The Mortuary Assistant

The Mortuary Assistant is a 2022 horror game developed by DarkStone Digital and published by DreadXP. Set in 1998 in a small town in Connecticut, players control a newly hired assistant at a haunted mortuary.

Gameplay
Players control Rebecca Owens, an assistant at a mortuary who embalms corpses under the watch of her boss, Raymond Delver. Players must engage in the mundane aspects of this job while avoiding demonic possession in the haunted mortuary. This involves jump scares and puzzles. PC Gamer described it as "more or less a walking simulator with some haunted scenery". It is played from a first-person perspective. Players must correctly identify which corpses are possessed, the demon possessing them, and perform the correct exorcism to survive. This process is timed, as indicated by a set of Post-It notes to show the progress of the demon possessing Rebecca. It has multiple endings, and a new ending was added in July 2023. The story is procedurally generated, but the game remembers which vignettes the player has seen and shows different ones in each playthrough.

Development
Brian Clarke developed The Mortuary Assistant himself, based in Connecticut. He had previously worked on massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Clarke's influences included creepy online videos and found footage films, especially Paranormal Activity. A prototype was released in 2020, and Clarke was surprised to find that many people wanted a full simulation of embalming. After researching embalming, he mostly implemented it realistically. Some aspects were streamlined for time, and he used archaic procedures when he thought they made scenes creepier. DreadXP released it on Windows on August 2, 2022, and on Switch on April 20, 2023. A film adaptation was announced in September 2022. DreadXP said it will focus on "the overall narrative" rather than replicating specific gameplay elements or endings.

Reception
The Mortuary Assistant received "mixed or average" reviews on Metacritic. On release, it became a bestseller on Steam.

Despite saying that it is short and "a little rough", GamesRadar said its atmosphere makes up for these shortcomings. They also included it in a list of top horror games. Polygon called it "a little clunky" and said the puzzles can be confusing, but they felt it "delivers a fun set of scares" while being a satisfying simulation. Bloody Disgusting praised the game's content but said they encountered many technical issues.