Amnesia: The Dark Descent

What makes horror stories resonate is the sense of vulnerability. Since the release of Resident Evil 5 [バイオハザード5], survival horror games have forgotten this. Amnesia: The Dark Descent boldly leaves the shotguns and grenades behind. Instead, this uncompromising survival horror title has a lantern with limited oil and a whole lot of imagination.

You awaken in an empty castle with a note written by yourself. You have purposely erased your memory for reasons unknown. Now, you must venture into the heart of the castle to kill a man named Alexander. This wouldn’t be so bad if a living nightmare wasn’t following your every step.

The five person crew behind Amensia has a masterful sense of player agency and purpose. The path through (and below) the Gothic castle always feels propelled by strong storytelling and direction. You enter a ballroom and a window breaks, unveiling a gust of wind. Of course, that’s the direction you must go. It’s in a broader sense of pacing that the game achieves its greatest scares. When you aren’t exploring rooms for clues that expand the story, you are hiding from a group of terribly unhandsome, disfigured people or solving elaborate puzzles. The game will often make you feel safe after a hellish encounter, only to increase the intensity a moment later.

There is a constant struggle between light and darkness in the game. Darkness, as well as witnessing disturbing events, eats at your sanity. As your sanity meter lowers, the game will find new ways to play audio and visual tricks on you that will make you question your own well-being. This leads to the greater tug-of-war throughout the game: player comfort vs. progress. As you travel down pitch-black hallways, you will wonder if lighting a candle is for strategic purposes (to see monsters) or for your own relief.

Unlike other games that let you open doors with the press of a button, Amensia lets you interact with every physical object by reaching out and touching it. For instance, a door can be grabbed with the click of a mouse. You can then carefully crack it open or slam it shut. This simple mechanic makes some of the game’s greatest scares possible, such as fumbling for a door knob or quickly assembling boxes to make a hiding space when an enemy approaches.

Part of the game’s genius is its reluctance to put the player in dangerous situations in its beginning while keeping the horror relentless in its delivery and pacing. By the time danger is tangible, virtual death feels like actual death. When death came close, I would exit to the menu, take a deep breath and reassess if I could make it out alive. To say the least, I haven't been the same ever since.

The Dark Descent has more in common with modern horror films than the genre staples in gaming before it; with its slow pacing, a threat kept mysterious for as long as possible, and personal allegorical story about guilt.

Gameplay choices like the smoke-and-mirrors sanity and light system, along with tense chase sequences help the player embody the cowering, fumbling wreck Daniel is. Through all the above and its brilliant use of sound and forboding atmosphere, it's quite a masterclass in instilling apprehension in the player so consistently.

for years i've kinda been writing off this game as a relic of the early let's play era but, of all things, a video essay actually got me interested in it again. and wow, i'm pleasantly surprised! amnesia: the dark descent has aged unexpectedly gracefully, despite what it's cheap-scare reputation would have u think. from a narrative perspective, the amnesia concept rly works for me. i find the way that, as daniel, u have to piece together yr own increasingly disturbing backstory through found documents and environmental context super unique and effective. frictional rly mastered the balance between a game world that's terrifying yet intriguing - i constantly found myself dreading what was just around each corner of this crumbling gothic castle, but being compelled to venture forward into the darkness anyway. forget the jumpscares - immersive atmosphere is this game's biggest strength. the fact that we're treated to a masterclass in tense sound design is no doubt largely responsible for this - i'd honestly hesitate to listen to the groaning, tortured, mad score in a dark room by myself. i'm a bit of a stickler for good game feel, and thankfully a:tdd doesn't succumb to the janky trappings of many older horror titles. i love how you can rly reach out and touch nearly everything in brennenburg - watching ppl play this game as a kid, i remember thinking it was so cool that u could interact with so many different physics objects. tbh, it's still one of the game's aspects that's most impressive to me

as for negatives, i do think that the sanity mechanic is a little bit of a gimmick - even the devs have basically admitted as such. it also broke some immersion when i realized i was just waiting for monsters to "despawn" rather than "go away" most of the time. both of these issues are apparently somewhat alleviated by the recent "hard mode" update, but i don't necessarily want things to be more difficult - just more fluid. texture quality is also a little bit jank sometimes, even though on the whole the visuals still hold up remarkably. i also found myself getting stuck pretty often - i suppose i would rather look up a walkthrough than have everything painfully obviously pointed out to me, but it was frustrating nonetheless. yr mileage may vary on that tho - as a rule, i'm a novice at horror game puzzles. on a technical note, the game crashed pretty damn often on my pc - once again, yr mileage may vary. also, apart from reexperiencing the freaky atmosphere, there's not much of a reason for me to come back to the game. i'll just look up what happens in the non-good endings lol - i don't need to play thru the whole thing again just for that. still, u rly can't deny amnesia: the dark descent's place in revitalizing pure survival horror, as well as being a fantastically immersive dark storytelling experience in it's own right

// UPDATE 11/7/22 //
the justine expansion doesn't have it's own glitchwave page, so i guess i'll briefly mention it here?? i mentioned in the review proper that i'm not very good at the type of puzzles these games employ, and amnesia: justine basically doubles down on the obtuseness. i constantly found myself frustrated with the lack of direction, tho i guess the point of the expansion is to be a bite-sized unforgiving experience. try as i might, i literally just killed all three of the captives lol - sue me. that being said, i do like the expansion from an in-universe perspective - the sadistic aristocrat u are revealed to be playing as has a very interesting backstory, this time largely delivered thru an eerie cylinder phonograph system as well as the expected found documents. given that the expansion came out during steam's arg event leading up to portal 2, i also like the whole test chamber human experiment parallel there - it's like a cool recontextualization of a futuristic franchise's core tenets into the gothic antiquated world of amnesia. worth a play, but it's not rly on the same level as the base game imo

Amnesia: The Dark Descent was my favorite horror game of all time when I first played it. The atmosphere is perfectly Lovecraftian. The monsters you encounter are horrifying in design and implication. The puzzles are decent. The sanity meter was unique. Having lamp oil be a scarce resource kept you on your toes alone.

And man, the modding scene was great for this game. There were so many downloadable campaigns that were honestly scarier than the base game.

But, for reasons I won't spoil, the replayability of this game is very low. The developers made some questionable design decisions, though you aren't likely to notice unless you replay the game. Definitely worth a play, and go in as blind as you can.

If you liked this game, then check out the Penumbra franchise. Black Plague in particular is mechanically very similar to Amnesia, but I think it's a better game. They are made by the same developer. They are just a bit older than Amnesia.

The settings and puzzles are well designed, the pace is well done, and the storytelling is creative. And the game genuinely does manage to instill a sense of dread and suspense for a time.... that is until I actually died for the first time to an enemy. The enemy design in this game is quite creepy, a little goofy, but creepy nonetheless. Especially when you first catch a feint glimpse. However, all tension and horror evaporated for me the second I died and realized just how goofy those things are when they see you and how ignorant and slow they are. Not that that makes the game as a whole bad, but its ability to be a horror game disappears when the threat ends up being not that.... well, threatening.

Still recommended if you see it for cheap, it's still fun and worthwhile as a game and those first 2 or so hours are unsettling.

One of the most influential horror games of the past decades, for better or for worse. As a game in its own terms? The obscure nature of Alexander's story is fantastic and grandiloquent, the horror is palpable and the enemies -while very easy to lure out-, do get the blood levels rising. But the final rooms of Amnesia are a bit too overlong, and the three endings thing is absolutely unnecesary; you can save before the final moments and do all of them without a hassle.

It did what it wanted to do very well. It's just a shame it was the mechanical inspiration to some of the worst videogame horror tropes and design philosophies ever, spawning the Slender-like games and the whole exaggerated crybaby Horror gamer YouTube personality that became so despised over the years.