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Review: The Suffering - Ties That Bind
You didn’t pay your monster tax!
The Suffering: Ties That Bind tells the tale of Torque, who is doing jail time for murder at the start of the game. An inmate revolt erupts, but soon the player can guess that there’s more than that going on. Torque gets visions on his way through the chaos and sees various rather unhappy monsters slaughtering their way happily through his fellow inmates and guards alike. Torque escapes from the prison island in all of the confusion; from there on the game’s story is told while he visits various locations that have some relation to what brought him into jail in the first place. While exploring the places of his past, he keeps getting visions that tell, fragment by fragment, what happened to end him up behind bars. Ever deeper Torque penetrates his blurry past, and ever stranger things happen around him. Monstrous creatures appear, run through his field of view for a moment and disappear without a trace, leaving nothing behind but a path of destruction. The visions become ever stronger, up to the point of the borders of reality and hallucination itself becoming hard to see and you’re not really sure anymore what’s really happening and what’s confined to Torque’s brain.
Very soon, Torque is contacted by a strange scientist-y kind of guy who seems to be knowing a lot about Torque’s past and, bizarrely, his future and what’s going on as well. He directs Torque from place to place, giving him hints where he can find out more about the events that led to his incarceration - but what agenda is behind is? What about the unnamed woman who seems to have such large interest in Torque to try and have him captured? Which role does Torque’s former fellow inmate Blackmore play in the whole thing when he keeps showing up and tries to enrage Torque as much as possible?
In terms of gameplay, Ties That Bind is a perfectly normal action game that’s switchable between first and third person views. Various weapons can be found on the way, although Torque can only ever carry two of them at once. This makes combat a bit more tactical than in many other action games, and furthermore creates a nice tension in the player and takes on shades of survival horror games in combination with the general lack of ammo. Occasionally, you can work around the scarcity of bullets by skillfull waiting and hiding - the monsters sometimes start fighting among each other, which can save Torque quite some work.
In addition to health, there’s another factor that’s relevant in terms of game mechanics: Torque’s mental stability. Every time Torque kills a monster or is confronted with other uncomfortable things, his mental health suffers a bit and a second bar below the health gauge fills up. Once it’s full, Torque can turn himself into a monster that’s not only generally a lot stronger than him but can also plow through the enemies at relative ease with the use of various special moves. What’s unclear is whether Torque actually transforms into a monster, or if he’s only letting his inner demons rage freely, turning into a beast on a metaphorical level.
Every now and then, you run into situations where Torque needs to make a decision - the choice of helping or ignoring a civilian that’s being mugged and beat up, the choice of murdering or not murdering a security guard to prove to your fellow inmates that you’re still on their side, and so on. What you do in these situations influences Torque’s “morality”, and with it the shape of the form he takes when he loses it and what the special moves in his monstrous form do. Moreover, the game comes with several endings; which of these you see is also influenced by Torque’s morality. The result of any given decision is usually made clear immediately in short visions following the act. If Torque chooses the moral path, his wife might appear and tell him how proud she is of him or that she might be able to forgive him; if he walks the path of evil, he might start hearing voices that ridicule the victim or try to justify his crimes. Even when there’s no concrete decision situation going on, Torque can drift off to evil, for example by killing innocents. This results in it being relatively easy to topple Torque’s morality to evil, but not quite as easy to keep it on the good side.
The problem with this is that the choices are usually limited to which of two parties you kill, which on the one hand gives the whole thing a nicely bitter aftertaste, but also further highlights the general linearity of the game. Which brigns us to the only real problem of Ties That Bind: the game is very, very linear. The feeling of being on rails is about as massive as in Jedi Knight 2 - wide roads are blocked in a rather unsubtle way by burning tram wagons or debris of crumbled buildings, all of the doors in a housing neighborhood except for the one you need to go through are locked or not even usable. Put bluntly, the game doesn’t exactly put a lot of effort in hiding that you have no choice about where to go or not go.
The obligatory bonus material is available in decent amounts in Ties that Bind. Most of it can be accessed via the menu on an entry called “Archives”, where the player is presented with three books: Jordan’s notebook, Consuela’s scrapbook and Carmen’s diary. Jordan’s notebook contains descriptions and images - also various concept sketches - of the monsters; Consuela apparently collects photographs and short descriptions of the locations that the plot is set in, and Carmen, Torque’s late wife, has pictures and texts about Torque’s past with her in her diary. The monster descriptions unlock when Torque meets the monsters in the game; Consuela’s scrapbook extends when you discover certain events or places within the levels, and Carmen’s diary fills up while you advance the plot. The sole exception of this are the last three entries Carmen has made, each of which become available when you’ve seen the corresponding ending.
Steel, Flesh and Blurry Road Signs
As with many other titles in the recent past, in Ties That Bind the PS2 is showing its age and general slight technological inferiority to the competition: every now and then, objects pop up out of nowhere, the game occasionally has some slowdown and the PS2 port generally simply doesn’t look as good as the XBox and PC versions. The polygon models of monsters, humens and level geometry alike are a bit blocky, the animations are a bit jerky at times and the textures on characters as well as landscape are often rather blurry; this doesn’t deteriorate the atmosphere the game creates rather impressively too much though. The special effects are pretty, but occasionally slow the game down even more - there are blur effects, color tints and the dirt and dust occasionally popping up during cutscenes, like we know from old movies.
The character designs are quite nice; particularly the various monsters are executed nicely gross. Flesh and metal meet and merge, bodies have outgrowths or holes in places where there shouldn’t be any, the faces are distorted and the anatomy in general almost always looks somehow unnatural. There’s one majorly nice idea in the character design: the monsters usually symbolise the bad aspects of mankind, which reflects in their looks. Creatures whose backs are pierced with lots of syringes are a demonic incarnation of drug abuse, monsters with blades in place of hands and feet stand in for the violence in the streets and large, corpse devouring beasts for greed - the ideas are mostly obvious, sometimes not quite as easy to see, but there is always the concept of symbolism behind the enemies’ design.
Sound
Even though the translation is well done except for rare screwups (highlight: “Insanity Mode” was translated as “Ausraster-Modus”) and the voiceovers are of high quality, the actors’ voices sometimes don’t quite fit the characters. The acting is mostly good, but just the actor of the lead character Torque often shows an unfortunate lack of expressiveness. Sadly, the DVD only contains the German language version - if you want to play Ties That Bind in original sound, you’ll have to go importing it from the UK or somewhere else. The voiceovers are sometimes also confusing due to the fact that characters which are behind doors or walls don’t sound dull, but like they were standing just next to Torque. Moreover, the voices don’t seem to be attached to the characters, but come out of the stereo speakers at the same volume, as if the speaking character was right in front of Torque. Even when he’s actually behind him, or next to Torque’s left ear.
In-game music is mostly limited to atmospheric sounds, occasionally drifting off into the industrial direction in action sequences - “inconspicuous” is pretty much the word that fits best. Most of the time, you don’t even quite notice whether a certain sound is an ambient sound effect or part of the background music. Sound effects are nicely done, but sometimes a bit low on variation. Low whispering resounding in Torque’s mind (or is there actually something there?), the clatter of monstrous metallic legs on asphalt, the screams of frightened bystanders and the hissing and gurgling of not yet visible things that you’d actually rather like to avoid - similar to the graphics, the sound in Ties That Bind creates a dense, disconcerting atmosphere by simple means.
The Verdict
Ties That Bind puts less emphasis on the horror aspect and more on the action. If you’re looking for a game that’s actually creepy, you might be better off with Call of Cthulhu of F.E.A.R.; as an atmospheric action game that has you shooting a lot of monsters, the Suffering sequel fares pretty good though. At least on the PS2, the game isn’t really up to current standards in terms of graphics, but still creates a surprisingly good atmosphere with the limited means it has.
Platform: PS2, PC (Windows), XBox
Publisher: Midway Games
Developer: Surreal Software
Genre: Action
Release: 21.10.2005
Web site: The Suffering - Ties That Bind
Age rating: not suitable for minors according to ยง14 JuSchG
