Ripten Review: Amnesia: The Dark Descent (PC)

Note: The following review was written by new recruit James Bannister. He lives in the UK just like Sam, which probably explains the fluent writing style and obvious use of a top hat while writing.

It’s a funny old world. My first attempt at a full review of a game began with Frictional Games’ Penumbra, a wonderful title brimming with emotion and horror, but rather sparse in many other ways. It was through that same article that I was offered a place here, and then I was told my first review would be Frictional Games’ latest title, Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

The game is a rather interesting title, if only because of its relation to Penumbra. While it plays like a much more polished sequel to its predecessor, development actually began before Overture (the first of the two half-games) had even finished, making it much more of a sister project. Even some of the scenarios appear to be reused in Amnesia: having to hide in a room while something awful attempts to break in, running from an unkillable monster as you attempt to impede its progress and several other situations all hark back to the original cave adventure, and I still can’t decide whether this is the result of polishing a rough diamond or running out of ideas.

For those unaware of either title, Amnesia is very much an experience-driven adventure game. One plays as Daniel, an amnesic who awakens in the dark halls of Castle Brennenburg. Using a first person perspective, intuitive interaction system and a brilliant physics engine, the game then tasks the player to slowly descend into the heart of the castle-come-complex and uncover the mystery of its past. Using the mouse, a player can interact with any object as though it were their own hand; a simple-sounding yet incredibly engrossing control mechanic that is still as much fun to use as it was in all of the previous titles. This, combined with the game’s new Sanity system, really help draw a player in. As your state of mind deteriorates, aspects of the world begin to lose their clarity. Your vision is slightly blurred, and your head movements lag just enough to give the impression of delusion. And then the effects come in. Insects begin to appear in front of you, rooms turn red as an evil presence stalks you, doors open slightly before you reach them, and you feel a thousand times more vulnerable to anything the world has in stake for you.

Even then, the bulk of the game’s appeal lies in its harrowing atmosphere. Or, to be more specific: the sheer, unconfined horror. And in this aspect, the game has no peers beyond Frictional’s earlier efforts – the game is quite simply the most unnerving, oppressing, downright evil thing I have ever played, and I’m quite the Silent Hill fan. It knows when you feel safe. It knows when you begin to relax. It knows every little way to make your heart stop with fright, and it seems the developers made it utilise all this just a bit too readily. I can’t reveal too much without spoiling some of the best parts, but allow me to describe just five minutes of my ten-hour playthrough.

I found myself in a storage cellar aspect of the castle, searching for a variety of items to combine together to make a way out. The area, though almost unnaturally dark, seemed entirely harmless. I searched almost every corner before finding a small room containing my first item. I took it, and turned to leave. There, in the middle of the hall, running towards me, was something straight from a nightmare. No feral cry to reveal its presence. No sudden change of music to alert me. One minute everywhere was safe, and the next moment I was trapped with no means of escape or defence. It struck me as amazing that nobody has done this before, and as I locked the door and hid behind some crates, I was utterly amazed. The game had me expecting a monster all this time, and just when I had thought myself safe, it was there. And that’s where the beauty of the game’s design lies: the developers know exactly how and when to throw something disturbing your way, and you will never see it coming.

However, for all the game’s incredible and absorbing atmosphere, it still suffers from problems that plagued even the Penumbra games. Firstly, the game has very little variety in enemy design. Drastically so. By the time you reach the final areas, you will have met three monsters, two of which you can experience for free in the demo. Unlike Black Plague, you never feel as though one shambling monstrosity is any different to another. You may very well have been chased through the castle by the same lonely monster, a thought that definitely sucks some of the horror out of the title. While this is helped by the game forcing you not to look at your attackers due to the sanity system (which in itself is a terrifying notion, making things even more delightfully horrific), it is still an annoyance.

But by far the bigger problem is the puzzles. Now I am incredibly happy to see that Frictional have scaled back the obscurity of Penumbra’s puzzle system (whereby you needed to find one item in one room, run halfway across the map to find another item found in an out-of-the-way corner of a locker room, and then find the final third somewhere equally far away. And God forbid you forgot to find the note saying you can make a fuse using string…). However, for the first half of the game at least, things were scaled too far, as though the game were designed for children. You find items, you put them where the game tells you to put them, and then you move on, little to no thought involved. And in situations where you can get killed because of this, the game immediately gives you the solution, practically tussling your hair and saying “Oh dear, it seems you’ve died. Don’t worry, though, let’s hold your hand and be Mummy for a while so you can get past this incredibly difficult section.”

And if you get that message because you fumbled with a door just long enough for a monster to begin nibbling on your face, it’s all too rage-inducing.

Then, without warning, Obscure Puzzle Syndrome rears its ugly head again. For example, I spent twenty minutes searching a control room for levers to lower a bridge before giving up and messing around with the physics engine and rocks. By chance, I accidentally send a rock flying off in the direction of a door, and as I went to collect it I noticed that a thin stick was poking from out of the wall, camouflaged by the stone. Apparently the game expected me to have the infinitesimal attention to detail to notice that a small structure next to the door was, in fact, a switch I was supposed to use. Again and again you hit these tiny niggles in an otherwise seamless level design and you begin to wonder if it was all made by the same people or not. Not to say each puzzle is too easy or too hard – many of them are just perfect, in fact. However, when they’re obscure, they’re unbelievably aggravating. And just to get some perspective, I thought that piano puzzle in Silent Hill 1 was straightforward.

These gripes, however, are just minor annoyances that appear every now and again, like a moth deciding your computer screen is just oh-so irresistible and must be immediately bumped against. It’s hardly enough to ruin whatever you’re doing, but the tedium of having to convince it that no means no is noteworthy at the very least.

I cannot stress enough how fantastically this game does Horror. You’re actually perfectly safe for a good 80% of the game, but the near-perfect design will have you convinced you are always in that 20% margin of being hunted and attacked. Like its predecessors, it’s an experience, a marvelous journey through madness and the macabre, and I would go far enough to call it one of the essential titles in any PC library. And it’s just £13 to boot.