Game Discussion of The Week: Amnesia: The Dark Descent

stratogustav - When I played it (PC version), it didn't have achievements yet. But I just played SOMA, also made by Frictional Games, and all its achievements were story related - just by finishing the game you get everything. I guess it must be the same for Amnesia.

My vote goes considering the impact this game had when it came out and the general evolution of Frictional as a development studio. See, I was a fan of Frictional since their first release of an early demo for Penumbra. The first Penumbra game was a survival horror: there was some combat, you had to get items, solve puzzles, standard stuff. For their second game, they upped the horror aspect: you couldn't kill the enemies anymore, so it was one of the first big stealth-horror kind of games.

In Penumbra, they really went ahead on the horror approach: you can't even look at the enemies, as the screen becomes distorted and blurry (that screenshot up there is only possible with cheats). That is a very good idea, because then you can't realize the low-budget models they're using for the games' enemies; they look much scarier when you can't see them clearly. It plays like a stealth game mixed with some point & click mechanics; one good thing they did is that the enemies' patrol routes have some randomization: for example, after some time, an enemy might just disappear from a place when you are not looking, so you can't perfectly predict were the enemies are - that is important for most of the games' scares.

I think I have a soft spot for the second Penumbra and for SOMA, as their stories are more interesting than Amnesia (SOMA has a legitimately haunting and well-written story, it's very similar to stuff like I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream), but Amnesia still has their best gameplay - in SOMA, for example, they took out the inventory, the randomization and the places to hide, so while it has a very good story, the gameplay is certainly a step down.

Just the fact that Amnesia later inspired the creation of Alien: Isolation makes it a very important game in my book.

By the way, I haven't played the sequel (A Machine for Pigs), but I heard it sucks as it was developed by The Chinese Room, makers of walking simulators.

EDIT: One terrible thing about Amnesia (though that's not the game's fault at all) is that it popularized those "Let's Play" videos with teenagers screaming at horror games. A long string of games started being developed with that braindead public in mind, until the bottom of the barrel was reached with things like endless releases based on Slenderman and Five Nights at Freddy's... And, ultimately, this kind of video made people like Pewdiepie famous: a quick look on his channel - gods protect me - tells me his entire first year on youtube was spent posting various Amnesia videos, so yeah.