Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a thrilling and terrifying experience from the beginning to the end. Problems do exist: the sanity mechanic turns out to be more of a chore than an enhancement to the experience, and the eight hours of the game are enough to grow desensitized to the horror that it provided throughout. Despite this, a compelling atmosphere of tension and dread supports Amnesia to the end.

You play as Daniel, a British man who wakes up in castle Brennenburg with no memory and only a note, written by Daniel before he gave himself amnesia, explaining your goal: travel through the castle and kill a man named Alexander, the lord of Brennenburg. You explore the castle, solving various puzzles while avoiding many enemies. Daniel is a normal man who has no means of combating the monsters and other horrors out for his blood. So instead of fighting, you have to use quick wits to evade and distract enemies in order to survive.

The graphics are not beautiful, but Amnesia more than makes up for its muddy textures with inspired use of shadow. The Dark Descent is a very dark experience, with the only light usually coming from your own lantern or from fire made with the tinderboxes found hidden in the castle. The darkness also acts as a gameplay element, as standing in the shadows will drain your sanity, represented visually with a brain in your inventory, while standing in the candle light will slowly restore your composure. The gameplay provides many compromising situations where the only way to avoid danger is to sit in a dark corner while your sanity drains. Tears are optional.

Amnesia can be called a survival horror, but its ultimately an adventure game. The puzzle solving takes the point and click mechanics of the classics, and applies them to a first person style experience. Physics based puzzles are also found, and they are probably the most immediately difficult. Though the game itself is hardly challenging. Most of the puzzles are pretty straightforward, and the monsters' are rather easy to avoid. It is hard to die, but even if you do die repeatedly, the game will supply hints and eventually delete the obstacle. Whether this is a good feature or bad is up to personal interpretation. If you're looking for a hardcore, challenging time with Amnesia, you will be disappointed. It is clear that Frictional Games realized that the biggest draw of their game was its atmosphere and that frustrating the players with repeated deaths would only serve to harm it. That said, it was pretty hard to take the threats seriously, considering that they would most likely disappear if they killed me.

The pacing of Amnesia starts off great. In the beginning of the game, you almost never see a monster and the monsters you do run into have plenty of space between them. To start out with, that is. As the game progresses, more and more of the creatures pop up to dealt with. For a while the increased frequency serves to heighten the tension I felt walking through the dark corridors, but towards the end it seemed like I was running into a monster every ten minutes with no downtime, lending to a more fast paced feeling that was inferior to the slow crawl of the earlier segments. Not to say you'll be bored! It's just that you eventually come to expect them a bit too easily. Hearing the groan of a near-by monster ceases being a heart stopping experience, and becomes just another encounter to grind through. You grow used to it, and that really hurts the game. Due to its short length, you aren't given a lot of time to acclimate to the situation, but I feel that cutting an hour off would have done wonders to preserving that sensation of terror.

The other glaring issue with Amnesia is the sanity effects. In most cases, they effectively add to the tension with the sound of grinding teeth, muffled footsteps down the hall, bugs crawling on the camera, etc. The effect collapses when you hit the bottom of the meter. Your view becomes blurry, the mediocre graphics get worse and the shadows become amorphous blobs of color. Your POV slows down and you can't run anymore. This effect is novel the first time but is only irritating in all future instances. You can not die from loss of sanity and the meter slowly refills overtime no matter where you are. The result is a cheap effect that holds no sense of danger and only serves to pull the player out of the experience.

In the end, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a thrill to play. It makes master use of various Lovecraftian elements to craft a tense adventure though the castle of hell, and, if you can let yourself be taken in by the atmosphere of this world, I feel you will enjoy it until the end like I have.