Amnesia: The Dark Descent

I will admit up front that I am not that big on horror games. It might have something to do with the fact that I am a fearful jumpy idiot – the kind of person who tenses up if they look off a ledge 4ft off the ground and who spends two hours at one in the morning tearing apart their room because they thought they saw a spider. I’ve never really been able to get into this mind-set of purposefully scaring myself for enjoyment or engagement, but I DO understand the people that do. Even I, the legendary seat-strainer of cowardice have to tip my non-existent hat off to Frictional Software and their masterpiece Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Serving as the 2010 bulwark of horror, it was one of the popularisers (if not the originators) of the 1^st person gameplay in which the player can only hide or run from threats; a system that has since been used successfully by Outlast, Layers Of Fear, SOMA (another game developed by Frictional) and many other aspiring releases. The ripples Amnesia left on the industry washed away the preconceptions that scary games need to be survival; that the focus should always be on limited ammunition for pea-shooters pretending to be guns and planks of wood that disintegrate on every third hit. Oh, and it decupled its budget in profits.

Amnesia follows the story of Daniel – British man of poor memory and assistant who doesn’t ask questions to Alexander of Brennenburg; a scientific cultist trying to play god. He decides to wipe his memory about 200 puzzle rooms away from his good friend Alex and then leaves you a note instructing you to go murder him. For that is what friends are for. One little foot note telling you to avoid the stitched horrors and carnivorous jam later and you’re away – to have flashbacks revealing more of the story and notes to keep you literate between the puzzles and pant-wetting portions of gameplay.

Your time will mostly be spent wandering the Brennenburg castle and its many sub-levels of basements, collecting and using items to solve puzzles. Between that, you’ll need to collect resources like Tinder Boxes and Oil in order to turn on lights or just bring one with you in the form of a lantern. Amnesia utilises a gameplay element in which you lose sanity when you stand in the dark or experience traumatic events and gain sanity when you complete puzzles, make progress or stand in light. This forces you to balance out being visible to monsters and going insane; a balance that only gets more precarious as you go (mad).

Your good friend Alex also has quite lax attitudes to staffing management, and so you can occasionally run into his old drinking buddies at various points and places around the castle. That said, he isn’t about to let his staffers slack off when a puzzle gets solved. I think they may actually hear the autosave function as a sort of dinner bell. When they do find you and offer their impromptu death hug technique of combat, your only recourse is to flee like a freshman from a school bully or hide like a freshman already caught and stuffed in a locker.

The atmosphere constructed by the game is as deep as poetry and about as intricately tuned. The ominous sounds that resonate throughout these dusty, wind-swept halls echo the manifestations of nothingness. That doesn’t stop them from chiming shadows in your mind, hiding in corners or past physics props callously arranged in the shape of a smiley face – by me, of course (it helps me cope). When it comes to horror games, the focus very much needs to be on sounds. Each player will be put in a state of hyperawareness – fearing the slightest footfall or splash of water. With this much attention, the audio needs to be top notch, and I’d say Amnesia pulls it off brilliantly, if a bit too heavy on British accents of various stereotype.

Each second spent aimless or exploring just adds to the heat of the slow boil that quickly bubbles and churns out of all control. It takes a good few puzzles and time for the player to encounter an actual threat, but that’s not how the game feels. Every step is hounded by cold wind on your heels and half-growls from creaking doors that make you glance over your shoulder constantly. One time I simply had to turn a few valves to finish a puzzle, but I stopped at least four times because the ambience was trying to convince me a monster was creeping in. It was unbearable. I was actually a bit relieved when I first saw the hairy bummed, jaw-less fiend that was to be my first challenge. No longer was I running from shadows. I was merely running from a sewn-together abomination carving clawed furrows in my squishy mortal back.

Finally, something I could deal with.

If it wasn’t clear, Amnesia sets out to do one thing right and it does it with distinction. No combat, no jumpscares, there isn’t even much resource management. Amnesia broke the mould, it took its smaller budget and team and figured out how to do the best it could with what it had. Don’t have the budget to make a combat system? That’s OK! Just put a monster at one end of a room, put the player at the other, add fog effects, physics props and see what happens. That’ll scare them. And it does scare them. So if you’re looking for a scare, I can’t recommend Amnesia enough. If you aren’t, then maybe try something else. Horror is and has always been a niche genre, and if you’re in that niche then Amnesia is perhaps one of the best horror experiences I’ve ever played.