On The Suffering

Allow me to begin by stating that I am quite fond of horror - all horror media, whether it is written, painted, or filmed. I get a perverse thrill out of scaring the bejesus out of myself. Those of you who enjoy horror understand. Those of you who don't...well, don't and probably never will. I find that for the most part, the enjoyment of fear, unlike beer and living in New York, is not an acquired taste.

That said, I would like to express the sensation of disturbance I get from playing The Suffering. For those of you who don't know or don't care, The Suffering is a video game on the Playstation 2 console. In it, you take the role of a convicted killer named Torque - a man who supposedly beat his own wife to death, then drowned one of his children in a bathtub and threw the other out of a window. In other words, a thoroughly pleasant individual and someone who undoubtedly voted for Bush in the last election (ooh! Political barb! Political barb!) The kicker is that he doesn't remember what happened - he blacked out the entire incident. Well, as a game character states, conviction and guilt are two different things. The truth of the matter becomes a central focus throughout the game.

At any rate, no sooner does Torque arrive in his cell that all Hell breaks loose. Horrific creatures suddenly begin spewing out of the darkness like an army of distorted, altogether creepy and terribly disgusting ants. Your job, of course, is to simply make it out of there alive. Killing lots of demons in the process. Now, I'm sure you're all thinking, "Yeah, okay, so..." Of course, there is always a but. As Torque proceeds through the dark, ratty prison, he is frequently beset by visions of his dead wife and children who obliquely hint at how they died and what sort of person you are. You will also, as Torque, encounter circumstances that require a moral judgment call. For example: you find a corrections officer cowering underneath a staircase. Your wife's voice pleads that he's defenseless and needs help, while a grating, sinister voice growls that he's so much excess baggage whose only use is being a repository for bullets. Your moral quandary, then, is to decide whether to help this man or to gut him like a fish. Okay, so it's really only a moral quandary if you like dropping kittens into boiling water and eviscerating puppies, but you've got the option nevertheless. Protect the man, and your wife is so impressed by your strength of character that you can almost feel your faith in humanity increasing. Kill him, and you're rewarded with a lovely image of a blood-stained bathtub and an angry wife wondering why she married a sick bastard like you.

You get the idea. Moral "dilemmas" continue, your character develops, and by the end of the game you know whether or not Torque actually killed his wife and kids. So what's the problem? The game is involving...extremely involving...and I found myself coming to care a great deal for Torque and his family. Yeah, I can hear you saying, "Dude...it's just a game." True enough, but I can't see how anyone could argue that the games we play are not a reflection of ourselves. And since this is my blog, I'm allowed to be as damned sentimental as I want. So I came to care for Torque and for the status of his soul, and I genuinely wanted him to be a good person in spite of his remarkable dexterity with bladed weapons and firearms. And never mind the whole turning into a demon thing. Needless to say, I was quite the angel throughout the game, performing every good deed available to me and feeling mildly happier every time Torque's wife reaffirmed her faith in him.

You're probably really wondering now, "So what's the problem...?!" Well, by the time that I finished, being the anal perfectionist that I am, my curiosity was tugging at me more insistently than a grumpy six year-old. I wanted to see the other endings. This, then, meant that I would have to go through the game. And kill people. And find out that Torque isn't such a nice guy after all. Okay, okay, I get it: "It's just a game." Nevertheless, as I ran through the game a second time slaughtering people like so many lambs, I couldn't help but feel uncomfortable, even disturbed. True, it's just a game, but it's also a game that tells a definite story, and I am not an individual who enjoys finding out the protagonist of a story is a child-killer. And in a weak sort of way, the forced detachment I felt gunning people down - people who are begging for their lives - seems distantly related to the detachment a real killer must feel. I'm not going to pretend I understand what a killer feels like - I cringe to see injured insects thrashing; however, it simply seems that a killer must possess a certain degree of either detachment or psychosis...or else eventually come to possess the latter anyway. Perhaps it is a statement of my endless optimism that I have to believe most people would feel the same way. Although I can just imagine some thirteen year-old laughing at the guards he just detonated with a stick of dynamite, I still have to believe that only a truly damaged, malfunctioning human being could kill another without that twisting sensation inside his gut. Power, pleasure, the rush of the kill - all of that aside, I still have to believe that something inside screams for them to stop, and that the faces of those they've harmed haunt their dreams at night.

So in the end, what did I get for slowly throttling pieces of my own soul? An ending I didn't really want to see anyway, a rotten sort of taste in my mouth, the vague sensation of needing to go drown myself in the toilet, and six bucks out of my pocket to rent another game (Prince of Persia in this case) to cleanse myself of the mental abattoir I just dragged myself through. Pixelated faces didn't haunt my dreams, but I'm certainly haunted by something today. Maybe it's me.