While I experienced hanging bodies in a corridor and insects crawling over my field of vision, others have reported portraits and paintings decorating the castle walls morphing and becoming grotesque. Leave him too long without light and the screen will blur and waver, controls will become sluggish, and, in a brilliant move by the developers, his perception of the world around him alters and distorts, making an already terrifying place worse.
Yes, you don’t just have health to worry about, but, given the bizarre nature of his circumstances and the eerie surrounds in which he finds himself, Daniel’s sanity plays a large part in the game and must be monitored carefully.īeing in the darkness for even a few moments will begin to fray Daniel’s mind, something which doesn’t bode well. Daniel will swiftly come to be utterly dependant on light sources to find his way around the castle and maintain his fragile sanity. Rather than using them as core themes, Frictional have employed light and darkness as the very fabric of the gameplay, using it to sustain the constant nerve jangling tension. No, Amnesia is smart and the whole game is engineered to force players through the wringer, deftly manipulating their senses and emotions to generate a thick atmosphere of tension which rarely strays from a knife edge of fear. Frictional Games have set a new bar with regards to horror, far surpassing cheap scares and over-reliance on gore to conjure tension and atmosphere. I typically avoid horror titles, however, in deciding to give this game a try, I threw myself so far in the deep end that I have barely, now, got my breath back. I’ll get it out of the way early and state that to say Amnesia is scary would be a gross understatement. From the outset, the castle is infused with a silent menace, a sort of expectant horror which only gets worse as the game drives you onward. This, however, is a horror adventure, so you can bet your britches it won’t be as simple as nipping downstairs and dispatching our mysterious Baron with a clean sweep of a sword. With this odd, but seemingly simple directive, so begins your exploration and descent through the castle and into the depths, unveiling the fog of Daniel’s story as you go. Discovering a note from his past self, Daniel’s task is to find and kill a man named Alexander, though for what reason, we are not yet told.
Before lips purse at the staple, amnesia storyline, it is integral to the game, not as a hackneyed plot device, but, rather, as a way of heightening tension, paying out a carefully paced string of horrors as Daniel’s past and the nature of his stay in Brennenburg Castle slowly unfolds with the story. Set in the brooding forests of Brennenburg, East Prussia, the player assumes the role of Daniel, an Englishman who wakes up inside an apparently deserted castle with no memory of how he got there.
Now, nearly three years later, the small team have quietly unleashed Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a game which has gathered word of mouth momentum, thanks to its lethal ability to scare the living daylights out of most jaded PC gamers who play it and, to be honest, it is hardly surprising. Their three part horror series, Penumbra, remains high on horror aficionados’ lists, bringing with it a smart ability which allowed players to directly manipulate objects in a realistic way. When it comes to horror adventures, Swedish developer, Frictional Games have a good pedigree.