Alright, so two weeks ago we took a look at the all-but-forgotten horror game The Suffering. It was an ambitious and successful game which was clearly meant to be the start of a franchise. So what went wrong? Why did the franchise not take off? Well this week we’re going to be taking a look at the second and final game of the series, The Suffering: Ties That Bind, in our search for an answer as to why these two games didn’t end up becoming a full series.
Ties That Bind picks up immediately after the end of the fist Suffering game. The main character Torque has remembered what really happened to his family, and in a nice bit of interactivity, the game will read a save file from the first The Suffering, the story will change depending on the moral choices the player made in the first game. Eventually Torque winds up in Baltimore where he is kidnapped by a vague yet sinister organization intent on researching the monsters unleashed in the earthquake in the first game. The monsters, which were a physical manifestation of all the death and suffering in the prison in the first game, are overrunning Baltimore now for some reason.
The first game had some amazing visual style, but with some very poor graphics even for its time. The second one, released a year later, somehow manages to have even worse graphics. The textures on the scenery all blend together. Everything looks incredibly flat and lifeless. There are some new monster designs, but they lack the visual pop of the designs from the first game.
The voice acting in Ties That Bind frankly leaves a lot to be desired. Back in 2005 when this game was released, voice acting was not as good as it is today. It was still largely a wasteland of C level drama students. Even by that standard, Ties That Bind has atrocious voice acting. It’s not even the funny kind of bad like the original Resident Evil. Instead it’s just really flat dialogue, often spoken by characters who sound like they’re right in your ear even though they are several rooms away.
Even the actual core gameplay has taken a step back since the first Suffering game. Perhaps the most important difference is that the player no longer carries healing items with them. Instead, the player can only use the healing items as they’re found. The player is also limited to only carrying two weapons at a time. So that’s a huge step backward in terms of how both health and weaponry are handled in the game. Also, the element of exploration feels like it is gone. Instead the player simply moves from one scripted scene to the next with very little else going on.
The Suffering: Ties That Bind is a major step backward. It ignores everything that made the original Suffering game in favor of making a far more generic, more action-oriented game. I think I understand now what sunk the Suffering franchise. The publisher, Midway, was experiencing significant financial difficulties and rushed out a half-baked sequel to a recent hit. However, the fact of the matter is that Ties That Bind was not a good game and if this is the quality we could have expected from future installments, maybe it’s for the best that The Suffering ended so early.
