Cracks under its own weight of making you fear nothing but fear itself.
Supposedly, at least. Testimonials of people who couldn't play further than fifteen minutes out of angst, videos of people screaming fearfully at their monitors, and the recommendation of one of my personal friends whose opinion I value a lot, convinced me to give it a try as well. After all, I too enjoy a good spook show now and again.
And Amnesia definitely considers itself a master-class horror title. When you first boot up the game, you're greeted with a list of warnings and guidelines, telling you how to play the game. With headphones on at night with the lights off, and don't worry about saving. Instead, immerse yourself in the game.
Yes, that's kind of the point of every horror game, but okay. It's nice that the developers noticed too.
You take control of Daniel, an English archaeologist who wakes up on the cold tiles of a castle floor with a bad case of I-forgot-everything-except-my-name. You'll soon find a note you've written to yourself, explaining why you gave yourself amnesia and what you have to do next. The rest of the story is explained via audible flashbacks and diary pages, revealing how Daniel unearthed a peculiar orb at an African dig site, and how his newfound relic started affecting his sleep and sanity. He got the attention of a Prussian baron, who offered to help Daniel if he came to visit him at his castle. Obviously there wouldn't be much of a game if things worked out fine, and in horror stories things tend to go double wrong.
As you stumble through the castle, you realise you're not alone. There's a darkness spitting out a slimy, tissue-like mess across doors and walls and the lower levels house beings that should not be. Encounters with them are few and far between, and it even takes a good hour or two before you meet the first adversary. Amnesia's idea of combat is to not have any at all, so confrontations are all about hiding in small rooms and cupboards. If the monsters spot you, you might as well leap into their clawing arms because chances of escaping from them are pretty small.
But it's not just an organic darkness that dwells within the castle walls; it's also just dark. As in, no light source other than the odd candle, stove or moonlit window. Spending too much time in the dark will affect Daniel's sanity, though it's not as prevalent as Eternal Darkness. All you get is a distortion effect over the screen and big, hissing cockroaches that start climbing up the walls.
To pierce that darkness, you get a lantern that rapidly needs oil refills, and tinderboxes to light candles. The idea is to use tinderboxes in locations where you'll return to and the lantern for places you traverse once, but not being able to tell which rooms will warrant a revisit means that you'll be hoarding your tinderboxes, unsure of when to use them. And even though standing in the light will calm Daniel's mind, it also makes him visible to the monsters.
There is another remedy for keeping your sanity: progression. Solving the puzzles will reassure Daniel but for a first-person horror adventure, the puzzling part is pretty low-key. It's not afraid to present you with a few fetch quests but the game also has a couple of well-executed puzzles.
This is partially thanks to the adventure game logic of combining item A with item B to use on item C (which I still find entertaining) and partially thanks to the game's interaction system, where the mouse is used to mimic hand movements in real-time, much like in the developers' previous game Penumbra. Opening a door, for example, requires you to hold the left mouse button down, and push the mouse forward. It's a more involving way to turn a furnace valve or shovel coal into a machine, after first opening the hatch, of course. Further fleshing out the puzzles is the game's physics system: throwing rocks on a bridge to lower it, or removing a block obstructing a rope's suspension works well with the aforementioned mouse controls.
But it's all about the scares, right? And truth be told, Amnesia is scary. The problem is that it is scary for the wrong reasons: it is designed to make you feel weak and powerless. You can't defend yourself whatsoever despite gathering a jar of acid and a crowbar, you get partial paralysis when the monsters let out their ferocious roar so that running away becomes troublesome as well, and with both light and darkness having a disadvantage for you, you're quickly under the impression that the game funnels you into intensity regardless of what you do or where you go. When literally everything works against you, of course you'll get scared.
Nothing is more evident of this than one of the game's most talked-about moments: the water creature. At a certain point, you're in a basement level that's half-flooded. You have to jump from crate to crate without touching the water, because if you do you'll get sliced by the invisible monster that's walking through it.
"No problem," I thought, "I'll just lure this beast away by throwing a stone into the water at the far end of the hallway." That didn't work. So, you play ball: if the game wants you to cross this section using the jump button instead of intellect, then so be it. You manoeuvre your way across, turn the corner and... a closed gate. You forgot to flip a switch somewhere.
If I'm not allowed to fight, fine, but then don't impair my movement and my wits as well, and then taunt me with a dead end in case I was speeding passed your little thrill-section. Restricting my every course of action isn't scary. It's unfair.
But even its regular enemies soon lose their edge. A spook show is only frightening until you see the strings that the puppeteer is pulling, and in Amnesia's case, the one visible string happens to be the aorta. You see, there's a reason why the game is draped in shadow, and probably the same reason that the water creature is invisible; the monsters really aren't scary at all. Sure, they might look like shambling horrors from afar, animating with an inhuman jitter, but once they get up close and personal they become almost laughable. Since there really isn't much to do but await your death when you're staring them in the crooked eyes, you get all the more time to think of funny ways these creatures came to be. Maybe it was a calamari living in a lake near a nuclear plant for a couple of years? Maybe it was a human who got his head stuck in a jellyfish? Needless to say, it hollows out the fear.
When you die shortly thereafter, it becomes apparent that death too is a minor hurdle thanks to the game's gratuitous checkpoint system, which puts another cross in the checkbox of fear dimishment. At this point, the game's thrills can only come from its darkness, story-telling and audio cues.
Which is still a powerful combination. At a certain point, you're going through a zombie-filled cell block that's as good as completely dark. Your lantern doesn't shine very far as is, but if you're out of oil you can only see maybe three feet ahead of you, and bumping into a zombie then is still a solid fright. Later on, you'll stumble through a torture area where a more passive but sadistic fear takes over.
The audio cues are what you'd expect; heavy piano-work and string-instruments such as cellos and violas come together in a soundtrack that's reminiscent of the early Resident Evil games, and the usual high-pitched violin clutter comes around to slap you in the face when it's time to haul ass. Voice acting is done well and graphically it looks alright for an independent game. The environments and the lighting are nice but human (or human-like) characters aren't very convincing. The hand with which Daniel holds the lantern even looks disfigured.
The game will take about nine hours to complete, though the internet community is invited to create its own chapters by using the game's editor. You can download custom stories from the official site, and access them from the game's menu. The creators themselves have already set an example with Justine, an add-on that was released as part of Portal 2's promotion on Steam.
For me though, I've had my fill of Amnesia. It got some chills out of me and some of its adventure aspects and story-telling are great but I'm just not a fan of how the game keeps you deaf, dumb and blind to provoke its scares. If you fancy a horror title that's heavy on forced tension, disregard my score and give it a whirl because you're bound to like it. If, however, you prefer to be in control of at least some aspects within the horror, you might wanna leave this one in its dark descent.