![]() ![]() That’s the simple way The Dark Descent forces you to progress: to survive, you need to delve deeper into the nightmare in search of tinderboxes to create new sources of light, and collect mementos and diary entries that slowly reveal who you are why your memories have gone walkies. And if you spend too long in darkness, you’ll start to lose your marbles that way, too. Oh, and if you look at what’s chasing you for too long, you start to lose your sanity, the screen warping as you slowly lose your grip on reality. There’s no means to fight back, and your only means of preservation is hiding and hoping that the ‘thing’ that keeps following you goes away, or simply turning tail and praying you escape with your life. You awaken with a bout of – you guessed it, the forgetsies – in a spooky old castle, where creatures made of flesh and shadow are relentlessly hunting you. Many of its most recognisable attributes have been reused countless times in the last decade – specifically that first-person view with a focus on running, hiding and uncontrollable sobbing – but as familiar as it might seem, it’s how Amnesia rarely over-complicates itself that really makes it a winner. ![]() It might have been made on a budget for an old generation of hardware, but time hasn’t dulled the potency of its scares.Ĭollecting together The Dark Descent, its Justine DLC and its sequel-of-sorts A Machine for Pigs, Amnesia: Collection is still one of the best examples of how to freak out a player with shadows, a perpetual sense of vulnerability and a growing air of dread. And with so many great (and a fair few not so great) horror games on Nintendo Switch, it’s fitting a game that was siloed away on PC for so long should join the ranks of portable fear. It’s the game that helped put the 'Let’s Play' format on the map, and while the series has long been showing its age – the original game is almost a decade old, and you can really tell – it’s still one of the most unsettling franchises you can play. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is one of those games part of a very select club that not only redefined the genre in video game form, but established a template that many would imitate (and most would fail to surpass). There are countless films, books and TV shows out there that claim to conjure blood-curdling chills, but very few of them really stay with you, like a splinter burrowing beneath the skin. Anyone can throw together enough blood, guts and gore to make a butcher green at the gills, but proper, unsettling terror is a rare thing indeed. Terrible design decision.Horror isn’t easy. If you die you have to start over from the beginning. Justine 4/10 Compelling premise, but it's short, and very annoying. Fewer moments of improvisational brilliance than the original. Monsters aren't as annoying or unavoidable as the first game. The main villian has a fascinatingly twisted psychology that marries a deep sense of nihilism about humanity with a savior complex. My biggest worry was that they had toned down the dark part of this game, but it's almost as morbid and horrific in subject matter as the original. The medieval/victorian occult settings of Dark Descent have been replaced by an ominous steampunk aesthetic, as you wander an enormous structure of pipes and machinery. The game shares many similar conceits, as you take control of a character with a dodgy memory who is revealed over time to have a dark past that he shares with the main antagonist, an enemy that periodically speaks to you over the phone or through telepathy to give foreboding warnings or to mock you. Machine for Pigs 7/10 Despite the lukewarm reception, I found Machine for Pigs to be almost as good as the original Amnesia. ![]() It's only second to Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. This game has a great insanity mechanic btw. They come out of nowhere, you can't really avoid them a lot of times, and the best way to deal with them is to get yourself killed so they despawn. The engine is just functional, and monster encounters are more annoying than they are scary. The reason I can't rate it higher is that it's a clunky game. This was crafted with love by people who know a lot about horror. Playing this game exposes oneself to not just fright scares, but a lot of uncomfortable emotions. Playing this game Dark Descent 8/10 Great classic horror game with a bleak and twisted story, and interesting morally ambiguous characters. Dark Descent 8/10 Great classic horror game with a bleak and twisted story, and interesting morally ambiguous characters. ![]()
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