Bridging the gap between nineties-eighties slasher movies and gaming, Suffer the Night makes its mark on the horror genre with a fresh approach, inspired by the golden age of video gaming. The indie outfit, based in California, has a healthy penchant for the nostalgic. Having previously released titles such as Weeping Falls Massacre, Terror at Oakheart and Massacre at the Mirage; Suffer the Night completes a collection of retro-inspired games that each pay excellent homage to the movies many of us grew up watching. It’s the gaming equivalent of stepping into an old yet comfy pair of moccasins.

Story and Gameplay

The game opens with the protagonist, a young woman calling herself Stacy Linden, awaking in the night while alone in her cabin. A storm is setting the perfect horror scene as flashes of lightning pair with the battering of rain on the windows. Deciding she is hungry, Stacey heads for the kitchen where we are tasked with making a late-night/early morning (one of these, because it’s still dark outside) snack of eggs on toast and a steaming cup of coffee to wash it down with. Perhaps in a bid to familarize the player with the basic controls, this was a down to me, the gamer, to do.

With the weight of the abject responsibility given to me to fix my own breakfast (or late-night snack), I searched for the required ingredients, donned my chef’s hat (the wife told me this wasn’t needed but it just felt right) and got to work.

In some strange way, the eggs and coffee quest was somewhat enjoyable. It served its purpose well and there’s something satisfying about cooking eggs, albeit in a digital world. After another household chore of doing some laundry, the bell at the front door chimed it’s taunting chime. Rushing up the stairs to see who was calling upon me in the middle of a storm, I discovered an envelope had been posted through the door. Opening the unsolicited mail I found a floppy disc – the game had started.

Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend

If there was one thing that I could change about Suffer the Night it would be the darkness of the early parts of the game. I understand that it help set the tone, but here it’s overdone to a point I found myself wandering around in the dark looking for a light switch.

By introducing the flashlight at the very start of the game would have avoided such irksome gameplay, and so early on.

A Text-Based Adventure with a Malevolent Edge

The disc turned out to be a retrotastic text-based adventure game that seemed pretty run-of-the-mill. However, it soon became clear that underneath the innocent veneer of a text-based adventure, something sinister resided. I didn’t have to wait for long for the nefarious underbelly of the game to reveal itself as the game’s world began to play out in the surroundings of my cosy cabin bedroom.

As horror and reality collide, Stacey must find her way to the end of the game and find the key to ridding herself of the entity to end her nightmare.

Specifications

Minimum

• OS *: Microsoft Windows 7
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz / AMD Athlon X2 64 2.4GHz
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 760
• Storage: 8 GB available space

Recommended

• OS: Microsoft Windows 10
• Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-9600K CPU @ 3.70GHz
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070
• Storage: 8 GB available space

Summary

Suffer the Night does a commendable job in mixing both worlds within the game. It’s classic horror cinema but that’s where the charm is to be found in Tainted Pacts catalog. While there are scarier games out there, Suffer the Night breaks the proverbial mode with a unique approach that wonderfully serves its purpose of taking the gamer back to the simpler times of gaming and the sheer cheesiness of eighties horror cinema that made it so special.