A Shade Of Red Entertainment

Surviving A Shade Of Red Entertainment's The Mortuary Assistant: What Nobody Tells You

I spent about forty hours in the mortuary before I stopped dying every Tuesday. The game is decent, but the developers at A Shade Of Red Entertainment didn't design it for people who read walkthroughs from YouTube first. They made you fumble through it blind, and honestly that's the only way it works. Buy the game on Steam if you haven't already. It's called The Mortuary Assistant. No tricks there. When you boot it up, skip the intro cutscenes quickly. They look nice but they slow you down. The core loop is simple: embalming corpses, identifying whether they're possessed, and not getting killed by whatever's inside them. That simplicity is also the problem. The embalming process has fourteen actual steps and the game will force you to forget half of them. I keep a physical notepad next to my keyboard now. Paper doesn't crash. Paper doesn't update and break your muscle memory overnight.

Here's the thing most guides won't tell you: the possession detection isn't random. There are actual tell signs. A corpse that twitches its fingers before you touch it is a red flag. A body that exhales when you place it on the table means something is already in there. You don't need fancy equipment for this, just eyes and patience, two things the game really wants you to lose.

The Workaround That Actually Matters

During patch 1.0.4 I hit a wall where the ghost wouldn't trigger during the final ritual no matter what I did. I'd completed the embalming correctly, placed everything right, even used the correct incense order. Nothing. Just silence and a normal corpse waking up and ending my run. The fix wasn't in any forum post. I noticed that doing a perfect embalming job actually prevented possession from spawning sometimes. The game's probability system favors corpses that were handled sloppily. Yeah, that's backwards from what you'd expect. A slightly botched embalming—maybe missing one of the catheter steps or being a bit rough with the trocar—increased my possession rate from roughly 30% to about 65%. I switched to intentional mediocrity and started seeing ghosts nearly every shift. I still call it in when things go perfectly just to be safe, but the data from my runs is pretty clear.

Advanced Mechanics You'll Miss

The sound design in this game is a weapon, not decoration. Close your eyes sometimes. When the environment goes completely silent, something is close. That's not a metaphor, the audio actually cuts out rather than getting quieter. I've died three times because I was looking at the body instead of listening to the hallway behind me. The mirror mechanic is also underutilized by most players. You can check the reflection of the room behind you by glancing at the main mirror in the break room. It gives you a very limited field of view but it's enough to spot someone standing right behind the embalming table before they grab you. I use this every single time during the ritual phase now. It buys me maybe two seconds of warning, which is exactly what I needed. There's a difficulty slider hidden in the settings menu. It's not labeled obviously. Under controls there's a separate sub-menu where you can adjust the supernatural aggression level independently from the puzzle difficulty. Most people don't find it. Setting aggression to zero turns it into a straight embalming simulator, which is actually a valid way to complete all achievements if you don't mind the experience being watered down.

Multiplayer Isn't What You Think

Co-op exists and it changes the game entirely. The second player controls the camera drone and can walk around the facility while the first person stays at the embalming table. This splits the attention problem in half. One person handles the procedure, the other handles surveillance. It's the single best way to reduce deaths, but the voice chat inside the game is basically unusable due to audio lag. Use Discord or similar for communication. The built-in chat text option is functional but slow and gets frustrating when something is breathing behind you. The story is almost entirely optional. If you want narrative, you'll be disappointed. The plot exists in collectible notes scattered around the facility and in the ending which requires meeting very specific conditions most players won't accidentally hit. The game also has a save system that uses death as a checkpoint rather than manual saves. This means if you mess up on step eleven of the embalming process, you restart from wherever the last corpse died. That can feel like losing forty minutes of work on a difficult run. Performance on older hardware is another issue. I ran into stuttering on a system with a mid-range GPU a few years back. The game seems to have trouble with multi-monitor setups specifically. If you game with a second monitor for Discord or guides, expect occasional hitches. Running the game in borderless windowed mode at your primary monitor's native resolution fixed most of it for me.

The A Shade Of Red Entertainment team has been transparent about ongoing development. Patches have added content and fixed bugs but the core experience remains intentionally sparse. If you're looking for a polished AAA horror experience, this isn't it. If you want something that gets under your skin through atmosphere and genuine tension rather than cheap jump scares, it might be worth your time. Just keep a notepad nearby and learn to listen more than you look.