The Weekly WTF: Yep, The Mainliners Are Still Utterly Creepy-Ass

GAH! Grand Theft Auto may give us a rather romanticized, check-out-my-badass-car view of the criminal life, but this is the harsh reality right here. You'll be abused in the pants area by ghastly mutants.

You may not be familiar with 2004's The Suffering, a slightly obscure psychological horror game from Midway. It's the criminally underrated --see what we did there? It's too damn early in the morning for that kind of wit-tastic-- tale of Torque. This angry dude has been incarcerated in a Maryland prison for the murder of his two children and ex-wife.

Whether he actually committed the crime is dependent on your actions throughout. It's one of those karma-based affairs. To be an asshole or not to be an asshole, as Shakespeare himself once pondered.

Choosing to take the evil path as you attempt to escape the prison has big ol' consequences. Mutate-y, demon-y, look-ma-I've-grown-fangs-where-my-wang-should-be consequences. Oddly, though, that's the least of your worries in The Suffering.

Abbot State Penitentiary is infested with all manner of hideous flesh-things. The monsters were designed by Stan Winston, of Terminator/Aliens/Predator/Jurassic Park fame, so you know there's some goddamn creepy badassery coming at you right here.


Resident Evil would be proud of some of these mofos. The creatures are each intended to represent a different form of capital punishment, which is all pleasant and happy funtimes and everything. So hold on to your butts and try not to cry for grandma, because the embodiment of the lethal injection is here, and it's been giving us the freaking willies for a decade.

This charming dude is a Mainliner. It's a squat, Gollum-esque little freak with hypodermic needles protruding from its body. It has needles for effing eyes, which surely tells you all you need to know about the kind of bastards we're dealing with here. These particular ones first surface in chapter 4 of The Suffering, and they're not there to share pervtastic anecdotes about the guy who dropped his soap in the shower.

They're there to horribly murderise you right in the face.

A Mainliner's presence is heralded by a feral shriek, and they'll throw one of their needles at your eyeballs before you know what the balls. When feeling particularly energetic, they'll instead dash at you like Usain Bolt with the shits; trying to straddle your shoulders and insert their needles directly into your neck.

Needless to say, these kinds of shenanigans can ruin your whole day.