Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010, Windows) Review

SWEET FORGETFULNESS

Also for: Linux, Macintosh, Nintendo Switch, OnLive, Playstation 4, Xbox One

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Before returning to the horrors of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, I thought I would be spared from most of the stress since I would know what to expect. I was dead wrong. Tell me, how does foreknowledge of being chased by deformed monsters through pitch black corridors alleviate anything? During this replay, that dread of uncertainty only turned into certain dread. Whenever I entered a new area I thought: "Oh God no - not this place!"

Amnesia: The Dark Descent, designed by Frictional Games, was a sleeper hit and became hugely influential after its release in 2010. As shared by YouTubers and streamers ever since, it uses excesses of darkness and sounds to torture your imagination. Some of the horrors are directed, like a few death chases through tunnels partly blocked by rubble, that you have to clear on the fly. Other situations are driven mostly by the systems, where the game spawns a monster in your vicinity to see how you handle the situation.

The story takes place in a Prussian castle called Brennenburg in the year 1839. You come to your senses lying on your side in a hallway, surrounded by rose petals. You have no memory of recent events. The brief prologue mentions that your name is Daniel, and you were born in a fancy part of London called Mayfair. In a brief tutorial you follow a trail of purple liquid on the stone floor. It leads you through a set of hallways and rooms, teaching you about the gameplay and survival mechanics of this prolonged nightmare.

The castle radiates a gloomy, stone-cold atmosphere at every corner. All around you the corridors and rooms seem to twist and move, as if the structure itself is alive and breathing. The game oppresses the player, tricking your brain that you're embodying Daniel yourself.

The entire experience takes place in first-person, with a brilliant, terrifying sound design that completely envelops you in faint murmur and noises that logically shouldn't exist. Sudden shrieks may be signs of hauntings, or signs that Daniel is losing his mind. Or what if the amnesic protagonist is starting to remember events he experienced himself?

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is very carefully paced. Puzzle-solving and story exploration may suddenly turn into monster encounters of varying kind. The player controls almost every step of the way, including Daniel's hands, through an elaborate physics engine. To open a door or pull a lever, for instance, you have to perform the motion yourself via the mouse or controller. When there's a monster in the room searching for you, the stress can become overwhelming. One of my favorite moments requires you to turn a valve, which very slowly opens a door, as splashes in the knee-deep water behind you indicate that something is fast approaching.

You must get to the bottom of Daniel's business in the castle. The titular "dark descent" may refer to a multitude of things, but most obviously points out the hellish geographical direction in which you're constantly heading. Every point of progression leads further down. And you're not alone on your journey. Misshapen creatures lurk in the dark, and some malignant force called "The Shadow" is hounding your every step. And Amnesia has no combat mechanic - you're completely defenseless.

This is where the intriguing survival mechanics come into play. Hiding in the darkness is your only means to avoid enemy contact. But to stay sane, you cannot remain in the dark for very long. Direct eye contact with the monsters quickly breaks you down. When this happens, your vision becomes distorted. Daniel starts to hallucinate and grind his teeth. His movements become sluggish, as if wading through water. If he suffers a total breakdown, he collapses to the floor, making himself known to the monsters in the vicinity.

Scattered all over the place are tinderboxes to set candles and lamps alight, and oil for your lantern. Turning on the lights helps to alleviate the stress, but if you brighten the place too much, you run out of hiding places. Also, the light sources are finite - especially lantern oil, which is the only mobile source of light you've got.

This delicate balance between light and darkness is a brilliant survival mechanic. It also bears metaphorical significance throughout the tragic and horrific storyline, which I shall not spoil. During his descent, Daniel uncovers some deeply disturbing activities in the dungeons beneath the castle.

By recovering documents left behind by the castle's owner and others - including Daniel himself before he lost his memory - you learn of inhuman experiments connected to old folklore. Frictional Games do not hide the fact that their greatest source of influence is H.P. Lovecraft, the most prominent author of investigative, cosmic horror. In tribute to him, they even call their design tool the HPL Engine.

Sadly, Amnesia: The Dark Descent loses some of the mental chokehold in the last act. This fact becomes even more apparent on a replay. As the story unravels, it loses some of its mysterious allure, and the game's pace is reduced to a crawl. Even the scares lose a lot of their creativity, becoming less frightening in the process. And strangely, the light-versus-darkness mechanic suddenly stops mattering altogether.

Up to that point, some of the more ingenious puzzles utilizes the physics engine in clever ways, and the more traditional inventory puzzles has apparent solutions. But towards the end, that balance also shifts, giving way to increasingly illogical, supernatural inventory puzzles. Also, the playing field opens up, giving you too much ground to cover, and the hints and tips become too vague. You spend a lot of time backtracking and searching for points of interest.

The game simply stops being scary, which might be a relief to some people, but they would already have stopped playing a long time ago. To jaded players tough enough to reach the final act, it feels very anticlimactic. And as you reach the story conclusion, it wraps up in one of a few different ways. None of them feel like a sufficient reward for the mental anguish you've endured, and the questions that might remain unanswered.

Of course, much like the subject of horror itself, the build-up is what matters. Many good horror stories in popular fiction end poorly. As the mystery is uncovered, the horror dissipates, since the unexplained often is scarier than the explanation. But the horror story might still be good. As that old saying goes: It's not the destination, but the journey that matters. But unfortunately, in Amnesia: The Dark Descent the last few hours of the journey itself is flawed.

Nevertheless, Frictional Games have become my favorite Swedish game developer. They have stumbled upon a great, sustainable business model wherein their games' initial sales might seem lacklustre, but the tail is long. As they've claimed on their excellent blog, they can live on their sales longer than many other narrative-focused studios. This can be attributed to the very streaming-friendly nature of their games, which helps spread the word-of-mouth for years.

Watching a skilled streamer play and narrate a good horror game is like watching a horror movie where the outcome changes every time. You get to relive that dread of uncertainty, of not knowing whether the player will make it through the upcoming area or not. The player's state of mind - all the raw reactions and emotions - can hardly be faked. Such sincerity is hard to come across elsewhere in the world of streaming. These kind of videos garner a lot of viewership, which in turn inspires others to give it a go.

It is no coincidence that my own favorite YouTube-playthrough ever (although I must confess I haven't seen many) is one of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. ChristopherOdd, take a bow.

That's how it spreads. Like the cursed videotape in The Ring-movies, the original source slowly becomes an almost mythical piece of work. You want to try it out, even though it might be bad for you. Amnesia: The Dark Descent has become a classic because it favors audio - which in terms of quality has been perfected for a while - over visuals. We can disregard the technical limitations of a decade-old game when they're hardly visible. The darkness becomes like a black canvas of the mind, and the brilliant sound design fills it with the anguish and horrors of a broken memory.