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The Suffering was heralded as gory, bloody, and horrifying. It delivered on all of those counts, though the degree of horror diminishes rapidly after the first few levels and virtually vanishes toward the end.
As the story begins, you are Torque, arriving at prison after having been commited for killing your own sons and wife. Unfortunately, Torque does not recall any of this. The dark tale of his crime, and that of the prison, unfolds through character interactions, flashbacks and eerie, creepy sequences like answering the phone to listen to dead people. The environments, monsters and later Torque himself are pretty gruesome and are designed to be horrific, nightmarish things.
While this all starts out being pretty terrifying, it quickly loses that edge as the story unfolds. Once the monsters become well-known and less frightening, they are nothing more than additional bad guys to destroy on your way to escaping the prison. In fact, in the latter part of the game, I was so well-stocked with weapons and ammo that I was running around the levels, howling at my TV like a crack-addled psychopath, looking for the next not-so-scary monster to blast.
Howling and shooting aside, the game does offer a compelling story, but refrains from really laying out every last detail in the narrative. Some of the pieces can be found through the levels, some in the different available endings. This, along with multiple levels of difficulty, provides some motivation for playing through the game more than once. The only problem with this, of course, is that since you already know what will happen, more or less, the horror and suspense will not really be there for you in the early levels after the first time through.
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