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Amnesia the dark descent water monster4/11/2023 ![]() Objects can be thrown or shoved, and they react sensibly to the flow of water. Machines can be jammed or un-jammed by interacting with their dangerous moving parts. Doors can be pried open with a good lever. Monsters are not common, but they’re strong, they’re fast, and your only real options are running and hiding.Īlso making a return appearance are the physics-based interactions. You’re a regular guy who has unwittingly involved himself in something far beyond his own power and understanding. You are not Master Chief or Marcus Fenix. And most of all it’s genuinely frightening.Īs with the previous games, you don’t fight monsters. This is the part of the article where the author usually flirts around and fills in some more details before they give you their opinion, but if it’s all the same to you I’d just as soon cut to the chase: Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a triumph. Having said that, the game was an admirable effort with a lot of brilliant ideas, and I was really excited to hear that they were coming out with a new game this year, Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The game would have worked a lot better if they had left that part out entirely. ![]() When you’re trying to spook the player with some terrible unknown horror from beyond, it’s a bad idea to give them the voice of some some low-level mook in Tony Soprano’s organization. The evil voice sounded too much like the comical devil in the original Black & White game. ![]() At that point the game completely lost me. Without getting too much into spoilers, there is a character who begins speaking to you at one point, suddenly giving voice and personality to what was previously an unknown danger. It presented a spooky world with a solid scare factor, but the follow-up titles didn’t quite work for me. Their 2007 debut title Penumbra: Overture was a good hook. This actually happened with the Penumbra series from Frictional Games. But in a survival horror game it’s possible to get the gameplay and technology right and still have the game fail because the idea simply didn’t connect with the player enough to make them feel fear. (Capcom please, please write that last one down someplace.) And you certainly can’t afford to break immersion with bugs. You need a stable story that isn’t going to distract them with nagging plot holes and nonsense. You need a solid story hook to pull them forward into danger. You need a compelling character to draw them in and make them care. It’s pretty hard to scare someone while they’re secure in their own home, sitting on their comfy couch, sipping their favorite beverage. Putting an air horn into the middle of Eat, Pray, Love wouldn’t turn it into a scary movie. It’s not clever and it doesn’t actually bring about feelings of fear. Decades ago hack movie makers learned that you can get a cheap scare by lowering the volume and pointing the camera into the darkness for half a minute before blasting the audience with sound and light. But doing all of that while reaching in and plucking at raw, primal drives? Invoking any emotion is tricky stuff, with fear being one of the most challenging to pull off.Īnd to be clear: I’m not talking about gotcha jump-scares here. It’s hard enough to just devise and properly execute a regular game where you can amuse yourself by building or destroying things. I can’t think of any other genre where the central purpose of the game is to make the player feel a specific emotion. and Doom are nice in their own way, but the really impressive work is found in games like Silent Hill or parts of Thief, where the game is more about self-preservation than bringing murder to all of the creeps. Monster shooting galleries like Dead Space, Resident Evil, F.E.A.R. I’ve said before that I think that survival horror (real survival horror, the kind intended to invoke actual fear) is some of the most challenging work a game designer can undertake.
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