Long time no post!

As if playing Dead Space 2 for a mere 15 minutes wasn’t telling enough that my ability to play horror games is near non-existent, I decided to try out Amnesia in yet another effort to break into the genre. I figured if I could make it through this, anything else would seem tame. If by chance you don’t know anything about Amnesia, check out the original teaser trailer below. It does a great job of spelling out what the game is.

Okay, so first off, some brief feelings about the game:

I’ve surprisingly played about 45 minutes of the game. There have been a few instances that freaked me out enough that saving and exiting the game came without much thought. Amnesia does sound and atmosphere like almost no other game that I’ve ever played. Hearing creaks, footsteps, crawling bugs and the panicked breathing of your own character makes for an aural representation of crazy. It’s also a very well directed experience. Going in, I thought Amnesia was a more open game than it is. There is a general feel about the world that makes it seem open and explorable, but every once in a while I get a reminder of how linear it is. This isn’t a bad thing. The developers obviously only want you to experience the game a particular way, and leaving room for the user to experiment could tamper with that experience.

Why I feel Amnesia is genius:

Between seeing everything from a first person perspective to how you manipulate the environment, the game is tailor made to immerse you. Moving a creaky door by slowly dragging your mouse puts you in control of how much noise you make. The decision to light torches in order to stay sane or leave them unlit to save your tinderboxes for later use? You have to decide. Most importantly, you are in control of walking through the world.

In a horror movie, you watch someone going into a room where you have a gut feeling or know from foreshadowing that they will be killed or attacked. You think in your head, or maybe shout at the screen, that there’s no way that you would go in there. You might even think that the character is horribly dumb for doing so. But in Amnesia, you are that character. The story is intriguing and the only way to know what really happens is to experience it first hand. But you have to go into that room and find out what the hell that noise is. You have to hide from the thing that wants to kill because you have no way to fight back.

Or, like me, you have to turn off the game in order to not wet yourself.

In games we are given a lot of control. We’re made to feel like masters of the worlds within. You may control the character in Amnesia, but the game manipulates you through fear.