Developer: Frictional Games
If you ask me horror is a genre of gaming that’s never really been able to stand on its own as of late. It feels like horror is something which is tacked onto an existing genre like some sort of gross shoulder tumour latching onto a supermodel in that it always seems to be something which desperately latches on to something else rather than being the nucleus of the game-play. Take games like F.E.A.R. which are basically first person shooter games with a little bit of horror tacked on to make it stand out a bit amongst its high number of peers. There are games like Dead Space or Resident Evil 4 & 5 which are essentially a third person shooters with some horror sprinkled along the top for good measure.
Japanese horror games have always been good at scaring you by creating an almost unbearably tense atmosphere coupled with a sense of dread and impending doom. You always feel on-edge knowing that something is lurking somewhere but sometimes waiting for what feels like an eternity for the payoff. American Horror as of late seems to take a different approach where it gives you some really big guns and waves upon waves of monsters for you to shoot at. Sure Alma from F.E.A.R. is scary and so are the Necromorphs from Dead Space but when you’ve seen both of them about 50 times they start to lose what makes them scary, the horror aspect just fades away and that once tumour-like bulge just turns into a little smudge on the skin.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent, however, breaks away from tried conventions of western horror games to deliver a horror experience unlike anything a lot of you have played before. The game is developed by swedish Indie Developer: Frictional Games, the same developers that created a little horror series known as Penumbra. These games are absolute horror-gems but many gamers have probably never heard of them since they’re low-budget PC-exclusive titles. If anybody reading this has ever played any of the Penumbra games then Amnesia: The Dark Descent will probably feel very familiar to you and a large portion of this review will contain information you will already know. However, for the benefit of everybody else I shall explain why Amnesia: The Dark Descent is better at browning your boxers than anything else you’ve played in the last 2 years at least.
The first thing you’ll notice when you play The Dark Descent is that the game is a first person game – not exactly something which a lot of horror games do – remember I’m not talking FPS games here, I’m simply talking survival horror. Amnesia plays more like an old-school adventure/puzzler with a mixture of stealth. It’s kind of like Thief meets Silent Hill. Games like Silent Hill and the old Resident Evil (prior to 4) used fixed camera angles so that the player could not see what was in front of them or behind them allowing for them to be scared more easily. This is all well and good but playing Resident Evil or Silent Hill made it feel like you were watching an interactive horror movie – Amnesia: The Dark Descent makes you feel like you’re inside one by allowing you to experience the horror through the eyes of the game’s protagonist: Daniel.  If you find yourself slowly walking through a dark hallway and you hear the faint murmuring of what could be a monster then it is up to you to decide whether you really want to look behind you. Playing the game with 5.1 surround is an experience with you hearing sounds from all directions making you constantly look around and scan the environment for foes.
The first person perspective also pays dividends when it comes to exploring. In any other horror game you would walk up to a chest of drawers, press the action button and a sentence or two of text will tell you whether you found anything or not. In Amnesia you would walk up to the chest of draws and pull each draw open yourself by moving the pointer over the drawer, holding in the left mouse button and pulling the mouse towards you in order to pull open the drawer and see what lies inside (this works for all actions in the game). Checking everything like this can make searching rooms for clues time consuming but it all adds to the immersion of being in that setting and interacting realistically with the world.
Another aspect of A:TDD which is more true to its genre than most games is what happens when you encounter an enemy. The game is set in the 1830s and there are no guns – in fact there’s pretty much not a single piece of modern convenience in the entire game. The game forces you to avoid encounters with enemies, y’know, kind of how you would if it was you inside a haunted old castle. The key is to lurk in the darkness and move undetected – however it’s not quite as simple as that.
Being in the darkness for too long and spotting enemies or witnessing harrowing events will drain your sanity kind of like in Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem on the Nintendo Gamecube. In fact I’m surprised such a mechanic has not been in more horror games since. When your sanity is too low the game becomes harder to play as your vision blurs and Daniel kind of stumbles around and has to drag himself along the floor briefly before he is able to get up. The only way to regain sanity is to find light sources, light candles with tinderboxes hidden around the environment or use a Lantern (which you have to fill up with Oil…ALOT) but the thing about light is that potential enemies can see you and you might not see them until it’s too late.
I said earlier in this review is that the problem with enemies in most horror games is that by the time you’ve killed a hundred of them they’re not really scary anymore – just an annoyance. Amnesia is different in the fact that I played at least an hour before I ever even encountered an enemy and even then all I saw was a faint silhouette at the end of a dark corridor. This scarcity of enemy encounters keeps each one frightening and also keeps you on the edge as you wonder when the next one might be coming to kill you ramping up the tension with each step you take. If an enemy does see you then you’ll have to do what most mere mortals would do and that is to run the fuck away as fast as you possibly can, barricade yourself in a room and wait until it’s gone.
Frantically running for a well-lit room, quickly slamming the door behind me and then pushing a heavy chest of drawers in front of the door as quick as I can and then watching and listening to the monster attempts to break through the door is a genuine heart-in-mouth experience which most people often experience in a nightmare but very rarely in a video game.
The game is by no means perfect and will by no means appeal to everyone. For starters the game is not very good at letting you know where you should be and what you should be doing. There is a notes system which you can use to give you a hint as to what you should be doing but it can be vague and you don’ always know whether you’re in the right place. There is also no map system either despite there actually being a room full of maps which you walk into at one point in the game. A map-screen would’ve been nice so I could at least tell where I had been and where I could or could not go. Other parts which irritated me might seem slightly unfair because the game is of the indie persuasion and therefore possibly made on a low budget but a lot of the exposition and the back story is explained through notes you pick up – the problem with this is that the notes are plentiful and consist of giant walls of text which you can’t always be bothered to read – some are read aloud by the voice of your character so these were the only ones I paid attention to. The game also has pretty much no cut scenes and story is explained in-game through the aid of voice-overs and such as well as the notes I mentioned earlier. In a way this is good because it does less to break the immersion and tension but those looking for a more cinematic experience should maybe look elsewhere and as I mentioned before the game does move at an intentionally slow pace and does require patience and strong nerves however it is evident that the developers have a tried theme and system which they brought over from their work on the aforementioned Penumbra series.
Amnesia may not be a fun game for every gamer but that’s not really the best way to judge the game. Amnesia’s main objective is to create an atmosphere which keeps the player constantly on-edge and create an authentic nightmare experience and on those grounds it wholly succeeds. Not only that but being an indie game it’s not expensive and most PCs should be able to run the game just fine. The game also boasts a story-creator as well which could make for some great user-created content – think LittleBigPlanet except you crap yourself. This alone makes the game’s meek price-tag seem like almost unbeatable value and extends the games replay value by leaps and bounds. Not only that but Haloween will be upon us in a few weeks so if you want something different that will give you a good scare then definitely check this game out.
82/100
