2019-07-01_PC_Gamer

The obvious caveat? It doesn’t matter.
Amnesia remains a gruelling, unique
experience. The sort of horror game
that’s difficult to play, not because the
puzzles are tricky or it’s technically
challenging, but because it’s horrid. I
played it on a bright Sunday
afternoon and it was
still frightening enough
to have me jumping at
every creak, moan, and
distant footstep.
The first thing I
learn about myself is
that despite being the
bravest person writing
this feature, I’m afraid
of the dark when monsters, the threat
of monsters, or the vaguest hint at the
possibility of monsters is involved.
Light sources are finite in Amnesia. A
sensible player will ration them. But I
use up all my tinderboxes lighting
every torch I can, like a timid child
home alone at grandma’s on a stormy
night. I’ve decided I’m actually
playing Amnesia: Relax with Scented

L

et’ s be picky. The central conceit of Amnesia: The Dark Descent
is unrealistic. As anyone who’s taken a first date to see a Lars
Von Trier film can attest, it’s impossible to forget your worst
mistakes. So the idea that someone could blithely erase out a
past containing torture, kidnapping, and murder seems harder
to swallow than than one of the game’s potions.

Candles. But then I run out of lamp

oil scrabbling about for more tinder.

It’s embarrassing, but it’s also a great

example of why Amnesia still works.

It can do more with a single shadowy

alcove than Shinji Mikami can do

with an asylum entirely built out of

hammered brains.

A couple of things

heighten my newfound

infantile fear of dark

places. Firstly, there’s

the sound design.

Moans echo down

every corridor, and

constant scratching

makes me feel like I’ve

got a spider dancing in my ear canal.

It gets worse as the game gets darker

and my sanity suffers – an effective,

gnawing way of saying “turn on your

lamp, you cretin”. And then there’s

how tactile everything is. I have to

pull open rusty doors, manipulate

fallen rocks, and explore creaking

cupboards. The fact that I’m

physically interacting with these

things draws me in, and every time I

open a door and discover the

blackness beyond, I’m tempted to

edge back into whichever well-lit

room I’m about to leave. It also

makes me wish that more games let

me interact with stuff like this –

preferably games with less terror. Let

me arrange flowers on a butterfly

farm or order socks in a Marie Kondo

simulator. Anything but this.

fear factor

So it’s horrible, but in exactly the

right way. I enjoy being this scared.

The only thing I don’t love are the

flashbacks that break the pace of the

game. They’re a means of exposition,

but the laws of relativity state that I

can’t be scared in two existences at

once. If anything, the temporal shifts

feel like a reprieve from the danger of

the present. Amnesia is best when the

horrors are woven seamlessly into

the exploration like satanic crochet

• and then, it’s so horrible that I want
  tocurlupintoaballandhaveacry.

NeedtoKNow

What is it?

A Lovecraftian

candle-lighting misery

simulator

EXPECttOPaY

£15

DEvElOPEr

FrictionalGames

PublishEr

In-house

rEviEWEDOn

Intel Core i7-7700 CUP

@ 3.60GHz, 16 GB RAM,

NVIDIA GeForce GTX

1070,Windows 10

MultiPlaYEr

No

link

http://www.steam

powered.com

81

Tactile, imaginative, and

unsettling – nine years

since release, and

Amnesia is still almost

too scary to play.

vErDiCt

Oil be gOne

Cowering in the shadows in AmNesiA:thedArKdesceNt

it getsworse

as the game

gets darker

and my

sanity suffers

olDgAmesrevisiTeDbymatthewelliott

thEY’rE baCk

This is why the teachers warned

you not to lean back in your chair.