SHE WHO TALKS TOO MUCH
Do you remember when horror was about the fear of the unknown? Sadly, Frictional Games seems to have forgotten that in Amnesia: Rebirth. This sequel to the classic Amnesia: The Dark Descent goes out of its way to demystify everything that once made its universe unsettling. Notes spell out every detail, flashbacks distribute backstory with unnecessary precision, and the alien world so eerily implied in The Dark Descent turns out to be rather bland.
Taken as a whole, this is a colossal disappointment.
Rebirth is built around a first-person experience meant to fuse the player with Tasi Trianon, the player character. As she staggers across scorching sand dunes, gropes her way through pitch-black caves, and flees through underground ruins, you are expected to be her.
Thanks to strong visual design and excellent sound work, Frictional largely succeeds in selling the illusion of an inhospitable place. The desert feels terrifyingly endless, the caves claustrophobic, and the alien elements are initially fairly intriguing. Rebirth is far more heavily directed than its predecessor. You are guided by a gentle but persistent hand, and as long as the story is compelling, I have no objections to that.
Unfortunately, Tasi herself—and her personal trauma—ruins the mood constantly. Her habit of talking to herself (and later, to her unborn child) verbalizes every feeling and realization the player is meant to have, and all my emotional investment goes down the drain. She suffers a lot in this game, so I could've sympathized with her, but she demonstrated enough self-pity for the both of us.
She's annoying as hell. She scolds me when I act carelessly; she tells me where to go despite the game being entirely linear; she keeps stating the obvious—such as noting that "this is bad" while heavily pregnant and stumbling through a desert storm. I soon begged for a ghoul to come and rip her tongue out.
The game opens with a plane crash somewhere in Algeria, followed by an amnesia gap large enough to fill an adventure game. When Tasi finally regains consciousness, she finds herself alone in the wreckage. She ventures out into the desert in search of her husband, Salim, who was also on board. The expedition they were part of has left traces behind. In small, convenient fragments, her memory returns as she explores—she realizes she has made this journey before.
The story is ambitious and full of good ideas, but it is overwritten and overly layered. Too much has already happened before the player takes control. Most major drama is in the past, relayed through flashbacks. The fate of the expedition itself is underdeveloped—when you occasionally come across the corpses of its members, you feel nothing. At the same time, a loosely related family trauma is given disproportionate weight. It only becomes relevant near the end of the game, when you have to decide the story outcome. Even then it turns out not to matter; it was so poorly conveyed that it had no influence on my choice whatsoever.
And for all the shocking revelations the game insists on delivering, it forgets some essential explanations: why does Tasi suffer from amnesia in the first place? And why does she wake up back in the plane wreck at the start of the game?
Progression is frustrating as well. Several times, just as you are about to leave a location, you literally fall through the floor and are forced to take a long detour through tunnels or alternate dimensions. Some of those sections drag on far too long. A series of chase sequences in the underground ruins made me groan in resignation.
The writer behind The Dark Descent and Frictional’s excellent SOMA is not responsible for this story, and it shows. Some of the dialogue is painfully repetitive and outright awful. When Tasi discovers that she is pregnant, the script proceeds to bombard us with saccharine family bliss. She and Salim constantly call each other “my heart” and refer to the baby as “little one” until your ears bleed. Even the most dramatic and tragic scenes—which I won’t spoil—fail completely to land.
That’s a shame, because the atmosphere of horror and paranoia is otherwise spot-on. The darkness is dense and oppressive. Monsters crawl inside the building walls, threatening to emerge at any moment. The environments are packed with unsettling and macabre details—mutilated bodies, disturbing idols, non-euclidean toilets, etc.
The mechanics are generally solid, the controls intuitive, and the HPL engine runs flawlessly. Opening doors and moving debris by physically dragging the mouse never stops being stressful—especially when something is growling nearby. The puzzles strike the right balance in terms of difficulty. From a narrative standpoint, the alien portals operate on a rather comical logic, but mechanically they were my favorite puzzles in the game.
Unfortunately, the survival aspect is undermined by frustrating limitations. The player character becomes terrified in the dark, represented by the screen being gradually overtaken by irritating black tendrils, accompanied by equally irritating skittering sounds.
If the fear becomes overwhelming—or if a monster catches you—something astonishingly stupid happens: you don’t die. Instead, a long sequence plays out where Tasi blacks out, hallucinates, and runs away. When she wakes up, she is somewhere near where she collapsed, and the monster has usually vanished. The realization you can't die is enough to mentally castrate anyone with a horror boner.
Light is required to prevent this madness. But why can you carry a maximum of ten matches? Are they a meter long or something? Since each match burns for about seven or eight seconds, you feel compelled to squeeze every last moment out of it—leading to frantic dashes into the darkness in search of anything flammable. One might think Tasi could bring along one of the many candles she lights, but no, she's too stupid—only the oil lantern, which burns through fuel at an absurd rate, is allowed.
Rebirth opens with a message urging the player: “Don’t play to win—immerse yourself in the experience.” I tried my best, but the game’s flaws and restrictions made it impossible to fully follow that advice. I searched every drawer and desk for documents. There were fragments of something fascinating—old legends of ghouls and wraiths, and desert people worshipping an obscure deity. It was enjoyable to spot connections to Daniel, the protagonist of The Dark Descent. But above all, I was looking for light sources and ways to avoid monsters—in other words, I was playing to win.
It’s sad that Frictional failed to live up to their ambitions. Playing as a pregnant protagonist is a compelling idea. Survival for Tasi is not just about herself—she must live for someone else, someone whose life she values more than her own.
But the game stumbles over its own grand ideas. Too much time is spent on a trauma that should have remained almost unspoken. Too much energy is wasted listening to Tasi’s incessant monologues. Too many explanations drain the horror and mystery of all their power. Rebirth is not particularly frightening. Since everything is spelt out, it doesn't allow the player's mind to process real fear.
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