Amnesia: The Dark Descent (REVIEW)

Because not many games sites have reviewed Amnesia, this time I will write a comprehensive review explaining all the things that make this game great (and not).

Just kidding! FART


Seriously. Under this line I begin a serious review.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is about Daniel, who is suffering from amnesia and is making a dark descent. But there is something that makes his amnesia not merely another boring amnesia: he is suffering amnesia in a horrible castle of horror. It's the type castle wherein the only living things are giant cockroaches and rats, plus a few people. And the deeper Daniel goes, the more tortured cadavers, and the more memories of their becoming cadavers, he finds. There are blood splatters. There's this pink, dangerous, throbbing matter slowly growing throughout the place. And almost everything is the color dark.

So you, Daniel, will need to light candles - when it is possible and desirable - and NOT run out of oil for your lantern, for staying in darkness too long makes you - the player - go insane and that makes the screen go blurry (you will hope: temporarily blurry). The game's developers understand that blurry darkness is scarier than just blurry or darkness. And they threw in dangerous monsters, here and there, whom you cannot fight; looking at the visible, mutilated monsters makes the screen blurrier.

What I am saying is Amnesia: The Dark Descent is excellent. Not excellent as in "fun," but excellent as in "makes you scared." The world needs more of these.

It's not just the darkness that makes the game scary. It's the scary music. The scary monsters (whom you cannot fight, but can only hide and run from). It's that running out of oil and hoping that you'll find more. It's the medieval torture devices and your imaginings of how they were used, combined with Daniel's memories of the begging and screaming. It's the slow revealing of the kind of person our hero Daniel is. And there's little of the cliche SURPRISE!! A MONSTER!!! BOO!!!!

Amnesia won't make you pee your pants, I think, but I think it will raise the hair on your arms. Thus it is good.

The game plays in the first person, gives you no weapons, and has manifold puzzles, and not too many.