#52: Amnesia: The Dark Descent
How a mediocre stealth game was turned into the defining template for survival horror
This review was originally posted to Twitter on February 6, 2019.
Note, written 12/26/22: Every so often there comes up some discourse about “objective” game reviews. Nobody seems to know what this actually means, given that objectivity when trying to review an entertainment product is inherently impossible and trying to achieve it is folly. Everyone is going to be influenced by their own biases, preferences and experience. With that in mind, I’m just going to be upfront and say there is no way I could possibly be objective with Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I hated this game when it was new, I hated it when I reviewed it three years ago, and I hate it now. It shows in my review of this game, which like all of my old Twitter-era reviews I am presenting largely unedited. Don’t expect an objective review — I spent the whole time dunking on it, and indeed I got started before I even finished the game:
I realize that my burning hatred for this game might be seen as a bit, perhaps, extreme (“it’s just a video game after all!”) and certainly an unpopular opinion. I only ask that, as I do with all my reviews, you give me the benefit of the doubt. -june
Initial release: 2010
Platform: PC
Developer: Frictional Games
Survival horror is like any other genre: it goes through phases, develops distinct subgenres, mixes in new elements, and so on. Evolution is inevitable if developers want to stay profitable. While Amnesia: the Dark Descent is not the first in the “defenseless weenie” subgenre, it’s arguably the most famous. While Frictional had a few games out already, namely the Penumbra series, it was Amnesia that launched them into indie darling status. It spawned a horde of imitators and launched the careers of many a video game streamer. But is it any good? Well, no.
Let’s just get this out of the way: I dislike the trend in horror games where you run willy-nilly around a haunted whorehouse or whatever with your arms severed, leaving you unable to even so much as grab a fireplace poker or something, and I blame Amnesia for starting it. I find this “I have no hands and I must wank” subgenre to be incredibly frustrating for one big reason: the lack of agency. Agency is one of the most important things in a game to me. I’m not asking for a BFG 9000. I’m not even asking for a shotgun. Just give me something, ANYTHING, to hit the damn monster with. Even if it’ll kill me. I know some people argue that it’s more realistic, that if they personally were in that situation, they’d be a complete wreck. Okay, fine, but video games are a form of escapism, and if you want to sit and cry in a corner, we have real life for that. The alternative doesn’t have to be like, say, Doom, where you’re mowing down enemies by the dozens. Alien: Isolation is the perfect marriage of having to use stealth around the monster while still having agency in your own defense. Like Resident Evil before it, you begin powerless but slowly pull together resources that give you more of an edge, even if it’s only to deter or delay the threat.
Unfortunately you’re not so lucky in Amnesia. The core gameplay loop is you’re exploring parts of a castle to solve puzzles and move on to the next area, and you’re often having to avoid some stupid monsters that you can’t even look at or else you’ll go mad.
You can’t defend yourself, you can only avoid them. Most of the enemies are the infamous duckfaces as seen on the front cover, though as poorly drawn as that picture is, the actual model (seen in the screenshot at the top of this article) isn’t any more intimidating. If they catch you, they’ll kill you, but the game will resurrect you, dropping you and the monster off somewhere else to try again. There’s some lore reasons for that but to be honest I’m just grateful I don’t have to really put in much effort to get around these damn things.
The plot is mostly a breathless cobbling together of gothic and Lovecraftian horror tropes, told mostly through letters and notes, as well as auditory flashbacks as the amnesiac hero gradually retains his memory, which turns out he lost on purpose. Why? Who knows. We’ve all heard bits of this elsewhere: blah blah artifact in the Middle East/crawling chaos/creepy old noble in Central Europe/brainwashed into committing atrocities, blah blah BLAH. It’s soulless and derivative. Shit, it’s practically a Phantasm knockoff on top of it all.
One of the more frustrating issues is how nonsensical the level design is. None of this resembles an actual castle in any way. The hallways meander off in odd directions, there’s no real rhyme or reason to the layout. It completely shatters any sense of place the castle might have. The castle itself is falling apart but it can’t even do that in a way that makes sense. The second half of the game implies I’m very deep underground, but holes in the ceiling have daylight shining down on me. How deep am I, really? this whole place is stupid.
While the sanity system is more subtly done than the ludicrous mess that is Eternal Darkness, it’s still an unnecessary element that serves to frustrate. Hiding in the dark lowers your sanity. Seeing monsters lowers your sanity. Random events lower your sanity. The lower your sanity, the more the screen begins to swim, you start seeing bugs, monsters that aren’t there, hearing things, the works. Eventually just moving the mouse becomes a chore, and then you collapse. But to what end? What even is the point? All this would be fine except for the fact that even hiding in the darkness puts you at risk. The entire game is oriented around you hiding from monsters, and the game punishes you for doing exactly that. It blows my mind that the game was still popular despite this.
I suppose it was inevitable that Amnesia would be such a game-changer. By the end of the aughts, traditional survival horror (i.e. the first three Resident Evil games or the early entries in Silent Hill) was effectively dead. Resident Evil 4 heralded a transition into action horror, but the survival aspect was gone. Amnesia came out at just the right time to fill the void. While Frictional’s Penumbra series had a lot of the same ideas, they didn’t have quite the same reach, in part due to digital distribution still being in its infancy in those days, but by 2010, gog.com and Steam were thriving.
A lot of what made old survival horror games work was because the controls were ass and the camera could be a struggle. It really made you feel like you were fighting for your life, but it was a turnoff for a lot of people. Sure, I get that. Not everyone wants to fight with the controls, which is why even more traditional survival horror games these days continue to take cues from the likes of Resident Evil 4. Amnesia and its clones presented another option. I said before that some people argue that it’s truer to life; while I disagree, that kind of helplessness and lack of agency can really drive home the horror aspect for some people. Personally, I have enough of that at home.
But there’s another factor in Amnesia’s fame: PewDiePie. The one-time world’s richest and most famous YouTuber, and one of the top five biggest pieces of shit on the platform (quite the achievement, really) had cut his teeth on budget indie horror games like Amnesia, giving Frictional untold millions in free advertising. This is probably how the “defenseless weenie” trend got started: a cottage industry of YouTubers who played almost exclusively cheap Amnesia knockoffs created a market for more cheap Amnesia knockoffs, because all you needed was a racist Swede to pimp your product for you. Combine all this with minimum system requirements that were incredibly low even for 2010 (requiring only a GeForce 6 — which came out in 2004) and a price of only $20 when most new games cost between fifty to sixty dollars and you have a recipe for a new flavor of the month (it tastes like money.)
It’s hard to believe the same company that made SOMA is responsible for this turd. While you’re still a defenseless weenie in SOMA, even the base gameplay is improved, and while the story and themes aren’t new (see anything Philip K. Dick wrote) it’s not often the kind of stuff that gets discussed in games. If I can say anything good about Amnesia, it’s that its success enabled Frictional to mature as developers and writers, and move beyond that creative stagnancy and preoccupation with a dead racist to really come into their own. Don’t play Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Play SOMA.
