![]() ![]() The game is ostensibly about a character named Daniel who awakens in deserted European castle with no memory of who he is or how he got there. You don’t need to know the history of Cthulhu to find The Call of Cthulhu terrifying.Īmnesia gets the significance of Lovecraft, and runs with the same ideas. ![]() A reader can choose to delve into the mythos Lovecraft created, but the tales are effective even without the elaborately constructed details. When a reader digs beneath the surface of Lovecraft’s work, the themes revolved around issues of mankind being powerless to change its fate (and our fate was almost always to meet a horrific end at the hands of unspeakably awful monsters older than time and space) and how man’s quest for forbidden knowledge often led to destruction. There’s a rich mythology running through all of Lovecraft’s fiction, but it’s largely window dressing. The guys at Frictional clearly adore Lovecraft (so much so that they named their 3D game engine HPL in his honor), who created the elaborate Elder Gods mythos and gave us evil monsters like Cthulhu and books of forbidden knowledge like The Necronomicon. This quality is largely attributable to the influence of author H.P. Amnesia seems to understand this – but it does something that most books, films, and games have rarely managed to pull off: it’s a simple story that creates the illusion of being something much deeper. This is part of the reason why something like John Carpenter’s Halloween (babysitters are stalked by a masked madman) is an enduring classic while Legion (featuring a war in Heaven and other assorted nonsense) is quickly forgotten. One of the commonly accepted truths of horror in books and films is that simpler stories are often the most effective. How did Frictional Games achieve this? What sets Amnesia apart not only from its predecessors but most other survival horror games? The answers are threefold, and less complicated than gamers might expect. Those experiences feel almost like test runs for Amnesia – one can see the Penumbra DNA in this newest title, but it’s been refined to such a degree that Amnesia feels only tangentially related to the earlier games. ![]() Any developer in this subgenre would be well advised to study what Frictional has done here – there’s much to learn.Īmnesia is the studio’s fourth release, coming in the wake of the three titles in their Penumbra series. The title stands as the company’s master thesis on creating fear in games and provides an interesting template for horror game creators looking to make their mark. The brainchild of Swedish indie developers Frictional Games, Amnesia is one of the creepiest videogames to ever grace a PC monitor. As great as some of those have been, few have been as perfect as Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Each has worked diligently to merge the idea of the horror narrative with compelling gameplay in order to craft experiences that keep gamers playing even while they cower in fear behind their controllers. There have been some genuinely scary horror games over the years – everything from Silent Hill and Fatal Frame to PC titles like Clive Barker’s Undying and so on. ![]()
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