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Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Started by Peregrin, January 12, 2011, 04:26:32 AM

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Peregrin

January 12, 2011, 04:26:32 AM Last Edit: January 12, 2011, 04:31:08 AM by Peregrin
I know a lot of people around here love their immersive tabletop RPGs, so I figured it would be prudent to mention this game.  It's one of my favorite types of video-games -- adventure/exploration in the first-person with a focus on atmosphere and presenting a detailed environment to interact with.

From the wiki:

QuoteIn a similar vein to the developer's previous games, Amnesia is an exploration-based adventure game played from a first-person perspective. The game retains the physical object interaction used in Penumbra, allowing for advanced physics based puzzles and interactions such as opening doors and fixing machinery.[5]

Amnesia does not give the player access to weapons, giving them no defense against the gruesome creatures that wander Brennenburg Castle. As such, the player must use their wits to escape and hide from the monsters until they lose interest in finding the player. Players can also choose to hide in the shadows at the cost of slowly losing their sanity.

As it mentions above, there is a sanity trait.  All status bars in the game, in order to make the game more immersive, are hidden from view unless you bring up your inventory, much like in CoC: Dark Corners of the Earth.  Your sanity and health are also not tracked by numbers, but loose descriptions of your state.  Sanity can be "a light headache and shaking hands" and health something like "a few cuts and bruises."  In otherwords, you don't have any "game" information or any information at all that your character does not have.

All-in-all, the game is extremely creepy, and relies solely on player cleverness and attentiveness to detail rather than rapid hand-eye coordination or skill/number crunching.  Good news is that it's also available on all software platforms, so the game is also available on Mac and Linux if those are more your thing.

As for the story/background, the game takes place in 1839 in a Prussian castle, with you searching around the corridors and depths trying to figure out who you are and how you got there, and what the thing hunting you is.  Saying anything more than that unfortunately goes into spoiler territory.
"In a way, the Lands of Dream are far more brutal than the worlds of most mainstream games. All of the games set there have a bittersweetness that I find much harder to take than the ridiculous adolescent posturing of so-called \'grittily realistic\' games. So maybe one reason I like them as a setting is because they are far more like the real world: colourful, crazy, full of strange creatures and people, eternal and yet changing, deeply beautiful and sometimes profoundly bitter."
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