The Mortuary Assistant, one of 2022's best horror games, has launched on Nintendo Switch.
After launching on Steam and the Epic Games Store in August of last year, The Mortuary Assistant quickly became a favorite of streamers for its ability to, well, scare the (un)living crap out of them for their viewers' entertainment. Take heed: this scary game is genuinely terrifying, unlike publisher DreadXP's other horror game, the WarioWare-inspired Spookware, which also just launched on Switch.
The Mortuary Assistant is about a young apprentice mortician named Rebecca Owens whose first night River Fields Mortuary becomes a lot more morbid and upsetting than she was probably expecting. Instead of simply grappling with cold and pasty corpses, the protagonist is confronted by all manner of malevolent spirits, as well as her own figurative demons, in a desperate struggle to survive until morning.
From a gameplay perspective, your night begins by completing mundane - and unsettling, depending on your tolerance for this sort of stuff - tasks. As someone with a mild phobia of the dead, the relatively menial assignment of embalming a body was extremely disarming when I last played, and so when shit really started to hit the fan, I was already in an incredibly vulnerable state. This made the genuinely startling jump scares and disturbing monster designs that much more effective at creeping me the hell out.
"The Mortuary Assistant has its issues – it's pretty short, a little rough in design and graphics, and marred by the occasional glitch – but it nails the atmosphere and moment-to-moment experience so magnificently that I'm willing to forgive a lot from it," wrote my fellow GR+ horror hound Joel Franey in his writeup from last year.
You can pick up The Mortuary Assistant on the Switch eShop for $24.99, if you dare.
For more frightful delights, check out our guide to the best horror games.
