The Mortuary Assistant offers a uniquely dark experience set in a dimly lit funeral home while demonic forces linger nearby. Tension builds through procedural hauntings, randomised sigils, and unpredictable hallucinations that keep each shift feeling fresh rather than scripted. As a mortician, the gameplay revolves around draining blood, suturing, and injecting embalming fluid, rooting the horror in everyday realism, before supernatural elements come crashing in. Multiple endings and a story revealed over repeated playthroughs add replay value, enhanced by new content like more bodies, an endless mode, and expanded lore in this “definitive edition”. Is working the night shift at a creepy mortuary the rip-roaring good time it could be? It’s time to find out.
Set in 1998 at the haunted River Fields Mortuary in Connecticut, the narrative unfolds across randomised night shifts where Rebecca Owens, a recent mortuary school graduate and recovering heroin addict, processes cadavers under the supervision of her former instructor, Raymond Delver. Rebecca’s past haunts her: her mother perished from an overdose she discovered as a child, leading to her own addiction; at fourteen, after collapsing from drugs, her sober father slipped and died rescuing her from a ravine, fueling lifelong guilt raised by her grandmother.
At River Fields Mortuary, hauntings unfold as random, procedural supernatural events during night shifts, growing more intense with every shift. These disturbances throw Rebecca off balance, disrupt body identification, and escalate into aggressive physical assaults, mixing jump scares, relived psychological trauma, and chaotic environmental changes. Lesser spirits bolster the main demon’s power, while personal hallucinations prey on Rebecca’s heroin addiction. The story is predictable and mean-spirited, often showing its hand too early. Most of the time, it feels like going through the motions.
The Definitive Edition adds new haunts, improved body behaviours like eerie contortions or rising from the computer, and more events across ten base bodies, plus holiday-themed variants such as amusing Santa-themed monsters/corpses. Hauntings build over time: early shifts bring subtle audio or visual hints; mid-shift sees cadaver movements and apparitions; late shifts hit with direct attacks, thrown objects, and mocking taunts like thumping or screams. These moments interrupt embalming, forcing risky investigations that speed up possession, making survival dependent on ignoring unreliable tricks like moaning bodies while paying attention to more consistent clues like slamming storage doors.
Despite its many improvements, unfortunately, nothing was done to enhance its visual design, leaving The Mortuary Assistant looking several generations outdated and somewhat cheap. The graphics aren’t intentionally ugly like in a Silent Hill game; it’s more a case of store-bought assets clashing with custom-made originals. Some places feel oddly unfinished because of how sterile and lifeless the setting seems. The cadavers don’t feel dead enough as they are lacking details like bruising and degloving, and look weightless.
Rebecca’s night shifts at River Fields Mortuary require her to embalm three randomly generated cadavers. The gameplay blends walking-sim exploration with adventure-style point-and-click tasks, such as retrieving bodies from cold storage, logging identifying marks on the computer, setting jaws and eyes, cutting into arteries for drainage, mixing and pumping chemicals, aspirating cavities, cleaning, moisturising, and storing them. Meanwhile, a cheeky demon tries to steer her toward failure unless she completes a three-step ritual after two full embalmings to banish the chosen demon.
Demons are randomly drawn from one of twelve houses, and it’s up to the player to figure out which one is haunting. This means burning ashes on the torso to reveal the house sigil, cross-referencing demonology scriptures, lighting strips at four spots to find name sigils, then binding and incinerating the right body in the retort, all while dealing with deceptive tricks and eerie apparitions. There is considerable pressure when trying to do Rebecca’s job and contend with a demonic presence, but the execution falls flat due to unbearably stiff controls and utterly poor collision detection, which makes the simple act of clicking on objects way harder than it should be, made worse with an unstable frame rate, which is surprising for such a sparse-looking game.
The Mortuary Assistant isn’t even scary. It’s quaint at best and unintentionally funny at worst. The demonic forces will often use a lot of swear words, which is very passe by now. The mortician sim elements aren’t very convincing, skipping over key procedures like ventilation and protective gear, and instead focusing more on the childish, gorier bits clearly aimed at YouTube shock value. Dealing with the demons is a tedious game of cross-examining the clues hidden in their behaviour, and once it’s understood, it highlights just how artificial and repetitive the whole system really is.
