Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Where/when/why This one entered the library via Humble Indie Bundle V, which I shamelessly purchased for US$5 in mid-2012 at less than a dollar a game. At that point Amnesia was probably the only game on that roster I wasn’t particularly interested in, although that would change a few months later as the game’s popularity spread due to the proliferation of LP vods of people freaking the fuck out, or something. A friend told me I totally had to play it; conveniently I already had it.
What/who Yep, so Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a first-person survival/horror. It’s set in a large, sprawling, not-quite-coherently-put-together castle in the 1800s. It has a lot of supernatural shit and progress is generally made by exploring and completing environmental puzzles. Oh and I guess the premise of the game is that you play as a guy called Daniel who wakes up having forgotten everything (Amensia dun dun dunnnn) and so you have to piece together all this stuff through flashbacks and by finding diary notes inexplicably scattered around the castle. Much darkness and foreboding and ancient mystic tropes. It came out in 2010.
It was made by Frictional Games, a Sweden-based indie. They’re also known for the early Penumbra games and recently released another horror game called SOMA.
First install? I’d actually played through pretty much the entire fucking thing during that 2012 Halloween period, but for some reason I stopped while 95% of the way to the finish line and forgot to go back to it.
Play time, this time? Completed? 7-8 hours, and yes, finished, hooray! However because I’d played through most of it before, I invited the girlfriend to join me on this occasion. Although I’d tried to play as directed (in the dark, alone, with headphones) the first time round, I was pretty happy to keep the lights on.
Thoughts Amnesia is still scary, even though little of it was new to me. Playing with a second person didn’t really dampen this at all, sadly - it made the scares more hilarious, but it also had an amplifying effect of sorts. My favourite thing that happened was when I left the room for a minute or two to get something from the kitchen and my girlfriend came running to me in a panic and I realised she’d gotten up to the water bit.
The story is kind of a mess, but it’s an entertaining and not-too-serious mess, and uncovering it via diaries and flashbacks is fun.
“Who is Agrippa again?”
“I can’t remember. Someone important I guess.”
The light/fuel/fear mechanism works pretty well most of the time - it was less of a dull hindrance than I’d remembered. The petrified drunk screen could be pretty annoying though.
A couple of the puzzles tripped us up to the point where we ran out of patience and looked up the answers on the internet. Is that a criticism or an admission of stupidity? I’m not sure.
Impaling yourself on a needle which you’ve stuck into a corpse to innoculate yourself against a fungus is a pretty gruesome solution in a FPV game. Just saying.
The arc of tension and drama in the game doesn’t quite pan out. While Machine for Pigs had some pretty gaspy moments toward the end, Dark Descent is relatively easy going in the final section. Feels like they missed a trick there.
Also unlike Machine for Pigs, the Descent part of the Dark Descent was far less prominent, plot-wise, and in fact the castle map remains pretty immemorable and incomprehensible to me. But that’s not a huge deal.
Is this goodbye? This is probably my favourite horror game and I’d recommend it to anyone. Give me another few years to forget the finer details (amnesia hurrrrrrr), and a good excuse, and I could see myself back here.
The gf enjoyed it too.
Next up is Analogue: A Hate Story