Euthanasia

In Euthanasia, you play as Shaun Randall, who retired from the military and leads a normal, boring life. Now he has an ordinary office job, an acceptable pay, an attractive wife and a son. One day when Shaun heads for work he is hit by a taxi and ends up losing his legs. His life was just turned upside down and he attempts suicide, after which he checks in a mental hospital. Dr. Van Wargen understood his pain and suffering and was compassionate enough to euthanize Shaun and make it look like a suicide. However, this was just the beginning of the nightmare…

This interesting story sets up the events for Euthanasia, a free to download horror first-person shooter with some really nice graphics and one of the best atmospheres ever in a freeware game. The interpretation of this voyage is simple but cleverly designed, being something of the spiritual path of the soul to the eternal light and the well deserved rest. Shaun will also experience some of the regrets and failures of his life along the way.

The decrepit settings of the asylum are amazing to look at and explore, helped by some great quality lighting as well as the sound design, with Shaun frequently commenting on what he thinks and sees. Where things fail a bit is in the enemy design, which isn’t bad in itself – it’s just that the character models have a strange high contrast with the dark surroundings, meaning that they look like they are always under a fluorescent light. As far as gameplay goes, it’s pretty much standard FPS fare. Luckily, the slower pace of the game never lets us forget that it’s more of a survival horror than a gorefest, but the weaponry is just as good as it gets – a meat cleaver introduces us to the joy of creepy enemy slaying, but the pistol, rifle and machine guns are way more effective, but beware of the short ammo.

Euthanasia could easily be one of the best games of its genre, but the technical issues that haunt it are hard to ignore. First of all there’s the need of adding a patch that actually removes two important levels from the game (as the author himself stated), but it’s not uncommon to find bugs of several kinds, from the enemy that freezes to the game over screen that crashes, among other game breaking bugs. Nevertheless, this is a first-person shooter that any horror fan should try.

Free Full PC Game Download (572 MB + Patch 73 MB):
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