AMNESIA: THE DARK DESCENT SPOILERS
I'm going to start this off by saying that Amnesia: The Dark Descent is not a good game, but it is a pretty good horror delivery mechanism. What I mean by that is that the parts of Amnesia where you play it like a game aren't enjoyable, the controls aren't super precise, the platforming is sloppy, the puzzles are all absolutely terrible and the darkness mechanics make it more frustrating than scary. But the parts where it's acting like a horror game and is putting you in undesirable situations where you have no way to fight back against the horrible monsters chasing you, are all pretty good...For awhile. I'll say this, the first two hours of Amnesia were some of the scariest hours spent in any form of media. There was constant build-up with little happening. The atmosphere was thick and constantly shifting. Like in any good horror game, I never actually felt safe. Then, there were enemies, and suddenly the build-up was exploding every ten minutes or so. It was exciting, actually scary and fun. Then, the next two hours happened.
In these hours I had figured out exactly what the game wanted me to do for the increasingly common and nonthreatening enemy encounters. Once you hear a slight drum beat or monster gurgle, you hide in a corner and wait about 30 seconds. Then you just keep going. The music is your only clear indicator for when the monster is gone, and it makes it infinitely less horrific once you realize that the monsters really don't pose any kind of threat. They pretty much devolve into pee breaks. Hear a monster gurgle? Hop in the corner and do whatever you might want to for the next couple minutes. There's almost no threat of the monster finding you because of how horrible the AI is. Which, is understandable, if the monsters could find you any easier than they already can then the game would petty much be broken, because if they weaken your one line of defense then you have no other options, which rides the line of being scarier, but also frustrating to the point of not being fun.
The problem with this is the same problem in every other horror game. They're exactly that. Games. In a horror movie the story progresses and the scares happen as the movie intends. You never see the same scene twice, so it's never diluted. In horror games you have to balance the gameplay with the scares. If you make the enemies too strong then the player has to repeat a section of the game, repeating anything makes it less scary, for me it takes all the horror out and strips it to bare mechanics. So how would you solve this? Make scary monsters that pose no actual threat? Then why would you be scared of them? Make really strong enemies that kill you in seconds? Then the game is frustrating and is less scary because you have to repeat the situation several times. This has been a huge issue in horror games for a long time: Are you making a horrific experience that is meant to be interactive, or a scary game that is meant to be played like a videogame? Amnesia walks the line between these two horribly. The enemy encounters are structured in such a way that it gives the illusion of gameplay, but is more akin to the experience side of things. Where you do have to play the game to get around the enemy, but if you play it like a game then they pose almost no threat. They're more experience-y because of how easy they are to overcome, which makes them not fun to play, but since you're still having to play them, the value of them being experiences is removed almost completely.
What I am trying to say is that Amnesia is often not a very good horror experience because of how much of a game it's still trying to be. Like with the puzzles; the puzzles are horrible. I'm not going to beat around the bush, the puzzles actively make the already not fun game even less fun. How do they manage this? By making them barely puzzles at all. A majority of them are just the player walking around looking at things until you either pick up the right item, or pull the lever in the exact way the instruction note says, or just find a small walkway hidden in the darkness. It's as boring and annoying as the enemy encounters, especially when you're playing one of the longer puzzles. What makes these puzzles even more tedious and less fun is that it's painfully obvious that there are not going to be any monsters while trying to solve these terrible puzzles. They take away any and all tension that might have been present by having you roam around brightly lit environments with even less of a threat to your life than the normal.
One example of these puzzles involves pipes. There are a few rooms that come off of this hub room, one has three or four levers, and you have to pull them in a certain way to trigger the machine to work correctly. How do you do this? Well you have two options.
Option A: Read the note that tells you precisely how to do it.
Option B: Just try every combination of the levers until it works.
It wouldn't be as bad if you could solve these puzzles by just thinking about them, or by using logic in any way, but no, you have to either try every possibility or just have the note telling you what to do. What's the point then? That's not fun, these "Puzzles" aren't hard or engaging, they're laborious. The entire time any puzzles were involved I was immediately bored to tears, because there was no horror happening, there was no attempt to be scary. It's mind-boggling that these were left in the game. Oh wait, if you took them out, then there would almost be no game. You'd just be walking down hallways until a spooky monster pops up and makes you stop walking down the hallway for a bit. And how is that fun? It's not. It's in fact very terrible.
Alright, now I'm going to talk further about how I don't like the monsters in the game. In Silent Hill or Resident Evil a large part of what makes the enemies scary is the context the game gives for what made them this way, or what they are. Thinking about what each monster in Silent Hill represents is fun and gives each a creepy vibe. They're also deformed and monstrous enough to be scary even without context. Amnesia does have deformed monsters who are scary to look at...For about five seconds, then you realize that they're some of the goofiest motherfuckers in the world.
Look at this guy! He looks like someone messed around with the Mario 64 start screen and thought it was scary. The way they move is outright comical, the way they sound is too generic to be threatening, they are not scary. And guess what! This is one of the TWO enemy models in the entire game! You'll only ever see one more equally silly monster design, and he's only in one small section that lasts maybe 20 minutes. Maybe I'm a special case, at one point I was running from a monster and went into a room, he then followed me in and was unable to get me from behind a table. So I saw him for about three to four minutes just repeating the same animations. After a few minutes I was able to jump over the table, run out of the room and crouch in the hallway, I was fine, I was literally in the same room as the primary enemy and was able to get out virtually unharmed. But hey, maybe I'm just a master of videogames, maybe the average person couldn't have done that, but we all know that's bullshit. The enemy AI is so terrible that it'll not only get caught on tables, it'll pretty much let you waltz out of the room.
The story is also BS, it gets interesting about five hours in, then immediately squanders it in the final area. I should probably remind you AMNESIA SPOILERS! Especially for this section.
Alright, so as the story progresses you learn more and more about Alexander and Daniel. You play as Daniel who erased his memory for some stupid reason, and you have to find notes to remember what happened before you lost your memory of your own volition. So you start to find out that you were brought to this castle by Alexander to help with his research. His research slowly gets revealed to be what is causing all these monsters to run a muck, because he's researching this "Orb" which is somehow connected to some kind of god or monster powers from another dimension that he's either from, or is connected to. Because oh yeah, Alexander is from another dimension and is trying to get back there by using the power of the orb which is harnessed by using peoples sorrow or some stupid shit. How he gets this is by torturing prisoners, and he gets Daniel to help with the torturing. So Daniel does it even though he has no actual reason to, since he knows little to nothing of this orb or other dimension BS. So after some kind of unexplained event the entire castle is torn apart, all the prisoners are killed, monsters roam free and Daniel decides to erase his memory of the entire situation because he thinks it'll help him escape. That immediately sticks out in my mind as complete bullshit, because wouldn't your knowledge of the environments, monsters, situation, and workings of the machines be USEFUL INFORMATION!? He says it's because he couldn't handle the guilt of torturing people anymore, and would need to erase his memory of it, which is also bullshit because he's still himself, reading notes about what happened, talking to Alexander and slowly getting his memory back. It doesn't make any kind of sense under the smallest modicum of logical analysis. Daniel's entire situation would have been made far easier if he hadn't erased his memory. It was only done to better serve you the shitty plot.
Alright, so Alexander is trying to use the orb to open the portal back to his dimension, oh yeah, he's also like thousands of years old and has been torturing people to open this portal all that time. They also don't explain what this other dimension is, how he got here from there, or why he's been trying so hard to get back. So you get to the final Orb Chamber and see a floating naked old blue man. It is unexplained how or why is he is blue, but it's safe to assume he did it to himself. So Daniel-San goes in and Alexander starts talking about how he's thankful or something and Danny has three options.
Option 1. Bad Ending: Let Alexander go in his portal and you die.
Option 2. Good Ending: You put the head of someone who is essentially an old version of you into the portal once it opens which then destroys the portal and Alexander dies for some reason. You then die and go to either heaven or some spiritual bullshit place with no explanation. Yeah, that's considered the "Good" ending
Option 3. The Revenge Ending, or as I like to call it "The Actually Good Ending": You pull down the pillars that are generating the portal and Alexander dies. Daniel then narrates as he walks straight out of the castle, talking about how it's all over. The reason this is the actually good ending is because it does the one thing the ending to a horror game should do. Gets you out. The way horror-games generally end is with the main character escaping or being able to walk free. It's the reward for braving the horrors to get where you are.
So, I've talked a lot about how bad Amnesia is as a game, and how it's actually pretty bad as a horror game, but I haven't talked about how I would fix the game. Well, I'll say my piece, but know that I'm no game designer, I have no real knowledge of what it takes to make a good game, what I do know is what I enjoy playing in horror games. So here're some bullet points giving a few ways they could have made the same basic game better without changing the foundation entirely.
One example of these puzzles involves pipes. There are a few rooms that come off of this hub room, one has three or four levers, and you have to pull them in a certain way to trigger the machine to work correctly. How do you do this? Well you have two options.
Option A: Read the note that tells you precisely how to do it.
Option B: Just try every combination of the levers until it works.
It wouldn't be as bad if you could solve these puzzles by just thinking about them, or by using logic in any way, but no, you have to either try every possibility or just have the note telling you what to do. What's the point then? That's not fun, these "Puzzles" aren't hard or engaging, they're laborious. The entire time any puzzles were involved I was immediately bored to tears, because there was no horror happening, there was no attempt to be scary. It's mind-boggling that these were left in the game. Oh wait, if you took them out, then there would almost be no game. You'd just be walking down hallways until a spooky monster pops up and makes you stop walking down the hallway for a bit. And how is that fun? It's not. It's in fact very terrible.
Alright, now I'm going to talk further about how I don't like the monsters in the game. In Silent Hill or Resident Evil a large part of what makes the enemies scary is the context the game gives for what made them this way, or what they are. Thinking about what each monster in Silent Hill represents is fun and gives each a creepy vibe. They're also deformed and monstrous enough to be scary even without context. Amnesia does have deformed monsters who are scary to look at...For about five seconds, then you realize that they're some of the goofiest motherfuckers in the world.
 |
| Bragh! |
The story is also BS, it gets interesting about five hours in, then immediately squanders it in the final area. I should probably remind you AMNESIA SPOILERS! Especially for this section.
Alright, so as the story progresses you learn more and more about Alexander and Daniel. You play as Daniel who erased his memory for some stupid reason, and you have to find notes to remember what happened before you lost your memory of your own volition. So you start to find out that you were brought to this castle by Alexander to help with his research. His research slowly gets revealed to be what is causing all these monsters to run a muck, because he's researching this "Orb" which is somehow connected to some kind of god or monster powers from another dimension that he's either from, or is connected to. Because oh yeah, Alexander is from another dimension and is trying to get back there by using the power of the orb which is harnessed by using peoples sorrow or some stupid shit. How he gets this is by torturing prisoners, and he gets Daniel to help with the torturing. So Daniel does it even though he has no actual reason to, since he knows little to nothing of this orb or other dimension BS. So after some kind of unexplained event the entire castle is torn apart, all the prisoners are killed, monsters roam free and Daniel decides to erase his memory of the entire situation because he thinks it'll help him escape. That immediately sticks out in my mind as complete bullshit, because wouldn't your knowledge of the environments, monsters, situation, and workings of the machines be USEFUL INFORMATION!? He says it's because he couldn't handle the guilt of torturing people anymore, and would need to erase his memory of it, which is also bullshit because he's still himself, reading notes about what happened, talking to Alexander and slowly getting his memory back. It doesn't make any kind of sense under the smallest modicum of logical analysis. Daniel's entire situation would have been made far easier if he hadn't erased his memory. It was only done to better serve you the shitty plot.
Alright, so Alexander is trying to use the orb to open the portal back to his dimension, oh yeah, he's also like thousands of years old and has been torturing people to open this portal all that time. They also don't explain what this other dimension is, how he got here from there, or why he's been trying so hard to get back. So you get to the final Orb Chamber and see a floating naked old blue man. It is unexplained how or why is he is blue, but it's safe to assume he did it to himself. So Daniel-San goes in and Alexander starts talking about how he's thankful or something and Danny has three options.
Option 1. Bad Ending: Let Alexander go in his portal and you die.
Option 2. Good Ending: You put the head of someone who is essentially an old version of you into the portal once it opens which then destroys the portal and Alexander dies for some reason. You then die and go to either heaven or some spiritual bullshit place with no explanation. Yeah, that's considered the "Good" ending
Option 3. The Revenge Ending, or as I like to call it "The Actually Good Ending": You pull down the pillars that are generating the portal and Alexander dies. Daniel then narrates as he walks straight out of the castle, talking about how it's all over. The reason this is the actually good ending is because it does the one thing the ending to a horror game should do. Gets you out. The way horror-games generally end is with the main character escaping or being able to walk free. It's the reward for braving the horrors to get where you are.
So, I've talked a lot about how bad Amnesia is as a game, and how it's actually pretty bad as a horror game, but I haven't talked about how I would fix the game. Well, I'll say my piece, but know that I'm no game designer, I have no real knowledge of what it takes to make a good game, what I do know is what I enjoy playing in horror games. So here're some bullet points giving a few ways they could have made the same basic game better without changing the foundation entirely.
- Shorten The Puzzles.
At the very least make them solvable with basic logic instead of just trial and error or step-by-step instruction provided by the game. - Remove Platforming.
Sure, the scariest part of the game was running from the water monster which was technically platforming, but the sections where it's dark and you just have to hop over little sections of ground with no real way to see where you're going to land is absolutely terrible. - Remove Sanity System.
Becoming insane was never a hindrance in running from an enemy, if by some miracle I was in the darkness long enough to become insane to the point where it remotely mattered, then I'd just have to stand in the light for 30 seconds. - Make Dying Problematic.
If you're the worst at games then you might die, and if you do then one of two things'll happen.
1. You'll start exactly where you were and will be full on health and sanity.
2. You'll start exactly where you were and will be full on health and sanity, and the monster will be gone.
No matter what, dying is a better option than hiding in the dark. Am I the only one who thinks that is absolutely insane?...Get it? - Add A Few More Monster Types.
I saw the supersecret.rar, I know you had more monsters not only designed, but their models were made! You chose not to put them in there! - Add A Way To Fight Back.
I don't mean that you should add a machine gun or combat of any kind. What I mean is that your only option to deal with enemies shouldn't be just hiding. Give me the option to setup traps or distractions, anything. Make it so that when I see an enemy I can do literally anything other than just hide. That gets boring after five minutes. Imagine if Final Fantasy was only swords. No magic or summons, nothing but swords. That sounds monotonous as hell, right? Yeah, that's because it is, Amnesia! - Improve/Remove AI Scripting.
I was able to figure out when a monster was going to show up based solely on formula. I was never shocked when a monster showed up, it was too obvious. Maybe I've played too many horror games and am desensitized to the formulas for making things scary. But that doesn't matter, when I saw a video over a year ago that had a monster show up, I was able to remember that moment when playing and was able to avoid a monster entirely. The whole thing is far too scripted. Fix it. Make it more random, program three times as many monster encounters then just have it randomly pick which ones will show up. Sure tripling your workload sounds hard, but you're making a game, and at the point where you have enemy encounters ready to go, it's pretty much copy and paste.
Those are just a few basic ideas that would make playing this game far more enjoyable.
Overall Amnesia left me disappointed, maybe it was over-hyped for me, maybe I'm too desensitized, maybe Amnesia isn't scary at all and everyone is playing a silly-silly prank on me, but the bottom line is that I don't think Amnesia is a very good game. I would not recommend it to someone looking for a fun horror game, I would still recommend Fatal Frame 2 over pretty much any other. The atmosphere maintains its heavy creepiness throughout, the scares are legitimate, the story isn't overly convoluted and It's actually fun to play! It hits all the marks a horror game needs to, it's scary, it's a good game and tells a simple but well executed story.
Hopefully A Machine For Pigs fixes the issues I addressed, but I recently heard that it is going to be "more puzzle oriented." Which fills me with negativity.
Overall Amnesia left me disappointed, maybe it was over-hyped for me, maybe I'm too desensitized, maybe Amnesia isn't scary at all and everyone is playing a silly-silly prank on me, but the bottom line is that I don't think Amnesia is a very good game. I would not recommend it to someone looking for a fun horror game, I would still recommend Fatal Frame 2 over pretty much any other. The atmosphere maintains its heavy creepiness throughout, the scares are legitimate, the story isn't overly convoluted and It's actually fun to play! It hits all the marks a horror game needs to, it's scary, it's a good game and tells a simple but well executed story.
Hopefully A Machine For Pigs fixes the issues I addressed, but I recently heard that it is going to be "more puzzle oriented." Which fills me with negativity.
R.I.P.
Survival Horror.
1996 - Whenever Amnesia came out.
Aaron Eades. 2013.
Email: Aaroneades@Skull-Kidz.com
Twitter: @Aaroneadez
