Content warning: this piece contains descriptions of the mortuary process.
Morgues. All I have to do is write the word and it evokes a reaction. These places are steeped in our fundamental fears and preoccupations with death, and those fears and preoccupations are preyed upon by entertainment and amped up for horrors or police dramas. Chances are, you’ve never been in a morgue, but I bet you have an idea of what one looks like.
I’ve been thinking about morgues this week because I’ve been in a couple and they made a strong impression on me. They’re not real, they’re in games, and the games are very much based around them.
The Mortuary Assistant I’ve been working up the courage to play all week. It’s exactly what I feared a game like this would be: a horror. I’m a young lady who’s working a new morgue job when I’m locked in one night by my boss and told there’s a demon on the loose, and I don’t have to wait long before things get creepy and weird.
Not that I hadn’t already freaked out seeing a cadaver on the table long before that. And then again when I had to give it the full treatment. It’s a gruesome job and the game delights in every step of it: pushing pins into gums so you can sew the jaw and mouth shut; cutting open the neck to put tubes in, and then pumping out the blood and replacing it with embalming fluid; emptying all the fluid from organs, and so on. Great backdrop for some scares, right?