It was like a gruesome parody of a Metal Gear Solid sequence. I nearly jumped out of my seat when it turned its hideous head, let out a surprised groan and started advancing upon me! The music rose to a crescendo of panicked notes and I instinctively turned and ran, knowing that the creature had seen me and was chasing after me. As Lovecraft and Hitchcock have both demonstrated, oftentimes it’s the things that you don’t see that are the most terrifying.Īfter purchasing the full game, and finding myself in the same section of the castle, I once again sprinted up to try and see this shambling figure first-hand. The fiend disappeared in a cloud of mist and I felt the barest disappointment: that perhaps the entire game was simply about playing tricks upon the player. Eventually you do chance upon one of the castle’s denizens, to which I promptly decided to examine up close. The game builds the tension nicely, with half-heard sounds and the suggestion of movement just outside one’s vision. I don’t want to say too much about them, but in my first playthrough of the demo, I couldn’t help be curious to see one of the things up close. You have to balance staying hidden in the dark, which slowly drives you mad, with lighting up every sconce and lantern you can find, making the player a walking target to the game’s enemies… Enemies for which you have absolutely no defence and have no choice but to hide from. But that’s the genius of the game design, really. Yes, you do hide in cupboards and darkened rooms. Some of the scares veer a bit too close to the cheesy “monster closet” variety, but the profoundly creepy environment is nearly enough to keep any gamer worth his or her salt moving forward to uncover the narrative. I won’t spoil the mystery, but the pages of the journal speak of strange excavations in the desert, weird artifacts and alien vistas, which does more to evoke the feeling of playing a horror novel than in other games which have employed similar techniques.Īmnesia establishes early that Daniel is at the heart of the mystery and although I haven’t finished the game, I have an inkling that there could be more twists and turns before the story is done. While you are retracing events that the main character Daniel has painstakingly (and intentionally?) tried to erase from his mind, you are also getting pieces of what happened before, and what brought him to this evil place in the middle of a foreboding Prussian forest. Normally, I find the old trope of the player’s character having amnesia to be a trite and lazy explanation (or lack thereof), but from what I’ve experienced so far, it seems to have been deeply woven into the fabric of the story. Picking up and reading the disparate pages scattered about the hoary old castle to piece together the back-story feels like something right out of one of the great man’s short stories. The atmosphere is positively dripping with Howard Phillips Lovecraft. ![]() ![]() In many ways, it also reminds me of the rather under-appreciated Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth primarily in its use of madness, first person exploration and dark themes. ![]() There are puzzles to solve which help you slowly unravel the clues that describe how you got into this mess and how you’re trying to get out of it. You are acting out an adventure story in first person, and using the mouse much like your hand, manipulating and interacting with the environment. Walking around the environment, I can’t escape the feeling that Amnesia is like a modern day Myst. Jon became primarily a PC gamer, but has since moved with the trends back to consoles, mobile and more casual gaming.Īmnesia blends all of the right elements for me, and although it could be distilled down to a “hiding in the cupboards game”, as some of my friends describe it so far I’m finding it a unique and gripping experience. His gamer DNA stretches back the golden age of 8-bit, where he found himself enraptured with the Ultima series on the Commodore-64. ![]() A lover of games and storytelling in general, he considers himself a bit of a “Renaissance Geek” with interests in traditional table-top role-playing and board games. Jon was born in London and grew up in California. Introducing another new contributor to The Average Gamer, Jon Jones.
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