The Mortuary Assistant: Where Every Body Tells a Dark Story

Death is the end of the line, but not in this game. 

Death is only the beginning. 

The Mortuary Assistant is a single-player indie horror game where the dead can hurt you. Developed by DarkStone Digital, The Mortuary Assistant was released August 2, 2022. The game has just recently celebrated its three year anniversary. It is available on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Windows. 

With a short run time of two hours, The Mortuary Assistant tackles its story beautifully. The story is complex and has many layers. The player follows the character Rebecca as she does her job as a mortuary assistant. The main goals are to prepare bodies for embalming, hunt for a demon, and avoid getting possessed. 

As the player continues you’ll come to realize this isn’t just a job. It’s a ritual. And something is watching. That something is a demon. Rebecca needs to continue her job and inspect bodies to find the demon. While doing so she is tormented by her past and the effects of possession. 

To avoid getting possessed the player must find out the name of the demon, which cadaver it is possessing, and destroy the possessed body to survive. The player must do all of this while on a time crunch. The game is two hours long and by the hour and a half mark Rebecca can succumb to possession at any point- leading to an ending of the game. 

There are eight different endings to The Mortuary Assistant. Two endings out of the eight are secret endings. There are the good endings and the bad ones. Some have Rebecca confront her demons- figuratively and literally- others are downright depressing. When playing, I only managed to get one secret ending and five of the others. 

During my play throughs, The Mortuary Assistant had a creepy tone the entire time. Performing the embalmings is uncomfortable and the added factor of the character being completely alone in the mortuary adds to growing paranoia. There were plenty of jumpscares and simple scares that crawled under my skin and had shivers running down my spine. The Mortuary Assistant is one of those games I made the mistake of playing for the first time late at night and home alone- safe to say since then I’ve had to play with the lights on and during the day. 

I have only two issues with The Mortuary Assistant. The first is the graphics and animation, for the price of the game they’re decent but I felt like they were lacking. There were also a handful of weird bugs throughout my play throughs, like symbols not showing up where they needed to be, functions not working properly, and once or twice my game crashed. 

With that all being said, I feel like the good parts of The Mortuary Assistant made up for those issues. 

The scares in The Mortuary Assistant got me every single time, the horror genuinely succeeds in being absolutely upsetting. The constant threat of a scare around the corner kept me engaged. 

What else kept me engaged was the embalming process. Call it morbid curiosity, but the uncomfortable and gross process captured me. What adds to the uncomfortable atmosphere is the sound effects as well, which are gross and unsettling. I’ll admit, in the beginning the process the player must do is confusing. However after doing it once or twice, it's easy to pick up on. 

The thing I absolutely love about The Mortuary Assistant is the replayability. No two playthroughs are the same. The scares and other elements are randomized with each game, making replays not repetitive. The only repetition is the key important parts of the game and certain tell tale signs that the player learns to identify. The difference between playthroughs and the multiple endings makes replaying interesting and not just a rehashing of the same thing over and over. 

Overall, The Mortuary Assistant is one of my favorite games and for anyone with an interest in the supernatural, horror, and mysteries, I highly recommend it. 

My Rating: