Video edition can be found here.
Amnesia. When I think of that word in relation to a video game, the voices inside my head shriek, "Damn it all! That's so cheap!" Images flood my head of mediocre, distinctly non-special games that all use amnesia as a lazy and arbitrary way to try to make a mystery out of all of the dumb crap you already know is about to happen in an incredibly predictable world and then you find out nonsensical and farfetched yet still predictable things like that you're actually your own grandfather and your kid is doing LSD and you raped your own dog.
Well this is why we need more games that handle a case of amnesia like the aptly named Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Instead of going through a world you've already figured out simply to find out your own boring identity, which ends up to have been pretty obvious all along, this game takes that formula and uses its exact opposite. You do have amnesia and you do learn about your complex past over time, but who you are and why you have to go and do something very spoilery is easily made clear, while what is happening in the dark Prussian castle surrounding you is the big mystery.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a horror adventure game from the sexy Swedish developers Frictional Games, creators of the Penumbra trilogy. It follows in its older brother's footsteps dealing with a venture into the dark unknown with no protection or hindsight. So far this has proved a winning combination for a horror game, because Penumbra was kickass, and so is Amnesia. Amnesia is the epitome of the concept of vulnerability in a video game.
As Daniel, the protagonist, wakes up from a dark slumber in a beautiful rainy corridor you almost instantly realize that he's defecating his own grey matter. One of the neatest things about this game is the sanity system. Though other games try to make psychological horror simply by making the player handicapped in some way, Amnesia drives you with its liberal use of brain damage to make you choose between the options of a fight-or-flight response.
A supernatural shadow-like blanket is coming to envelop you and the entire castle in which you reside, and it's very angry. When hiding in the darkness or being near an enemy, this "Shadow" likes to take advantage of your fear of the unknown by screwing with your sight and control over Danny. There are ways to go so ridiculously insane over time that you can find yourself dragging your face around on the floor with bugs crawling all over your screen. This, at times, very rare times, can feel simply like baggage, but often the atmosphere and actual danger can reinforce how damn unlucky you are. Going insane can make it easier for monsters to notice you and make it harder to progress through the environment.
This brings us to the aforementioned atmosphere. It absolutely could not. be. better. unless it was happening in real life. The development team seem to have the right idea about how to convey a horror atmosphere. Sound. Through fancy expensive visuals you cannot and will not ever be able to make someone as afraid of the unknown as through good, detailed noises and brilliant nightmare fuel music. The sound in this game is perfect, absolutely, totally amazing. Every single ambient, unimportant noise helps reinforce your fear of the unknown. Hear those dragging feet? Are they real? Is there actually a flesh-eating creature waiting behind that door? Or is it on the floor above you? And why did a small animal just start yelping on the other side of the level?
If you answered, "...," to one or more of these questions, then you'd be even more scared to know that quite a few parts of the game have random triggers, and this just keeps adding to the uncertainty of continuing onward. There were times where so much crazy nonsense was going on but I never encountered a monster once, and even now I am completely unsure if I was just lucky or if no confrontation was ever supposed to actually happen. The randomness ends up ranging from monster encounters to simple environmental anomalies.
But your brain fluids leaking out of your nipples is not the only means of scaring you that the game has to offer! Remember when I mentioned a fight-or-flight response? Well, that's... actually more of a... "run-or-hide" response. Stealth is a pretty viable option in the game, as in the Penumbra series, but it is much harder at times without thinking on your feet constantly. Other times, the closet-hiding action has never been simpler and more effective.
When not crawling in a hole and hoping to die in your sleep, running away is even more frightening. Actually coming face to face with the creatures is absolutely terrifying. They are brutal, both in imagery and in strength. These scary freaks are unimaginably... unimaginable in terms of appearance, as if photographs of deformed and mutilated corpses were mixed with Salvador Dalí's "The Persistence of Memory" painting. Despite their agonizing appearance, they can also rush toward you pretty fast, and they do a lot of damage. In fact, one type of enemy can kill you in one blow, but it never gets frustrating.
This is because Amnesia has a very unique way of dealing with monsters and their death-dealing abilities. Since it's so easy to make a repeated event become tedious, even if it is horrific the first few times, the game completely circumvents the traditional method of dealing with death that simply reloads save games. Instead, it assumes that whatever horror that killed you has been pulled off pretty successfully, and there's no real need to try it again. Often when you respawn, you have all of your progress to do with puzzles kept as it was so there is no boring backtracking involved, and there are environment changes, often having to do with monster placement. If something killed you, it's probably not there anymore. Or it may have been replaced with a different monster. Who knows?
This is an absolutely brilliant system and more developers should use it, assuming they do it correctly, because it prevents a lot of tedium and can sometimes even make the game scarier. For example, you could be trekking through a large, open, and dark area, making your way to wherever you have to go, but bam! a monster is lurking, and you're unfortunate enough to fail at your stealth routine. Normally a game would put you back at the start of the level, but in the minds of these crazy bastards from Sweden, why not put you somewhere in the middle of this looming expanse with no directions where to go? Exactly.
It's not a perfect system, however, since death can bypass certain challenges. If you just let yourself get killed by a certain enemy, there's a chance that the enemy will not be in the level when you respawn, meaning that someone who isn't immersed can exploit this and systematically destroy the potential experience of it all. It's a double-edged sword, one side being able to chop trial and error in half, the other side being able to water down the atmosphere. It's fine if you keep it pointed away from yourself, but some people aren't that good at playing with swords.
Amnesia is also partially an adventure game, as it's not all simply about survival, and puzzles are offered in order to make the game more diverse. One of the things the developers were trying with this release was to minimize the aspects of trial and error gameplay that frustrate people. This would be in order to make these puzzles feel like part of a progressing story, rather than mandatory sections that break up all the action. Things like your progress and inventory being kept after you die can help lead to a much nicer flow between exploration and/or hiding and puzzle solving, but not everything is melted together flawlessly.
The puzzles are good, though a bit basic for an adventure game, and they all make sense and provide relevance to the story. Nothing is particularly challenging, but I found myself stuck on some occasions looking for certain objects that I didn't notice a million times over before actually finding them. To be fair, I played at night, in the dark, when I was feeling the most tired and vulnerable, as was suggested in the little demotivational text that appears when the game is opened for the first time. My thought process wasn't that straight either considering how insane I had already become, but some things could have definitely been more noticeable.
But instructions on what to do are made very clear and still leave room for a little dexterity of your own to be added into the mix, and plenty of puzzles have the multiple solution-y goodness that makes the world feel so dynamic. This I would take any day over the promise of perfect flow through the world. These are puzzles, and that means you're supposed to think. They aren't as complex as the ones found in the Penumbra series, which is kind of a shame, and they aren't smooth enough to make every bit fluid, but the middle ground is A-okay, and I still love plenty of the challenges involving intelligence I had to overcome during my play through the game.
The main motivation of the attempt at seamlessness in the way Amnesia flows was to help create not just an immersive environment, but also an immersive story, and for the most part, it's very successful. Along with amnesia, Danny seems to have been injected with a good dose of telepathy (or something, I'm not really sure), which helps to trigger audible flashbacks in familiar areas that tell of his past. You will also find his and others' notes and diaries throughout the depths of the castle, and while some of the placement of these items seems a bit... odd to say the least, all of the documents you'll find will help explain your immediate surroundings, while also tying up loose ends from other parts of the game. It's possible to skip over some notes and not really understand the story by the end of the game, but everything is reasonably noticeable and it's very easy to find everything that you'd need to get an A+ on your history lesson.
One of the things I don't particularly like about the story, though, is that it rarely communicates directly with you, but rather stays affixed on your past. Compare this to Penumbra, which worked with classic objectives such as a damsel in distress perfectly by keeping in contact with characters but never allowing you to actually reach them. This made me feel like I'm a real character with friends in need, but Amnesia handles the story differently, populating the game mostly with poor conversationalists. It's not particularly bad, no, not at all, but it doesn't seem to fit with the idea of Daniel as a character. He is alive, but playing as him, I felt sort of like a ghost, almost similar to the character Alexander Nesterov in Cryostasis. While it worked perfectly there, this is a survival horror game and piecing together peoples' pasts and solving self-assigned quests doesn't feel like enough to make me feel as attached to Danny as I should be at times.
That only has to do with the main protagonist, though. The rest of the story is all about the history of the place surrounding you. I would go to great lengths to say that it is one of the most disturbing and mature stories in the history of video games. This is the kind of thing that screams ideologically sensitive material into your face as it mutilates all your loved ones. This is not a nice game, and it never had any intention to be, but when comparing it to other types of horror, even the kinds that I consider scary, this quite simply is something that attacks your brain unlike anything else. The story of Amnesia catalogues the lowest of lows that human beings can stoop to in defense of their own lives, and the best part is that it really makes you think about whatever sacrifices you've made on behalf of others for your own benefit.
It's pure survival instinct and dexterity mixed with a very, very sorrowful, disturbing tale. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is the scariest horror game I've ever played, and probably the scariest you'll ever play too. Its flow is almost perfect and its atmosphere is so refined that it feels real, something many horror games only see as a glimmer on the distant horizon. It is worth buying, and it's worth not being able to sleep over. Even if after you buy it you're just going to watch someone else play it on YouTube because you’re a stupid wimp.
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