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Amnesia: The Dark Descend is a graphic adventure survival horror game by Frictional Games, who previously developed the Penumbra series.
Gameplay
In a similar vein to the developer's previous games, Amnesia is an exploration-based adventure game played from a first-person perspective. The game retains the physical object interaction used in Penumbra, allowing for advanced physics based puzzles and interactions such as opening doors and fixing machinery.
Story
Set in the year 1839, the game casts the player in the role of Daniel, a young man from London, who awakens in the dark halls of the Prussian Brennenburg Castle with little to no memory about himself or his past. All he can remember is his name and that something is hunting him.
Let's talk about this scary **** !
- 56 Replies
Umm Freakenstein - half of the horror is the devastation and immersion the game puts you through with the use of audio, amazing voice acting and the lack of that kind of stuff. That form of horror is to obvious and annoying for me to want to deal with, I like this, it's a psychological effect of "Is something REALLY there?" and not "Suck it up when that thing jumps out on you".
That's really great and all, but my argument still stands. If I am playing a horror game such as Amnesia, the effects would be much better if they didn't point it out to me and didn't hint that something was going to happen.
One of the good things is that it doesn't let you wrap your head around the puzzles as it has interesting lore pieces
Which are tossed much too frequently about the game, so much so in fact that it is disrupting the gameplay. I am fine with these lore pieces and flashback moments in the game to relay more information about what the hell is going on in the game, but not when it is so frequent that it hardly merits as horrendous. It's horrendous in the fact that I just want to play my game. Now don't get me wrong, I love how you can metaphorically "ick up pieces of your memory", but they should not do so by scattering them in clustered and, dare I accuse it, in abnormal places.
I thought that the scarcity of the items, such as the lamp oil and what I like to call "fire sticks", was spot on, as conservation of resources can also contribute to fear. "I better not use too much of my fire sticks; I might be alone in the dark if I run out!" Puzzle items, however, seemed to be spoon fed to you, as in the items are most definitely in the same area as you are when you stumbled upon the conundrum that you must solve, the game guides you to the items by using script-encoded scenes, and by using the Shadow (the game's infamous stalker). If you have no idea where the items are, you must simply navigate areas where these scripts are triggered. If the Shadow is nearby, then it is obvious that said items are there and he does not want you to progress.
Audio was meh. I'm not too versed in this kind of subject. I do, however, want to point out the fact that the scripted sounds in trigger scenes aren't in perspective--they are played out to seem that the cause of the noise is in your area. An example would be the Shadow's growl, as you pointed out, Highfire. I can be navigating a corridor and I would hear his growl almost as if it was next to me, yet I would find him chillin' near the ceiling.
Let's not forget about the Shadow itself. The guy has got to have the lowest attention span in the history of horror monsters that have been spawned by video game sadists. If I were to be spotted by the monster, all I gotta do is find a corner, crouch, and sit there for a well-timed 10 seconds. Now here's the thing. If I were to instead be the monster and I had the inhumane urge to hunt down my prey, I wouldn't just give up in that short amount of time, now would I? No, I would hunt that pansy with the excessively-soiled pants down!
[i]Why hello there! I'm a hungry monster with a low attention span that wants to kill you, but am afraid of corners![i]
You know what would contribute to fear? A monster that would hunt you down to the ends of the earth unless you are wily enough to escape his scent.