After that, Frictional threw up their hands and kicked any notion of self-defense in the head. Which wasn't a good idea when Alone in the Dark did it either, because it always tends to feel like you're controlling someone with two dislocated elbows. It used their trademark click-drag physics engine in that you had to manually swing melee weapons around with the mouse. Now, in Frictional's first Penumbra game, there was a bit of combat.
Hanging around in the scary darkness depletes sanity because apparently we're five years old, but staying in the light makes it easier for monsters to see you, creating a toss-up between not getting a headache from wibbly-wobbly camera filters and not being murdered. And as is so often the case, the main effect of losing your sanity is that the screen goes all blurry and weird, as if the first thing anyone does when they go insane is lose their contact lenses. From there the plot is heavily Lovecraft-inspired, and like many games with a Lovecraftian bent, implements a sanity meter, as if sanity is like diesel oil or something and you can get a reading on it by sticking a dipstick in your ear. Your past self is courteous enough to write you a note telling you to find and kill a guy, but not quite enough to wipe his memory somewhere that isn't five hundred locked-door puzzles away from the target. If adventure games were a medical condition, the first symptom would be amnesia and the second would be kleptomania.
You have amnesia, that old video game storytelling chestnut. The entire backstory is neatly encapsulated in the title. Guess I'll turn around and- WHERE DID YOU COME FROM?! WHAAAA! RUN, RUN, RUN! I'M SORRY, I DIDN'T MEAN TO MESS YOUR CHAIRS UP! OH, PISSING BLIMEY, THERE'S JAM COMING OUT OF THE WALLS!" I'll just go back and.whoa, what was that thing I just glimpsed running down a hallway? I don't know, but it looked cross about something, so I think I'll go down this other hallway instead. Doors suddenly blowing open in the wind? Yawn-o-rama! Guess I'll just look around upstairs and then might as well play Halo: Reach for a bit. Oh, look, physics! I can throw chairs around like a removal man who's completely stopped giving a shit. It's quite a while before you even glimpse a monster, and let me just transcribe my thought process at the time: "Dum de dum. It's actually got pacing, unlike Dead Space, where all the monsters are so fucking thrilled to be working that they fight each other for screen time. This is something Amnesia pulls off quite nicely. All a good horror game needs to do is hand you a piece of sandpaper and shout encouragement as you vigorously massage your own undercarriage. See, the second one is best, because your imagination is doing all the work. And then there are horror games where the guy in the spooky mask goes, "abloogy-woogy-woo" while standing on the far side of a brightly lit room, before walking slowly over to you, plucking a violin, and then slapping you in the face with a t-bone steak - that would be your Dead Space. Then there's the kind where the guy in the spooky mask isn't in a cupboard but standing right behind you and you just know he's going to go, "abloogy-woogy-woo" at some point but he doesn't and you're getting more and more tense but you don't want to turn around because he might stick his cock in your eye - that would be your Silent Hill 2. You see, there are three kinds of horror games: first, there's the kind where you're in a dark room and a guy in a spooky mask jumps out of a cupboard going, "abloogy-woogy-woo" - that would be your Doom 3. Regular viewers will know I have a fondness for horror games but that recent mainstream horror games haven't been scratching that particular pulsating, tumorous itch.
#Games like amnesia the dark descent how to
And what they know is how to make me poo my pants. I guess it's good to stick to what you know, and Frictional seem to be stuck, nailed and riveted to what they know. Brought to us by Frictional Games, whose only previous title is Penumbra, a first-person survival-horror adventure game with physics puzzles and stealth elements available now on Steam. I spent all the time I should have spent playing it playing Amnesia: Dark Descent, a first-person survival-horror adventure game with physics puzzles and stealth elements available now on Steam. But while I like keeping up to date, it's slightly eclipsed by my love of baiting fanboys, so Halo: Reach can sit in my to-do bucket for another week.
I know it's unusual for me to review a lower-profile indie game when there are big, juicy, mainstream targets doing the fan dance in my sights.
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