At PAX West 2024, All Ages of Geek caught up with Brian Clark, the mind behind The Mortuary Assistant and co-director of DreadXP. Brian gave us a deep dive into how this terrifying and replayable horror experience came to life—and why players keep coming back for more.
What is The Mortuary Assistant?
In The Mortuary Assistant, you play as Rebecca Owens, a new mortuary intern taking on her final exam. What starts as a normal night shift quickly turns into a nightmare, as dark forces close in and the dead don’t stay still.
You’re not just embalming bodies—you’re also identifying which demon is trying to possess you before it’s too late. Once you figure it out, you have to bind the demon to a specific body and destroy it, or risk being dragged into hell yourself.
It’s a horror experience that’s built for replayability. Each session, you embalm three bodies while surviving random hauntings and unpredictable scares. Every run feels different, with a new demon, new events, and new ways to be caught off guard.
How the Game Keeps You Guessing
Brian explained that The Mortuary Assistant uses a dynamic event system to make sure no two playthroughs are ever the same.
The game constantly tracks your progress, where you are, what items you’re holding, your level of possession, and even the direction you’re facing. Based on that data, random hauntings can trigger at any time, growing more intense as the night goes on.
At first, you might just hear a noise or catch something out of the corner of your eye. But by the end of a session, the game throws everything it has at you—full-on entity attacks, hallucinations, and scenes where even your own family members might turn against you.
Even Brian himself said he doesn’t always know what’s going to happen when he plays, which keeps the scares feeling fresh and genuinely unpredictable.
Where the Idea Came From
The Mortuary Assistant started from a simple challenge.
Brian gave himself a seven-day personal game jam to build something scary with a small environment. Needing something contained but unsettling, he landed on the idea of a tiny room with a dead body—and from there, the concept of embalming took shape.
Compared to autopsies, embalming felt more intimate and unnerving, blending science with a kind of fragile, respectful artistry. That closeness to the dead body became the heart of the game’s horror.
He put an early prototype on itch.io just to showcase his work, and thanks to huge support from creators like Markiplier and Jacksepticeye, The Mortuary Assistant quickly exploded in popularity.
From there, Brian stayed deeply involved with the community, constantly watching feedback from players, especially small content creators. Their reactions helped him fine-tune the full release, keeping the original atmosphere alive while adding layers of polish, haunting events, and lore.
How Brian Describes It
When asked to sum up the game in just a few words, Brian said it best:
“Embalming bodies in a haunted house.”
He also shared the tagline they use on Steam: “Alone with the dead.”
Simple, but definitely enough to send a chill down your spine.
At its core, that’s exactly what the game offers—an eerie, unsettling experience where you’re forced to confront death up close, all while dark forces stalk you from the shadows.
Where to Play The Mortuary Assistant and What’s New
The Mortuary Assistant has been out on Steam for a while, but it’s now also available on PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.
The newly released Definitive Edition brings everything together, fixing major bugs, adding more haunting events, expanding the lore, and even offering new bodies to embalm. There’s even an embalming-only mode if you just want the full mortician experience without the possession terror.
If you want to follow Brian’s future work, you can find him at DS Digital Dev on and Darkstone Digital everywhere else. His next big project? A game called Paranormal Activity that’s already starting to build hype.
Final Thoughts
The Mortuary Assistant doesn’t just scare you once—it builds a system where fear is constant, creeping, and impossible to fully predict.
It’s a rare horror game that knows how to stay scary even after you know the rules.
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