#670: Amnesia: Rebirth
This is someone’s fetish, isn’t it?
Initial release: October 20, 2020
Platform: PC, PlayStation 4, XBox One, XBox Series X/S
Developer: Frictional Games
If you’re a long-time reader of my reviews, or you know me personally, you probably know that I really, really, really do not like horror games that deprive the player of agency. I grew up on the likes of Resident Evil and Silent Hill; I played Half-Life (it counts!) and Doom 3, both of which were action games with strong horror elements (Doom 3 especially.) Even Thief — which leans strongly into dark fantasy — lets you bring a sword and holy water into haunted tombs. So when Amnesia: The Dark Descent took the nascent indie scene by storm and built an entire cottage industry of dorks shrieking in front of a camera for YouTube I was more than a little resentful of its success and the wave of imitators. Here was a game that threw out most of the basic expectations of what a horror game should be like and turned itself instead into a linear sequence of scares where the player has absolutely zero agency, reduced only to running and hiding (and thanks to how the insanity/fear system works, you’re punished for doing that too!) While the sequel was much the same way, it was at least interesting thematically and didn’t overstay its welcome; the fourth game (which I played next, given that it’s placed chronologically prior to the third) dispensed with all that and instead took a more modern take on traditional survival horror by being, effectively, an Alien: Isolation clone deep in a World War I bunker. It’s clear, now, that Amnesia: The Bunker was developed in response to reactions to Amnesia: Rebirth — the cultural zeitgeist that made the original game successful simply wasn’t there for Rebirth, which takes the basic template of the original game, makes it twice as interminably long, and wraps the whole thing around a pregnancy storyline that is alienating for a lot more than mere gender divides can explain.
Like the rest of the series, Rebirth is a period piece (pun not intended) set in the late 1930s. You play Tasi, a French woman who’s part of an expedition to a mining concern in Algeria to improve output. She’s recently pregnant (though this isn’t revealed in-game until about a third of the way through, it’s mentioned heavily in promotional texts as the pregnancy is the core of the game’s plot) after having lost her previous daughter to an unnamed disease. After her plane crashes, she wakes up a week later to find herself alone in the desert, the rest of the expedition crew scattered throughout a lengthy series of ruins and caverns nearby. She has scattered flashes of memories, terrifying and bloody, but has difficulty piecing it all together. A mysterious amulet tied to her wrist seems able to tear holes in reality leading to a dark, hostile world, home to a ruined civilization populated by wraiths, ghouls, and a monstrous goddess that seems to be at the center of the whole mess.
Gameplay wise, it’s basically the same deal as Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Most of your time will be spent wandering dark hallways, occasionally lighting torches or candles; you do have a lantern, but keeping it lit is a challenge. The game does give you a regular stream of matches but there will be portions where you’re just without any form of light at all. These dark corridors are frequently populated with monsters. Looking at these monsters, or hiding in darkness, or looking too long at corpses or other scary scenes, will gradually ramp up Tasi’s fear level, indicated through blurred vision and a steady encroachment of what appears to be veins along the edge of the screen, ultimately triggering a minigame to fend off some kind of mind control. Most of the monsters are the corpse-like ghouls, former humans reduced to feral cannibal freaks. There’s a few moments of cheekiness where a ghoul will sometimes pop out of some hole somewhere and steal matches or lantern oil before you have a chance to pick it up, but this subtly humorous element ceases after you leave the old fortress. Late in the game you’ll deal with wraiths, floating, mutated monstrosities with faces reduced to yonic-looking gills. If you are caught in their searchlights, it automatically triggers the mind control resistance minigame.
Say you fail the minigame; you’ll see flashes of memories and wind up somewhere else. Sometimes you’ll wake up in the same spot with the threat gone, sometimes you’ll wake up after the section you just failed. This latter bit was controversial among audiences — it felt like being rewarded for failure. Personally, I was just happy to not have to deal with whatever I ran into again.
Ultimately I found Rebirth’s gameplay to be a chore. Every bad design decision meshes with another bad design decision to make the game more frustrating. Tasi is afraid of the dark, but the game doesn’t give you much in the way of navigating that. Your matches are short-lived and the torches you can light with it don’t illuminate much; the lantern lasts maybe a minute from full, which is just insane to me. And to make all of this worse, as the game progresses, looking at corpses gradually stops triggering fear, but being in the dark — even with a light source just feet away — still raises Tasi’s fear level. I could understand not ever getting used to the ghouls chasing you, like… you’re in a room that’s half-lit and nobody’s trying to eat you, Tasi, can you like, chill???
All this is bullshit, but it’s what I’ve come to expect from Amnesia and its many clones. So there’s only really one thing to talk about with this game: I gotta talk about the pregnancy thing. The basic gameplay being basically a longer version of The Dark Descent is one thing, but the pregnancy thing takes it into some seriously weird territory. Every time Tasi returns from a long trip through the Dark World she’s more pregnant, despite the game’s story taking place over maybe a couple of days. You can sort of manage Tasi’s fear by waiting for the baby to kick and then holding down a button so she’ll stroke her pregnant belly for a while.
The early hours of the game were whatever, but once the pregnancy stuff kicked in I found myself thoroughly weirded out. I’m not against pregnancy depicted in video games; I’m not even, theoretically, against a pregnant woman being the protagonist. But there was just such a weird vibe to how Rebirth handled the whole thing, and how the pregnancy — and Tasi’s reaction to it — was what doomed the expedition in the first place. The way the pregnancy is more than just a plot point but quickly goes from “maybe a few weeks” to “giving birth” in the span of a few hours really had me thinking — this is someone’s fetish, isn’t it? It’s gotta be. Gamers being gamers, certainly there’s a misogynist undercurrent to some of the criticism of the game — given that it features a female protagonist and mentions in extreme passing a gay couple who get maybe two lines each — but I don’t think that’s the whole of the reaction. Even AFAB players were put off by the pregnancy stuff. Because, well, it’s weird, right?
I was curious about who wrote the storyline. It’d be one thing if the author was a woman; instead, the lead writer is a guy named Ian Thomas, who joined Frictional during SOMA’s development and took a driving position in crafting Rebirth’s scenario. And I’m going to be brutally honest — I’m going to be giving the side-eye to anything with his name as a writing credit on it from now on. How could I not?
In a lot of ways, Amnesia: Rebirth is the true sequel to The Dark Descent, given that A Machine for Pigs went off in a different direction, was originally a mod, and was developed by a different studio; but in the decade between the original game and the third game, a lot has changed in the industry, and that change is obvious in the reception to Rebirth. It’s a mystery as to how SOMA turned out to be so enjoyable, even for a curmudgeon like me; but whatever the case, Frictional have clearly learned their lesson, with The Bunker going off in a different direction entirely. Let’s hope they stick to it. And keep their fetishes to F-Chat like the rest of us.
