Every day is the "End of the Week"

     This game has been surprisingly amazing.  I hadn’t even heard of this gem until one of my friends mentioned it to me in passing, calling on tales of a treasure so unholy it made people scream and run in fear.  Since I was a veteran of Fatal Frame, Eternal Darkness, and both the Silent Hill and Resident Evil series, I steeled myself to the hunt for an amazing survival horror experience.  

     I was not disappointed.

     Amnesia opens up as the main character, Daniel, struggles to hold on to his memories as they fade away from him.  As he wakes up, he finds a letter he wrote to himself before he lost his memory.  The letter clearly states Daniel’s goal in the game: Find Alexander Brennenburg, the owner of the castle, and kill him.

     The game’s style from the get-go fills you with a sense of unease.  Set in the mid-1800s, the game takes place in an ancient Prussian castle in disrepair.  It is an incredibly stormy day, and the poor castle is always dimly lit. To make matters worse, Daniel’s afraid of dark places.  While it might seem trivial, this is actually an important detail.

     Daniel’s life is held in balance by two factors: his sanity, and his health.  His health decreases from being attacked, standard fare.  His sanity, however, decreases for a number of different reasons.  Most of the time it will drop due being in dark places, or from seeing things out of the ordinary.  If his sanity falls low enough, Daniel’s vision starts to go blurry, and the grating crackling of eggshells fills the air.  Not only that, but the controls begin to lag, making it hard to execute quick reactions.  Make it fall too far, though, and Daniel will actually die.

     Survival is at the very core of Amnesia’s gameplay.  There are absolutely no weapons to be found throughout the game, and there are definitely creatures stalking the halls searching for you.  It’s very hard to run past these ghouls in the narrow corridors, and you can take at most two hits in normal mode before you die.  So you are forced to do what any normal person would do in this situation: Hide.

     Hiding is a beautiful, simplistic, difficult affair.  Enemies can see you clearly in the light, so you aren’t safe where you might think.  You have to run to a dark corner, crouch down, and hide.  But, Daniel’s scared of the dark, and will slowly go insane in the dark corner.  Cabinets are also useful hiding places, assuming you close both the doors all the way.  But the kicker is that you cannot look at the creatures.  If you do, not only will your sanity drop like a hunk of lead, but he will eventually notice you automatically.  So, mirroring what one would do in real like, you have to crouch and hide and pray that whatever it is just goes away.

     There are puzzles in this game, because what kind of survival horror game wouldn’t have puzzles in it?  But they have some of the most practical solutions I’ve ever seen.  For example, one of the earlier puzzles shows a room on the other side of a glass window.  The only other entrance to that room is a locked door.  In any other game, the solution would be to find the key, which would involve finding three figurines based (loosely) on Alice in Wonderland, which would be scattered throughout the opposite wing of the castle.  In Amnesia, though?  Just throw something heavy at the window to break it.  It’s surprisingly simple solutions like this that give Amnesia a true feeling of realism and immersion.

      Amnesia truly defines survival horror for me.  It presents a situation in which you are truly frightened.  Many survival horror games give you weapons and methods with which to kill or, at least, incapacitate your enemies.  Towards the end, they become less survival horror games and more action games with plenty of blood.  Amnesia remains a survival experience from beginning to end.  It immerses you in the world and keeps it grip on you even after you shut the thing off.  If no one’s picked this up yet, it’s only fifteen dollars on Steam.  I can’t recommend this title enough to those who truly enjoy survival horror games.

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