Marecki on 4/10/2010 at 13:18

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At the risk of antagonising everyone who has posted so far, having played the demo I feel quite confident I will not spend 20 USD on "Amnesia". Sure, it looks good and is scary as hell - but it doesn't feel like much of a game. In fact, either having god mode handy or the game making you lose consciousness and wake up in the same place when you "die" might in fact be better for the "do not play to win, play to be immersed" approach the "Amnesia" wants you to adopt... As it is, you frequently:
- do something wrong without even realising it (:weird:);
- die a gruesome death;
- have the game tell you in big white letters what to do next (:nono:);
- try again but mess up and die again;
- repeat the last two steps until the game decides you suck and removes this particular problem after the reload, preventing you from actually letting it work it out (:tsktsk:).

In short, it feels to me like Frictional couldn't decide whether to make a game or a video. Oh, and maybe it's just me but I don't find repeatedly moving two boxes making your way across a room without getting into the water particularly entertaining... If it cost 10 USD I would probably get it, if only to support independent game developers as well as to help Frictional not stop releasing games for Linux (if you read one of their post-release blog posts, they are apparently considering doing so in favour of console ports in order to boost revenue); as it is, if I spend these 20 bucks on games at all I will buy "(http://2dboy.com/games.php) World of Goo" instead.

PS. Once again I highly recommend "(http://www.braid-game.com) Braid". It both is immersive AND can be played to win - and it costs half the price of "Amnesia", too!

Marecki on 5/10/2010 at 11:13

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To begin with, please note that all my impressions from the previous message were based on the demo not the full game! I'll get back to this at the end. Meanwhile,


I do, of course. Then again, IMHO the (last part of the) demo of "Amnesia" is very unforgiving.


I meant this in the context of treating "Amnesia" merely as a semi-interactive film rather than a full-blown game. Otherwise, it would be rather silly for a survival-horror game not to have the protagonist be threatened!


Fortunately, it seems to be possible to turn these hints of in the options menu! At least in the full game anyway.


I wouldn't exactly call one-two failed attempts "many", though - and that's exactly what happened. See below.


It happened to me in the final section of the demo, in the waterlogged archive. [SPOILER]The second invisible monster disappeared after killing me twice, the third - the one smashing the door just before the end of the demo - after just one failure.[/SPOILER] Given the impossibility of saving and restoring the game at will, I didn't bother to see if this could be reproduced.


Anyway, having heard more good opinions about the game I decided to give it another go and grabbed a torrent off the Internet. Now we're talking! It feels so much more interesting and interactive now. After playing the full game for half an hour, I decided I was sold and bought "Amnesia".
Note for Frictional: the so-called piracy has just earned you 20 bucks.
Note for RIAA and the likes: of course I didn't download a torrent of the full game, I simply have been known to lie on the Internet.

Lytha on 8/11/2010 at 23:40

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A friend just nudged me into the direction of this game, and then I remembered to have seen the name of this game here at TTLG before. So, I downloaded the demo.

Very nice, but the game and I strugged about the control of the camera a couple of times:

"there's someone or an armorstand! I want to look at it!"
"no, you don't"
"yes, I do!"
"no, you don't!"
"yes, I do!"
"okay, then take this improved visual madness syndrome now and do whatever."

... .well, maybe it was the kitty hair in the mouse that had this argument with me, and not the game itself. I doubt that though, because the game made me look at the zombie, too.



I don't quite get it why he went so mad that he crawled around on the floor one time, and then, when I was too stupid to solve the puzzle of the wooden stick in the mechanism of the floor hatch and was running in circles for some minutes, no madness syndrome happened at all.

Also, where did the zombie go to? He just disappeared.



Invisible monsters ftw, by the way. Especially when they can just chop you to bits with 2-3 hits. I think that me sitting on the crate, staring at the invisible monster and going "nya nya nya, can't hit me here. I've got all day" was a bit anti-immersive though.



Edit: Uhm, apparently it was more disturbing than I realized. When Geordi the tomcat jumped into my bed in the night after I played the demo, I thought that he was the second invisible monster and screamed. If playing the game means that I might scare my cat afterwards, just because he wants to snuggle with me, I am not so certain anymore that I really should play this.

Xorak on 9/11/2010 at 22:49

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That review above, showing the character insane, crawling along the floor and envisioning bugs scurrying across his face is the coolest thing I've seen in a game ever.

Eigenface on 20/11/2010 at 06:21

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I love this game. The first Frictional game I played was the Penumbra tech demo, and I've eagerly awaited each of their subsequent releases. Stealth-horror is my favorite genre hybrid. It's so natural - Thief is scary even when you're just hiding from guards, but the horror-themed missions really get you on the edge of your seat. Strange and unfortunate that most horror games are not stealth-based, and most stealth games (or stealth sections of games) do not go out of their way to be scary. Thank goodness for independent game developers!

Amnesia has its flaws, but I like to play games that are new and creative, rather than just rehashing the tried-and-true formulas. Amnesia makes fantastic use of lighting, sound, and story to create a creepy atmosphere. The plot goes in some very disturbing directions, but what I like most is the Lovecraftian theme, "true terror comes from inside." As the protagonist, you learn to fear yourself and the horrible crimes you don't quite remember. Amnesia's use of physics is just right; the controls are simple and intuitive, and all it does is make the environment feel more immersive by bringing mundane objects to life. You can pull drawers open and swing doors shut, but there's no ragdoll/explosive-debris eye-candy and no contrived puzzles about stacking crates on seesaws.

I'm on the fence about the sanity system. I hated the sanity system from Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. All it did was obstruct gameplay (to the point of being unplayable at times), and it did nothing to make the game scarier (don't get me wrong, the game was scary nonetheless, and I liked it overall.) The effects of insanity are nowhere near as cumbersome in Amnesia, but I still find it dubious to fake the psychological consequences of fear with post-processing effects - they don't actually make the person playing the game more scared.

I'm also on the fence about the gameplay mechanic of not letting you look at the enemies for very long. In theory it makes perfect sense - the greatest fear is fear of the unknown. In practice it did two things, heighten my fear of the unknown, and force me to work around the game. Drawing the player's attention to the artificial nature of the gameplay constraints being forced upon them is never good because it throws immersion all to hell. In the final analysis, I'm not sure the "look away" mechanic comes up as a positive in Amnesia or in Penumbra, but it's good the game designers are exploring its potential.

I'm yet again on the fence about the mechanic of making you avoid darkness. It runs counter to the fundamental gameplay of stealth, and this shows in Amnesia. When enemies are looking for you, you want to hide in the dark, but then you start going insane - a rock and a hard place. I'm sure the designers did this on purpose - there's no safety, all you can do is choose between the lesser of two fears. The only problem is although the enemies are scary, the insanity effects do nothing to make the darkness scary, so you're actually just choosing between fear and annoyance.

I'm on the fence about a lot in this game, but that's good - I like being challenged by new ideas. And despite my reservations about some gameplay mechanics, the overall experience is very immersive, atmospheric, and scary. Can't wait to see the next iteration of Frictional stealth-horror.