The Mortuary Assistant: Definitive Edition review

Jump scares are too predictable these days. You see it all the time in movies, and learn to anticipate them due to the same old tropes being dredged out from lazy writer’s rooms. The horror genre needs to remain fresh to be impactful, especially when relying on making an audience jump out of their skin, and video games are no different. The Mortuary Assistant is a rarity – an uncut gem – that continually makes your heart leap out of your mouth, and those jump scares that have become stale in recent years are so unpredictable in Brian Clarke’s wonderfully fiendish game.

You play as a young woman called Rebecca who takes on a job at the shady River Fields Mortuary straight out of college. Your grandma tells you she’s not comfortable with you going there due to some rumours of the occult flying out of there, but you go regardless. After learning how things run by the guy in charge, you get to work on embalming your first corpse. It goes well, he seems impressed, but something doesn’t feel right. After going home thinking you’ve messed up, he calls you back in within hours to go and do the night shift all on your own.

It sets the story up pretty quickly, and within twenty minutes you’re grabbing bodies out of cold storage and getting to work, but not before finding out there’s a demonic force taking over them, and Rebecca is a stone’s throw from being next. What ensues is a terrifying journey through the night, and a race against time to find out what demon is attacking your mind and running amok within the mortuary, all while trying to do the actual job you were hired for. It’s intelligence is subtle as the layers aren’t apparent at first, but as you learn what you need to do, The Mortuary Assistant blooms into a game with many gruesome petals.

To uncover the demon, you must burn this paper to reveal sigils hidden around the mortuary. While embalming the cadavers, you’re also keeping an eye out for anything out of the ordinary, and doing your best to keep your wits about you. As you piece together clues and opinions on which body might be housing the demon, you’ll eventually have to place small tokens with the corresponding sigils you’ve found onto a circular tablet, then rest it on the body you believe is possessed. After this, you take it to the retort (cremation chamber) and burn it. There are multiple ways it can end depending on whether you’re right or not, but for your sake, let’s hope you made the right decision.

To piece together the clues, you have a database on the computer that helps you to find out the name of the demon through the correct sigil alignments, the different traits of the demons so you can potentially work out how the strange occurrences relate to what has been happening around you, how different markings on the bodies can represent the demon’s patterns, and more. Some clues and sightings are subtle, and others are as loud and terrifying as they come, but everything serves a purpose in working out what demon is terrorising you as you work on the three bodies during every shift.

The process of embalming is the same every time, and at first there’s a lot to take in. After a while, you’ll naturally move from one task to the next, but you can always check your clipboard to see what needs doing. Bring the body from cold storage with the gurney and inspect the body for markings, input them in the computer, then file the embalming report. Cut open the carotid artery and jugular vein and pump the embalming fluid into the body. Use a trocar to fill the abdominal cavity, clean up, and put the body back in cold story. It’s a straightforward process, but it’s what happens as you do this that can never be expected. Prepare to jump out of your skin without the ability to prepare for it.

Random banging of doors and lights turning off are the least of your worries. Shadowy creatures appearing in the distance, visions of your grandma clawing at the window from outside, corpses getting up and walking back towards cold storage, and new markings randomly appearing on the body are just a few of the things I encountered. The different demons act separately to each other, making every playthrough different. What unsettled me the most however, was the way Rebecca’s past plays into what she sees, whether via hallucinations, flashbacks, or changes within the embalming room.

I saw drug dens with heroin needles on a filthy table, only for the room to fill up with water and bodies to launch themselves towards me. A body hanging in front of me, with a suicide note I apparently wrote beside it, with voices filling my ears and leaving me uncomfortable. Through it all, there was one body with a severely scarred face, blaming me for something I knew nothing about. Rebecca’s story reveals itself little by little in The Mortuary Assistant, and it became a big reason I kept replaying and understanding more about what she went through in her life.

The Mortuary Assistant: Definitive Edition gives console players a chance to play a superb horror title that constantly keeps you on your toes. It’s a simple concept executed with clever gameplay and multiple layers, and the jump scares are so random you never know what will happen next. There were a few cases where the game froze on me and I had to reload, and it’s a little rough around the edges, but if you’re wanting to play something a little different, this is easily one of the best horror games we’ve had all year. Just make sure you’re ready to have a heart attack on more than one occasion.