The Works of Mercy

What would you do if a stranger on the phone told you to kill a random person? What if that stranger was holding your family hostage? That's the terrifying reality we're dealing with in The Works of Mercy, a brand new horror game that tries to show the lengths somebody will go when they have nothing left to lose. And while it has a compelling enough premise and a dark and twisted story, this is ultimately a frightless first-person horror adventure that seems more afraid of showing us anything gory than trying to scare its audience.

This would normally be the point of the review where I introduce you to the protagonist and talk about their plight. Unfortunately, the game isn't interested in filling in any of the details or giving us context. We discover through a one-sided phone conversation that our nameless hero's wife and daughter have been kidnapped by a crazy person. What does he want? Well, it's unclear at first, but killing a sex worker does seem to be on the agenda.

As horror games go, this is actually a pretty good premise. It feels like the kind of setup you would see in a low-budget horror movie, and is rife with possibilities. But I can't help but feel like almost every aspect of this game was mishandled in one way or another. This is a short, predictable and ultimately boring horror game that looks and plays the part, but holds the best stuff back and is scare-free all the way up to the very end.

This is a game about becoming a serial killer, so you would think that it would be filled with a lot of brutal murders. The gory and gruesome kills are largely what the audience is looking for from this type of story, yet there's nothing like that here. Take the very first target, a call girl who has the misfortune of being assigned to the wrong client. The person on the phone tells us that everything is set up and there are explosives rigged to a toothbrush, so all we need to do is convince her to brush her teeth and then BOOM. A pretty good kill, right? The only problem is that we don't actually see any of this. She shuts the door, the game fades out, we hear a sound and then, when we open the door, we see a lifeless corpse with a partially blown off face.

The problem is that this is how The Works of Mercy treats all of the kills. Even when you eventually get to see what happens, it's never as satisfying as you would expect. And this is kind of a big deal, since it always feels like the game is building to something, only to then sheepishly pull back at the worst moments. And this doesn't just extend to the kills, but also the story as a whole. It has one of those endings that is predictable from the opening moments and executed in the most anticlimactic way possible. I had almost no reaction at all when the credits rolled after 75 minutes. The truth is, this story could have been told in half that time.

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I think a lot of the problem comes down to there just not being much to do. There aren't a whole lot of puzzles here and most of the game involves walking around your swanky apartment waiting for something to happen. Usually that something is a phone call, so a lot of this game is spent just looking at a telephone. There are a couple trippy moments where we're investigating an old hospital or the middle of the woods, but these are linear stages where you mostly just follow the path and wait for something to happen. The problem is that the something that happens is neither scary nor interesting; it's just a thing we're supposed to care about for some reason.

And that's the problem I had with this whole game -- I just didn't care. We're given no reason to connect with the protagonist beyond knowing that his family is in danger and he doesn't have to be pushed very hard to kill women, so when the game tries talk about the family's history of abuse, the whole thing falls flat and feels insincere. This is a character that spends the entire game making the worst possible decisions, so it's nearly impossible for us to root for him. Had we gotten to know this character and his life, the final big twist at the end would have likely had more of an impact. Like everything else in the game, the best stuff seems to happen off screen.

With a story involving kidnapped family members and a father forced to become a serial killer, you probably expect The Works of Mercy to be a dark and gruesome ride through all the horror tropes. Unfortunately, this is a tame and scare-free experience set in a boring apartment with a predictable story and bad writing. It's a game built around building suspense, and yet it never gives us any sort of payoff. It's bad enough when a horror game lacks any genuine scares, but The Works of Mercy makes it worse by being toothless and boring.