Amy

The survival-horror genre has been under attack by current generation design for a long time, forcing it into near-extinction. Modern design philosophy revolves around the concept of accessibility and empowerment, which naturally comes into direct confrontation with survival-horror dogma. A good survival-horror game wants to make you feel powerless, incompetent, afraid, and desperate. A best-selling, triple-A video game doesn’t. The Silent Hill and Resident Evil franchises were popular showpieces of the genre, but now have shifted towards being more action-orientated, for better or worse. The gene has had to live on as inspirations to other games like Dark Souls, but those games aren't satisfactory substitutes for true survival-horror games.

So when fans of the dying genre heard that a creative mind like Paul Cuisset (creator of Flashback) was working on a new, honest-to-god survival-horror game, it’s easy to see why people were excited for AMY when it was first announced. AMY became championed by survival-horror fans who wanted the game to be good so developers and publishers alike would see its success and give the genre a second-chance in the mainstream market.

Unfortunately, AMY is not the triumphant return of the genre that fans wished for. It’s a well conceived, but poorly executed game that takes every good idea it has and dilutes it with a myriad of bad design decisions. But AMY is a not a total unplayable train wreck. It is a bad game, and while it’s not one of the worst games ever made, it comes dangerously close to it.

AMY puts its worst foot forward right at the beginning with its opening cut scene which has frame rate issues, screen tearing, bad voice acting (the player character, Lana, will switch between multiple accents more times than all of the cast of Heavy Rain put together), and mediocre graphics. All of this is prevalent in the game, but to a certain point I can forgive a small downloadable game for having below-standard production values, but that’s the least of AMY’s problems.

After a quick exposition set-up (apocayplse, zombies, mysterious science facility, and various other horror clichés) you’re quickly introduced to, in order: a shallow and unnecessary combat system that gives you poor feedback for your actions, a badly implemented stealth mechanic that is napalmed by inconsistent and totally random AI, a terrible hacking mini-game that relies more on chance than actual intelligent player input, and to the character and gameplay mechanic of Amy herself, which is probably the most well-constructed system in the titular game.

She isn’t a burden like most side characters in other escort missions; she has practical uses. You can order her to crawl into small spaces, operate switches, and use her psychic abilities. Unfortunately, the situations that you use her for are too ham-fisted and quickly take you out of the experience.Why are there so many convenient holes in the walls? They aren't vents, and I'm actually pretty sure Lana can fit through them. What’s the point of an elevator when its operating button is on the other side of the room? And I'm not even going to touch on the generic stupidity of a little girl with psychic powers; you can figure that one out for yourself.

But Amy’s most useful ability is to cure the zombie sickness that runs in Lana’s veins. When Lana is separated from Amy for long periods of time, she’ll start to undergo a zombification process and will die unless reunited with Amy quickly. This creates a codependent relationship that we rarely see in video games, and this exciting concept is at the core of AMY. The game’s second most interesting gameplay concept plays with this zombification process, but I won’t spoil it for you here, as it’s one of the few things that AMY has going for it.

What brings AMY down from being somewhat bad to almost completely abysmal is its horrific checkpoint system and trial-and-error gameplay. If you're going to have trial-and-error gameplay then you need good checkpoints, and AMY doesn't have good ones, or even just bad ones, but miserable ones. You'll get maybe three checkpoints in a 2-hour level, and if you die, you go all the way back to the last checkpoint you hit. Could be 15 minutes ago, could be 45 minutes ago, AMY doesn't care.You also lose all of your health items when you die, not even Dark Souls pulls that shit on you.

Also, if you're going to have trial-and-error gameplay, then you need to have your gameplay nailed down, and AMY's is anything but. As previously stated, the AI has no logic is seems to follow. So, for example, you're playing a mission where you automatically die if an enemy spots you, you kinda' have to observe the area, recognize enemy patterns, and so forth. The problem is: there's no pattern at all. An enemy that couldn't see you behind that car before now automatically focuses in on you and you're dead. I don't think I need to tell you how bad that is.

Well, maybe if there's a good storyline or characters to encourage you to go through all of this nonsense then maybe AMY would've been more acceptable. The problem is, there isn't. The characters are underdeveloped, the storyline is nonexistent, and for a survival-horror game AMY is the least scary game I've ever played, so there isn't even the anticipation of seeing what the next jump scare is. And the atmosphere is lifeless so it never builds any tension from that. There's no motivation to play AMY outside of the gameplay, and the gameplay simply isn't very good.

AMY is frustrating. That’s the underlying emotional experience that I had with the game and my ultimate take away from it. It’s frustrating that the combat system sucks, the stealth mechanics are half-baked, the AI is infuriately random, the game isn't scary, all of its technical issues are a bummer, and why any story or character development at all is absent. But what’s the most frustrating thing about AMY is that it had so much potential, and at parts you can see some something interesting and kind of awesome in there, but it never truly manifests in the game itself.