The Agony

My first impression of The Agony was curiosity - a small Russian studio, a premise about catacombs that bend the laws of physics, and a clear affection for the kind of pseudo-scientific eeriness that Strugatsky paperbacks used to conjure. That is a setup I will always at least follow to the menu screen. What you find once you get there is a Ren'Py visual novel built around a single disaster-night scenario: a couple, bandits, and a sprint into underground spaces where ordinary reality stops applying. The tone leans toward what the developer calls pseudo-sci-fi rather than pure mysticism, which is an interesting distinction - this is not a ghost story, it is something closer to a forgotten-laboratory unease, and for the first chapter or so that mood lands reasonably well. The branching structure is the mechanical core. Every decision you make feeds into one of four endings, and the pivot point sits early in the game, which means replaying for alternate outcomes costs you very little time. At roughly ninety minutes per run, The Agony knows it is a short thing and does not pad itself out. I appreciate that self-awareness. The soundtrack has picked up a "Great Soundtrack" community tag on Steam, and while I would stop short of calling it exceptional, it does commit to the subterranean atmosphere in a way the writing does not always manage to match. The writing is where things get genuinely complicated. KishMish Games is a Russian studio, and the English translation carries the texture of that - sentence structure occasionally lands sideways, character motivations blur at key moments, and several plot threads introduced with real promise simply do not get resolved across any of the four endings. Players who have spent time with this have noted that characters vanish without explanation and the conclusions feel less like payoffs and less like hard stops. Some choices that look meaningful turn out to be instant death branches rather than genuine divergences, which is a different kind of disappointment. For a certain reader - patient, drawn to the uncanny, willing to grant significant goodwill to a small team working at the edge of their resources - The Agony has a genuine, slightly bruised atmosphere worth sitting with. The premise of everyday people tumbling into catacombs that obey different physical laws is the sort of image that sticks. But if you want a visual novel where every thread has a satisfying knot at the end, or where the prose carries you past its rougher patches on the strength of its craft alone, you will likely feel the loose ends more than the atmosphere. It is a flawed short story, not a polished one, and the distance between those two things matters depending on what you came looking for.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on The Agony.