Throw several H.P Lovecraft novels, Penumbra series, and 5 developers in a blender and you get Amnesia The Dark descent.
The game casts the player in the role of Daniel, a young man from London, who awakens in the dark halls of Brennenburg Castle with little to no memories about himself or his past.All that he can remember is his name and that something is hunting him. Upon finding a note that he wrote to himself, he finds out that for some reason he has chosen to forgot. And before he does so, he writes you a note telling you to kill a man named Alexander.
Amnesia the dark descents gameplay is incredible, instead of allowing the game to do all the work for you, you have to click on doors and actually drag them or push them with your mouse. The same controls apply to shelves and so on. You can pretty much pick up everything, it becomes useful when you are trying to hide from a monster and you place a barrel infront of the door. Each door opens its own way, so while being chased by a monster the tension is even higher.
One of the biggest minuses has to be the sanity meter, it works well in paper but it just gets annoying. You have choise to either stay in light and stay sane, but you will be seen. Or you can stay in dark, lose it slowly and remain hidden. The screen becomes so blurry that it's sometimes hard to see, and since I had several times where I had to wander around dark hallways with Daniel apparently having a heavy hangover, not having any tinderboxes nor lantern oil.
Amnesia the dark descent does not look as good as most newer games what are released with tons of budget and hundreds of employees working on it. And it's understandable because FIVE guys, with minimum payment built the engine from groundup. That is impressive. The engine supports parallax occlusion mapping, SSAO etc so it is not that dated and it actually looks really nice most times.
The biggest thing with amnesia the dark descent has to be the sound design, it is perfect. From monsters growling loudly as they are trying to find you in a room, to distant ambient sounds such as flags moving in wind and flies flying everything is perfect. There are also flashbacks from before Daniel chose to forget. The flashbacks are mostly disturbing. Another perfect thing has to be the music, finnish composer Mikko Tarmia did an excellent job setting the atmosphere up. From small ambient tracks while exploring, to "OH GOD RUN" theme when you are being chased by monsters.
Amnesia the dark descent is just a masterpiece in survival horror genre. It was made by five guys who have serious fiancial issues, so the future of frictional games depends on how this game sells. Dont be a cheap ass and buy this game. It's only like 15 euro (20 dollars)