unique and capable horror game for a number of reasons, but it all starts with the story. As the name implies, you play as the new assistant for a mortician, but it quickly becomes clear during your first shift that you’ll be doing more than just embalming corpses.
As it turns out, the mortician you’re working under is also someone who fights demons. Specifically, the kind of demons that are looking to enter our world by possessing one of the bodies you’re embalming, or possibly even you.
The premise is simple, but it’s paired with a number of different endings that expand upon the overall lore of the world, as well as the backstory of the main character, Rebecca. The story would have been serviceable if the game had been about a no-name protagonist fighting demons. However, adding a character with a dark past allows the story to take center stage as part of the potential scares and, of course, the possible endings.
The game plays out in “shifts,” each session consisting of a single night. You’re tasked with embalming three bodies while also using various tools and observations to figure out which one is playing host to the demon that’s stalking you.
Each shift can end in several different ways. There are good and bad endings, but others require you to go beyond your nightly duties to see additional lore about your world and even a resolution for Rebecca’s past struggles.
It’s a compelling setup that ties directly into the gameplay. It’s not the most in-depth story, nor particularly deep, but it establishes a great atmosphere and premise for everything you’ll be doing. At the end of the day, a horror game lives or dies based on its atmosphere.
At the end of the day, though, the story is not why you’ll check out The Mortuary Assistant. No, the unique gameplay loop and randomized horror elements made this game the success it is today.
For those who haven’t played it, The Mortuary Assistant’s gameplay has you navigating several rooms within a single building, including a morgue, embalming room, front office, and janitor closet, and others. You’ll do so in first-person, using a clipboard to track the embalming process for each body.
For each “shift,” the location of the items you’ll need is randomly chosen (with a nod to this in one of the notes you can find). This keeps you on your toes, but after the first body is done each night, you’ll become familiar with the location of everything. Thanks to how the scares work, it becomes routine but not repetitive.
Random events will occur while you’re performing your responsibilities. You can adjust the frequency of these in the main menu, but they range from subtle to outright terrifying. Sometimes, you’ll pick up your clipboard and see a horrific message scrawled across the paperwork. Other times, you’ll turn your camera and spot a shadowy figure watching you from a corner or down a nearby hall.
In other cases, scares will be more sudden, like the body you’re embalming suddenly sitting up and yelling at you in a demonic voice or someone talking to you from outside one of the windows. The fear of what the next scare would be kept me on my toes every moment of every shift.
As the night goes on, you’ll also need to deduce which body is possessed and the name of the demon inhabiting it. Discovering the demon’s name involves using a paper item that bursts into flames when you’re near one of its sigils. As time passes, you can discover up to four sigils that you’ll look for on the office computer within a larger database of demons.
When the time comes, you’ll place a mark with the demon’s name on the body you think is possessed before cremating it to finish your shift. This basic loop is repeated across your shifts, but it’s harrowing to send the body into the fire every time, hoping you got everything right.
This gameplay and story, along with the wide variety of scares, made The Mortuary Assistant a massive success on PC. Now that I’ve spent many nights in the PS5 version unlocking the game’s endings, I would say that my experience has been pretty positive compared to what I played on the PC.
The biggest issues I encountered while playing the PS5 version were visual bugs, awkward controls, and repetitive scare events. Before I get into these, though, I will say that I didn’t run into any game-breaking bugs that forced me to restart my shift, something that did happen more than once when I played the PC version.
The most egregious issue is how the controls were translated to the console. I had to finesse the sensitivity to make the movement feel accurate enough to pick up the small tools and items needed for each shift, but even then, it never felt quite accurate enough to be natural.
The issue also extends to the menus, including the inventory and the computer interface you’ll use every time you catalog a body or look up a demon. Instead of giving you a cursor or a reticule so you can move freely, the menus require you to navigate with the D-pad and subtly highlight your selection.
Again, I adapted to it as time passed, but the issues kept creeping up when I had to do something simple like transferring scars and marks to the computer system. This required me to select one and then tap over to the category on the computer before selecting the second field. Little things like that needlessly slow things down when playing with a controller.
None of it was enough to diminish my enjoyment, but some of the other bugs I encountered in conjunction with the controls took some of the wind out of the game’s sails.
A Few Bugs Snuck in With the Demons
The presentation in The Mortuary Assistant: Definitive Edition can be a mixed bag, even in the PS5 version. Some elements are exceptional, others look dated, and others result from bugs the publisher has said will be addressed in a future patch (likely the week after this review goes live).
I’ll start with the positives, which include the environments and scares. The building where you perform your work is almost a character in and of itself (especially when doors start slamming on their own). The sense of atmosphere and the detail in all of the rooms make you feel a sense of place as you go about your work.
Despite the controls when using the computer system, the overall retro look and feel of the UI is also fun, and the website where you research demons feels like something out of the 90s. During some of the scare sequences, you’ll also be taken to new environments that feel a mixture of foreboding, claustrophobic, or surreal based on the nature of the vision.
The game feels dated in the animations and character models. The bodies are detailed enough, but cutscenes with facial animation can look stiff and fall into the uncanny valley pretty often. The same goes for the animations when you’re wiring the jaw shut or injecting embalming fluid. The movements with the controller translate to awkward animations, which can break immersion temporarily.
As I mentioned, the game also has a few noticeable bugs at launch (though a patch is in the works as of this writing). The most intrusive one I encountered twice was a broken texture during two of the longer scare sequences. Where a character or scene should have been, there was just a floating purple block. It was an obvious visual glitch, completely removing any fear associated with the scene.
Other players have also reported missing sound effects like footsteps, which I hope will be patched out soon. I will come back to update the review once I can confirm. In the meantime, my experience with The Mortuary Assistant: Definitive Edition on PS5 was largely positive. When it was firing on all cylinders, it was easily one of the scariest and most atmospheric titles I’ve ever played.
Here’s hoping that, with a few updates, it can smooth out some of the rough edges. At that point, it would be one of the scariest horror games on the PS5.
Final Score: 8.0/10
Review code provided by the publisher
Article by – Bradley Ramsey
Insert date – 8/06/2024