This horizontally-scrolling shoot 'em up features six long levels, all with detailed and mellow background graphics, aiming for a less hectic feel than contemporaries such as Project X. As a magician's apprentice, you have been turned into an owl to give you the best chance of destroying the many dark creatures to be faced, and thus discovering the secret of cosmic strength.

These dark creatures include piranhas, giant ants and mosquitoes. Extra weapons and invincibility periods can be collected. The technical details include 3 layers of multi-directional parallax scrolling, background animation, and different title and in-game music.

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Part of the Following Group

Genre: Scrolling shoot 'em up

Merchant	Title
	Agony
	Agony
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User Reviews

Sideways scrolling shooter with top quality visuals	Neepie Lantern (482)
An amazing game.	Mark Papadakis (30)	unrated

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The Press Says

Amiga Action	Feb, 1992	86 out of 100	86
Amiga Joker	Feb, 1992	81 out of 100	81
Jeuxvideo.com	Nov 16, 2011	16 out of 20	80
Pixel-Heroes.de	Dec, 2004	8 out of 10	80
Amiga Power	May, 1992	78 out of 100	78
Pelit	Feb, 1992	78 out of 100	78
Power Play	Apr, 1992	59 out of 100	59
ASM (Aktueller Software Markt)	Jun, 1992	6 out of 12	50

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Trivia

Allister Brimble

Allister Brimble is listed in the credits as one of the five loading music composers but although he did compose one tune for this game, it was not used.

Dimmu Borgir

When Norwegian black metal band Dimmu Borgir released their 1996 album Stormblåst, one of the songs, Sorgens Kammer was a cover of Agony's title track. They never gave any credit to its creator though, and therefore the track was later replaced when the composer contacted the band.

Intro

The non-playable demo of the game contains following information: "After starting up with an over 50 takes long animated intro sequence Agony will lead you through 6 worlds." The problem is that there is no intro sequence in the final release of the game. Franck Sauer (from the development team) was kind enough and provided precise information about the missing intro for Agony:

There was an animated intro sequence that was supposed to be included into the game and explained its backstory in more detail. That sequence had been animated by fellow artist Marc Albinet but didn't make it into the game mainly because it would have required one or two more disks and given the quality wasn't really on par with the in-game art, Psygnosis and Yves Grolet (lead programmer) decided it was not worth it."

Music

Tim Wright composed two tunes for this game but "title" tune was not used in its original version and "high score" tune was not used at all.

When he sent the tune off for inclusion in the game, Franck Sauer (from the development team) changed the piano samples in it for better ones. However, one of them was at the wrong octave. Wright did not find out about these changes until the game hit the shelves and as he states: "Maybe people like it but it always sounded wrong to me". He eventually released both unused "high score" tune and the original version of "title" tune on December 10, 2001. They can be downloaded from his personal website (in one 7 MB big archive with all other tunes he created on Amiga) or from Exotica.