Getting caught also increases fear, but also gives you a chance to smash the keyboard to escape. Sneaking by them, sitting in the dark, looking straight at them, you name it. Just about everything involving monsters increases your fear. Instead, a creeping darkness will envelop the screen when Tasi is afraid. Amnesia: Rebirth doesn’t have a traditional health or sanity bar. The major alternation to the formula comes from the game’s fail-state. It’s nothing new, but a tried and true formula that is no less effective in Amnesia: Rebirth. Puzzles all require a mix of physical manipulation and deductive reasoning based on environmental clues. These encounters come in the sneak around things and run away from things variety. Each area is spiced up with a few puzzles and infrequent enemy encounters. You poke around various long dark hallways, lighting candles and lamps with your limited supply of matches. If you’ve played Amnesia (or any of the games it inspired), you should be familiar with the basic mechanics. So before I get into all of that, I’ll recap the gameplay the best I can. It’s pretty impossible to talk about any of the game’s meat without revealing some key plot elements. I’ve become more cavalier about spoilers in my old age, but I’ll do my due diligence and stop talking about the plot for the time being. You’ll have to piece together various notes and contextual clues to piece together what happened and find the route to safety. She quickly finds the remnants of the party, though it becomes abundantly clear that a few days have already passed. Afflicted with the game’s namesake amnesia, she must travel through the desert in search of aid. A member of a mining expedition to Algeria, Tasi awakens in the ruins of their crashed plane deep in the desert. In Amnesia: Rebirth, you take the role of Tasi Trianon.

So with Frictional returning to the helm with Amnesia: Rebirth, can they rekindle that spark that made the original a beacon in the dark and dingy corridors of indie horror? Or is the franchise not fit for new life? Developed by The Chinese Room (best known for Dear Esther), Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs was considered by many to fall short of the original’s. However, the first Amnesia sequel was considerably less well received. It solidified Frictional Games as a landmark horror studio capable of delivering multiple hits. That extra second or two to undo a latch, open a door, or turn a lever made the game’s relentless enemies infinitely more terrifying.įrictional Games would go on to follow Amnesia: The Dark Descent with SOMA, one of the greatest and most thought-provoking horror titles of all time. It was a perfect fit for Frictional’s proprietary HPL Engine, which had the player moving objects manually by clicking and dragging. No guns, no combat, just running and hiding. Frictional Games sought to take things in the complete opposite direction. Horror at a time when horror was becoming more and more action-focused. Outlast, Layers of Fear, Slender, and countless others all owe their success to the foundation laid by Amnesia. When Amnesia: The Dark Descent hit stores in 2010, it shifted the landscape of horror in a way that lasts to this day. Developed and Published by Frictional Games

Amnesia the dark descent lore