The Suffering

This is a game that needs to be played on Surround Sound (Pro Logic) or with a good set of headphones. It needs to be loud in the room, and it needs to be dark. It should be like any good horror movie.

After a few moments into it, it’s likely you’ll forget about "Resident Evil" and its repetition.

A surprising twist to the horror genre. With extremely creative monsters, an unique setting and quite a bit of replayability, The Suffering provides a sense of where the survival horror game could be going within future titles.

Told in fragments along the way, the story resolves differently, depending on whether you torture and kill other humans or help them survive. Either way, the eerie atmosphere will scare you straighter than an "Oz" box set.

One of the goriest, sweariest action games out there but with some nice touches and a decent combat system. [GamesMaster]

As it is though, it's a good, solid, disquieting action game that ought to serve fans of the macabre and whodunnit-with-demons perfectly adequately, but stands little chance of threatening the crowns of the Silent Hills, Resident Evils and Project Zeros of this and other worlds.

It's not that this is a bad game, but to ignore the more important elements of gameplay in order to add more gratuitous elements to the cauldron is unforgivable, and in that sense The Suffering is most similar to Soldier of Fortune II and the like. [June 2004, p.123]

This is one of my favorite horror titles for the PlayStation 2, i enjoyed the gameplay and atmosphere as well as the in game enemies based on different forms of the death penalty. This game is by no means perfect, but i highly recommend playing this game if your a fan of action/horror titles.

I can tell this came from a time when "scary" or "thrilling" meant gore and unnecessary violence. I think the plot of this game is interesting - end up on death row and things go south immediately when you get there, so you need to investigate what these things are that are killing everyone in the prison, and what you've got to do with everything happening around you. Story-wise, I'm invested. However, this is definitely a dated game. Character models look super goofy (it's safe to assume that more detail and work went towards the next generation of consoles this was made on). The dialogue is also pretty bland and doesn't hold up too well. I also sense that some enemies were inspired by Silent Hill, which is pretty neat. This is worth a play if you're interested, and definitely worth a run through if the story catches your attention. But that's it.

Solid gamefeel and a interesting design of enemies and concepts, all around a central idea of crime, karma and morality. The only real bad aspect is the transformation mechanic.

alright experience although I'm more of a survival horror fan so it's not entirely my cup of tea, fun time but don't see myself revisiting it any time soon

after so many years, i feel ready to give a slight review. this game was boring, the graphics were ugly even in 2004, the horror was not present. the monsters were ugly af, gameplay was bad and the game gave a ugly motion sickness feeling, i was playing this with my cousin back then and we both were super disappointed in this game. i hope this will never get a remake