Amnesia: The Dark Descent

2024-01-15
This is a tough one to review because while I've been meaning to play it for probably a decade I only got around to it now, some almost 15 years after it was released. And that age shows because of the game's goal of delivering a singular horror experience. The beginning of the game starts with a message telling you to play in a dark room, with headphones, and to not try and "win" or "finish the game" but to try to imagine you are really inhabiting the shoes of the main character, Daniel wandering the walls of the creeptastic Castle Brannenburg. I think it does a wonderful job at what it sets out to do but the visuals and mechanics are dated enough at this point where I had a hard time really getting into the mood. It just felt like I was playing a game from 2010.

Let's focus on the positives then. It is a wonderful creepy tale very much in the vein of HP Lovecraft. I think many games and stories try to hit those notes and fail and I think Amnesia: The Dark Descent actually succeeds here. There are horrors some of which you can understand, some of which are slowly explained, and some which you'll never understand. The way in which all of this is unfurled for you the player is mostly through journal entries from the main character to himself as well as some of the other major characters. Many of them are voice acted which adds a little character but the VO itself is not particularly good which kind of distracts.

Mechanically it's a game about walking around a creepy, scary set of rooms trying to progress to the end. You'll have to search for keys, combine objects to get through obstacles, typical fair. These aren't particularly inspired but they're almost mostly painless enough that I wasn't having to pull up a guide constantly. There are also monsters you'll come across. As is typical in horror games you play a character who cannot fight and thus these enemies function either as chase scenes to get your blood pumping or stealth challenges forcing you to navigate around them. One notable mechanic is the sanity system which causes the environment to change around you the more Weird Shit you see on your journey. Stare to long at the handsome monster man and the fountain pouring water you saw earlier will be spitting up blood with a corpse in it the next time you see it. This is cool but I imagine credit should be given to Eternal Darkness as being the originator of this type of mechanic.

I enjoyed the vibe and the story enough to keep going but I wouldn't say I had a particularly fun time playing. I don't think it's really worth playing the modern era.