Pach's Real Talk: Amnesia - The Dark Descent

Greetings game-Oh my... oh my god are you ok? Jesus, sit down... can I get you anything? You look like you just ran a mile, you're covered in cuts and bruises, and your hair is starting to fall out. Just... just relax and tell pachy what happened. Wait, Amnesia? You played it ALONE?! Well... you know what they say about poking a sleeping bear with a stick.

Real talk.

Look, we've all been there. We've all been horribly emasculated before. It comes in all shapes and sizes ranging from accidentally calling your teacher "mommy" in 4th grade to having that one chick give you the "don't worry, it happens to everybody, I'm sure you're just stressed out" talk. Well F*** YOU DEBBIE MAYBE IF YOU DIDN'T LOOK AT JOHN THAT WAY WE COULD HAVE MADE IT WORK. WE. COULD. HAVE. MADE. IT. WORK. Oh god....

Wait what was I talking about?... Ah, yes. Whores. And Amnesia.

Before we get started let me just say that I am a horror game/movie enthusiast. Now, I'm not talking about slashers and gore and virgins (because who REALLY likes those anyway?), I'm talking about good old fashioned theatrical horror. The kind of stuff that makes you scream and want to stop watching... but is so compelling that you keep coming back. The kind of stuff that has you shouting at the television or cuddling some random nearby object with the hopes that it will turn into something that loves you. Entertainment at its most basic level is there to elicit an emotional response from an audience, so to me the horror genre is incredibly important because it controls two of our most important emotional responses: fear and courage.

First, I think it's important to note what makes a "bad" or "unmemorable" horror experience, and then we'll talk about what makes Amnesia a truly incredible horror game.

Bad horror games or movies always tend to have the same things in common:

1.) They tend to overuse quick scares and shocks

2.) They tend to very much abuse special effects (in the case of movies) or extremely over the top weapons and gore in the case of games.

3.) They tend to not have very accessible scenarios or plots

4.) They tend to go for the cheaper hooks such as sex, offensive/explicit content, or stupid addons like multiplayer and survival modes.

What does all this mean? Well lets break down a few of those for a minute here... just to better understand where I'm coming from. Lets say you have a very young sibling (for the sake of argument lets say little sister) and you happen to be a very, very cruel person. Not too hard was it you psychopath...? But anyway, you want to really, REALLY scare the crap out of her. You have two options: You can either don a monster mask and garb, wait for the moment she's going to bed, and leap from the closet to scare her OR... you take her whilst she is asleep, lock her in a strange, dark basement or toolshed with no windows, and then when she wakes up make torture noises from outside for a few hours.

What's the difference there? Well you're probably thinking "One makes you an ass in her eyes, and the other puts her in therapy for 5 years." But why? Both don't actually cause any physical harm to her, or put her in any actual danger, but what's the difference? The difference is imagination. The human imagination is a terrible, dark, demented place filled with killer bunnies and midgets covered in peanut butter. With the immediate jumping out of the closet method, you blow your load all at once. She may jump or even scream, but then she see's that it's just her dickhead sibling and her mind relieves the stress. With the basement method, you allow her terrible imagination to dream up all the most horrible, painful, vile explanations to what is going on, and then force her to KEEP imagining until you let it stop. That is the difference. Whenever the imagination is allowed to do its sadistic duty, we as creative thinkers tend to put ourselves in FAR more peril than we may actually be in. Being afraid isn't about being logical and seeing something as scary, being afraid is about being irrational and imagining the worst case scenario for your demise.

Now, this is not to say that the "monster jumping from the closet" tactic doesn't have its fair share of uses. It can be VERY useful if put in the right circumstance. But going for the low-hanging fruit on a regular basis can cause the audience to get numb or detach from the experience. Which brings me to my next point: gore and weapons. These things can be the kiss-o-death for any horror experience if used incorrectly.

While one might immediately think "Seeing blood and guts everywhere is really scary!" That is never the best way to get the response that one wants from a horror game. A horror game is all about stress relief management. Let me say that again: stress. relief. management. In most "horror" games there is a fairly simple formula that designers tend to use when creating a scary experience. They put you in a scary place with scary blood and guts, then something scary comes out and scares you in the scary place, then you murder that scary thing and move on to the next area. They stress you out with immediate danger, and then when you solve the problem you go back to neutral waiting for the next scare.

Using poor stress relief management, games will stress you out with a monster that bursts through a window, or a random scream here or there, but once you get past it you realize that it was just your annoying brother in a mask.

However, with a true horror game, your stress doesn't go in peaks and dives. Your stress is a constant build. Every step further that you take puts you more and more on edge, and even when you deal with whatever antagonists the game has in store for you, you STILL don't feel any better. We've all played games with poor stress relief management... Dead Space, Doom, Fear, Condemned, etc.

Now, you may be thinking "Hey bro, dead space was supes scary! I jumped like a little girl the first time those things came out of the vents!" Well. I'm sure you did. The FIRST time. But by the twentieth vent, I'll bet that you didn't jump nearly as high, or scream nearly as loud. In fact, I'd wager that you didn't really react at all beyond the reflexive need to survive. I'll bet by the 50th mutilated baby or torture victim you probably became a little bit numb to the whole situation. That's because gore and direct violence do NOT make for a complete horror experience. We are never afraid of someone getting killed in front of us in a game, we are afraid of coming into a room knowing that tons of people HAD been killed there.

Put yourself in the protagonist's shoes and tell me what's worse: A monster jumps out, he spooks you, and you dismember it with your laser crossbow or shotgun to the joys of its screams and blood spattering the walls... OR A monster jumps out, you have no weapons so you grab the nearest pipe, you struggle with it, barely escape with your life, and realize "Holy god, it's still out there somewhere... waiting for me." Yeah. Have fun sleeping tonight.

The final point I'd like to make about bad horror games (before we get to sweet, sweet Amnesia) concerns the situations that designers put their players in. A lot of times we assume that putting players in a scary place, such as a bloody space station with aliens, or an abandoned military base with demons, will somehow assist the players in making an emotional connection to the game. But lets think about this for a second... what makes a player connect? Well one of the primary things that makes human beings connect to one another is empathy, or the ability to relate to one another and their experiences.

If a player can't put themselves in the shoes of the protagonist to a certain extent, or if they can't empathize with the hero's plight, the player tends to tune out a lot of what goes on from moment to moment. What I'm getting at here is: I can't remember the last time I was a super soldier with the ability to control time, trapped in an abandoned military base forced to fight my way through hordes of mutants and demons with my M4 and flashbangs... but I can remember a time when I've been alone in an abandoned hotel after dark, or trapped in an elevator, or stuck in a shady subway station with no cell phone, or been in a house that someone was trying to break into. It's that human connection that makes a horror game truly stand out as a memorable experience.

Which brings me to Amnesia - The Dark Descent. This game breaks all the formulas one expects from a horror game, and defies all expectations. Not only that, but it does so without ANY over the top blood and gore, or ridiculous shock tactics.

You begin the game not as a soldier, or an ex-cop, or a dude in a super suit, but as a guy. Just a normal guy. A normal guy who has seen some ****. Seen so much, in fact, that to keep from going crazy he drank an amnesia potion to forget all about it... all but one crucial thing: get to the bottom of this castle/mansion and murder an old man waiting for him down there.

So as you might expect you start off in a castle just after drinking this cocktail of brain melting goodness. There are no weapons, no power ups - just you, your balls, and your masochism to get you down to the bottom of this elaborate place. There is only one catch. Yeah, that terrible stuff that you wanted to forget about? Well... it's following you and trying to murder the crap out of you.

Alright, now without giving away any spoilers, lets get down to the awesome.

The protagonists' name is Daniel, a name you'll probably be screaming over and over again like a death scene in a bad action flick as he runs from one place to another (DANIELLLLL RUN YOU PIECE OF COWARDLY **** RUN RUN RUN RUN DANIEL DANIEEEEEEEEL). He is constantly being pursued by a "shadow" that takes the form of different monsters and just generally messed up things. Ok, actually that sounds pretty standard, right? Nothing too out of the ordinary for a scary video game, right? Wrong.

First of all, there is a special catch to the monster's presence in the game. By looking at it, your character slowly starts to lose his god damned mind a la Eternal Darkness. But not only that... by looking at it, it can see YOU better as well. This makes things a little bit complicated since you also have zero means to defend yourself, so your main mechanic when dealing with the monster is going to be hiding and running like a coward. Why is this actually a brilliant and meaningful mechanic as far as horror games go? Well, three reasons:

1.) As tough as we all would like to think we are (bro), the truth of the matter is this: if we were ever confronted with a horrifying monster that feeds on dreams and happiness, we would run, run, and run some more, then hide, cover our eyes and ears, and wait for death. That's just fact. So having the game mechanics tap into our core impulses like that makes for some VERY meaningful gameplay.

2.) Remember when we said stress relief management was about a build as opposed to a burst? What do you do when you have no way of striking back at the force that scared you... no way of punishing the game for making you feel the way you feel? The answer is you reach a level of uneasiness that is very difficult to achieve in a fantasy world.

3.) When even looking at the antagonist in a horror game is bad news, it causes the player to... well... not look at what is scaring them most of the time. Which means that the game is forcing the imagination to come up with a monster far more terrifying than anything the game designers could dream of. It also makes the monster personally catered to you as a player, which is an even more horrifying concept.

Not only that, but the environment of Brennenburg Castle (the place you're running for your life in) is perfectly designed to keep you on the edge of your seat every single solitary moment of gameplay. The lighting effects of the game are top notch, and have been designed to affect the gameplay as much as anything else. Sitting in darkness makes you go crazy faster... but darkness is usually the only place that you can hide from the monster in. Your lantern is your saving grace, and you will find yourself rustling through countless drawers and cabinets trying to find more oil and tinder... just like a real crazy person trapped in a hopeless murder castle would do. Oh... that is if the shadow doesn't blow out light sources as it comes and goes. Yeah... **** that thing.

The sound design brilliantly and subtly influences your every decision as you travel around. A creaking door here, a gust of wind there, a strange whisper (or was it?) and even the sound of your own footsteps all paint a picture of absolute terror for your mind to wrap itself around.

Sound also plays a huge role in the game because most of the time that's the only way you'll know whether or not the monster is coming after you. There is no traditional music in the game other than some ambient noise and tones based on your mental state and where you are, but when the monster comes the music changes to let you know to get the **** out of dodge. But to take it a step further, once the game trains you to respond a certain way to music and sound effects, it starts to mess with you a little bit. Sometimes the monster will show up without music, or the music will continue to play whether he's there or whether he left. While many other horror games develop scare patterns that players eventually get used to, Amnesia takes it a step further and teaches you to not trust your eyes or ears... but your impulses.

Which brings me to my next point: you should never "play" your way through a horror game, you should feel your way through it. A good horror game doesn't have any real patterns and it certainly doesn't let the player come to expect certain things. A good horror game grabs a hold of you and doesn't let go until you turn it off and go pretend like you weren't affected. That is what makes Amnesia so awesome. When you're playing, you're in it, and even when you scream or stop playing it still lingers with you as you go back into reality.

So many times we find similarities between our games and tend to expect certain outcomes for our behavior. You expect that the game will stay the same if you die and revive, you expect that once you beat a boss the game will lay off you for a minute to catch your breath, you expect in many ways that the game is on your side. With horror this is a difficult thing, because for the game to REALLY be on your side, it has to be scaring you and constantly putting you in stressful situations (ideally at a disadvantage), and it must be merciless about it. That's what you bought the game for: to be frightened so badly that you have a visceral reaction to the experience. And Amnesia delivers, every step of the way.

No hardcore weapons, no weird torture-babies, no tentacles, no gore, just good old fashioned theatricality. The ability to mess with a person's subconscious and emotional state of being is what makes any horror experience succeed or fail in the end. Amnesia - The Dark Descent doesn't disappoint. Not only does it not disappoint, but in this humble blogger's opinion it sets a very high standard for the horror genre that will not be met for some time. Every single aspect of this game is a success, and (if you've got the nerve... cause it's totally fine if you don't) I definitely suggest you pick it up.