*WARNING - review contains spoilers*

Purgatory is about helping a girl named Enri escape the facility she is for a yet unknown reason trapped in.


Even though it may seem in the beginning that the silent Enri is in fact in purgatory to atone for her sins, it is revealed later that she is there for a completely different reason. Quite a turnoff, I honestly expected to see a complex sinful life story unfold before my very eyes that will lead to an epic scene of her finally ascending to heaven.

But nope.

Apparently it is more of a haunted-house-kind of horror story. Three of her classmates were talking about the rumor and decided to take the outsider of their class with them, who is none other than Enri.
When standing in front of the building they'll shortly decide on Enri being the one to investigate, since they figure she'd be no loss in case the rumors are true. When she attempts to go in, the one classmate with actual moral, Oliver, tells her she doesn't have to go if she doesn't want to and gives her his cleaver for self-defense. Shortly after Enri having entered the building, the three others will be approached by the owner of it, the butcher, and killed by him. To get away from the butcher, Enri's only choice is to jump in the huge hole in the floor which is probably there for disposing of corpses in the fastest possible way.

Which is exactly the point where the game started in the first place. All the rooms of the facility are tiringly gory and bloody, which takes away the horror effect of it (a simulation of the odor would have certainly been more disturbing than the visuals). The puzzles are quite okay, I guess.


Two situations of fridge horror I liked:

The first one is when at some point a corpse falls down into the first room and you take the cleaver from it. Later when hearing the backstory from shortly before Enri's "arrival" you'll see that Oliver was the one to give it to her. So that corpse is actually...?

Or maybe not since she was supposed to have it, so what about the corpse then.

Or it's Enri who was killed and the Enri in the game is some demon?

.... or the game really has no deeper meaning, which would explain why I'm not a big fan of it.

Well, the second one is later when wanting to obtain the "DEMONIC END" you'll destroy some spider egg using a demonic axe you found previously for some reason and a spider will accompany you. It'll eat corpses when you come near them, which causes it to grow. I thought this was helpful in fighting the butcher or something, so I let it eat all three corpses scattered about, and in the end it ate me when I attempted to pull the lever to start up the elevator. Great. Well, if you don't let it eat all three corpses (they are easily avoidable anyway) and pull the lever, the spider will be smashed by a huge weight. And this corpse is pink and doesn't look human...? So it's clear what these piles of flesh in the first room were. For some reason there were spider corpses amongst the human ones.

Maybe it was supposed to be creepy because it's all silent in the facility, but well, I honestly did not expect the corpses to randomly follow me. For a very obvious reason. This could have been taken advantage of in a nice way. Say, I find myself in this facility, and after a while, when I simply don't expect it any longer, some corpse will crawl up to me and accuse me of something I did to them when they were still alive and besides that, the room is full of subtle stuff that will make me remember what it was. Well, it could have been.




If you're looking for awesome backstories unfolding: I do not recommend this game.

If you're looking for gory stuff: Go ahead.