I played through the first hour and a half or so last night, and this game has some of the weirdest pacing I’ve ever seen. You and your character are both deeply confused about who, where, and when you are. As soon as you get a handle on it, there’s a shift in one or more of those categories that puts you off-kilter once again.
Like 15 minutes in, you’re already blindly and seemingly randomly warping back and forth between off-brand Carcosa and a labyrinthine cave system. I think it’s just a clever illusion, but it really feels like there are a multitude of paths you can take, and you’re never certain you’re on the right one. It’s quite effective at making you feel totally lost.
I feel like the reveal of the other world was a little early and underplayed, but I get the sense that things are going to get a lot weirder and more majestic.
It’s interesting the extent to which this style of first-person, physics-oriented horror gameplay is starting to feel a little long-in-the-tooth. What felt very modern and innovative in Penumbra now feels like a throwback. I’m not gonna lie though, as fussy as the controls can be, I still kind of like being able to manipulate every little object for no reason. It’s fun to pull a sack of millet off of a suitcase, revealing a pair of matches I desperately needed.
This game does the exact Metroid Prime: Echoes thing of running between safe light sources through dangerous darkness, but I think the matches are an excellent, very visceral extension of this kind of play. Matches burn out so quickly, and it’s wonderfully perverse the way the game models them burning faster when you run with them. Watching the flame reach the bottom of the match while you desperately try to light one more candle… Awful. But great.
Wait hold on. There’s like, a new new Amnesia game? Literally from the title I though this was some kind of remaster or whatever. Marketing is a blight and a curse
I’m not sure how far I am into the game but I would guess close to half way now. The pacing is something that’s been on my mind as well. I can’t say much without having experienced the whole thing, but right now I am feeling like this is the weakest beginning to any of the Frictional horror games, which usually do so well with a creeping introduction of horror and intrigue. Rebirth did the interesting thing of showing the weirdness right at the start and then making you walk around unthreatening spaces, listening to endless flashbacks, for a long time afterwords. It’s honestly kind of annoying to me.
I also really just wish they’d throw me into an actually threatening situation without faking me out and having me perform like a rat test subject through their curated obstacle course on my way to a door to escape. I really want to be thrown into a maze where something unexpected could happen
It is very archaic but also very novel. It’s like obviously Myst-like but kind of futuristic feeling with a immersive-sim quality in the way everything is based on simulated physics. It’s a little… uncanny
When I replayed TDD this week I kept wondering to myself why spinning my mouse in circles and playing with simulated physics was scary, because I think it does make things scarier.
I suspect that I’m at about the same point in the game that you are. I’m very close to leaving the fortress (as far as I can tell), part of which took me much longer than it probably should have. (I didn’t notice the cannon wheels for the longest time.)
I’m with you on the pacing. I’m willing to go along with whatever they are doing with this game, but I also suspect that it’s going to get a lot meaner somehow in the latter half. I say half, but I have no idea how long the game is. I guess there’s a scene early on that’s maybe meant to be upsetting, but the scene in question is more of a how-sad-for-that-character thing than something that pulls in/resonates with the player. For me at least.
One of the best parts of Amnesia 1 was tossing everything I could find into the acid pot. And I agree that it’s fun to be able to just pick up and throw things around in this game as well. I enjoyed fighting with the physics to get a slat in the elevator, for example.
One of the genius bits of Gone Home, which is still the best walking sim but also toys with horror despite not being a horror game (which is very fun and good but also contributed I think to the game’s popularity being released in the time of Amnesia, which was a foundational hit-streaming game), is the blanket interactivity. Being able to pick up and pick over and rotate and move and hold everything is a severely underrated aspect of how that game plays. It adds both to verisimilitude and uncanniness.
boy did the original Amnesia!! SOMA was also more painful as things went on. I am hoping this one does too but in a different way.
And I agree about that one part being more sad for the character than significant for me as a player.
I like the juxtaposition between staying in the light when indoors and staying in the shadows in the desert. In TDD the lantern was much more powerful than tinder and the new mechanic of holding matches and being able to light things is much more elegant and spooky.
Although there are maybe a few too many voice-acted flashback parts (especially the sentimental scenes with the couple and the kid), I think the confused storytelling overall is interesting. I remember wondering why she took the (apparently wireless) radio receiver, only to have her get a call later. And I like the little hints in what the doctor says, that her condition caused whatever trouble they are in and that something bad will happen if she gets too frightened or angry. (I’ve been trying to avoid that, of course, but now I’m curious to see what happens.)
Some nice subversion in how the game teaches you to hide and then in the first real monster chase hiding doesn’t help. I failed that part because I just kept running in circles, but when the game brought me back I was past it so I guess it’s more forgiving than similar parts in SOMA (at least so far).
The environments are more varied and lavish than I’d expected, though I’m kind of ambivalent about one of them (alien tech) that, although impressive, feels a little like generic video game setting #4.
Two-thirds through this now and while I have some probably solid grievances with it I think there are some really accomplished aspects to the way the game is designed when the horror parts do kick off.
Funny that they didn’t realize that these would serve as jump scares. I don’t mind them, though.
Last night, I had a second case of being overcome by an enemy. As with the first time, my respawn was past that part so I didn’t have to repeat it. Maybe the game is so forgiving because such things lead to a different ending or something like that rather than setting you back in the moment. I’m still not sure what the intro means exactly when it says you shouldn’t play to win.
I read a cryptic thing in a review about how (very minor spoiler) you’re actually meant to die as part of regular gameplay, and there’s an important aspect of the game that ties into it. I haven’t gotten far enough to die yet though so I dunno.
I heard stuff like that, people saying the game was designed to allow players to “fail forward”. But having finished it, getting caught only twice, I couldn’t tell you what really any of that might mean.
My thoughts on what's so scary about this game.
The game finishes a lot stronger than it begins, which is just what you’d hope but not at the cost of making the beginning super unengaging and rote like I thought it was. Honestly, for the first half of this game I was very bored and frustrated. But by the time you get to the Catacombs, a later area set in a Roman style excavation site, the game really stops withholding the fun. I just finished TDD last week so I knew going in that Frictional’s horror philosophy is to make you think you’re in greater danger than you actually are, so going into the encounters with enemies and chase sequences I was struggling to let myself feel actually harassed by the horrors. But despite that cynicism which is so undermining to horror, basically every single encounter managed to make me feel like I just barely survived.
I think a big part of that is with so many of them, and the parts in the catacombs especially, the level design shifts from being completely linear to offering you a shocking and disorienting amount of choice for navigating these parts. The difference is extremely slight, but having just one more option than normal to make a wrong turn and end up in a small room with nowhere to go, or being deprived of a clear and obviously delineated path through is really freaky when the game is otherwise so clear about how you’re supposed to move through the space. It’s like the game suddenly dials back the handholding at just the right parts, and it was really effective for inspiring doubt about probably the one thing the game has basically trained you to never really question. Suddenly it seems very possible to completely miss the correct way to safety, you actually have to seek it out and it just the worst moment too. So despite never dying until like pretty much the last stealth section I had several moments where I thought “oh shit, this is the end.”
That’s not the same as being dumped into a maze with patrolling monsters like the Choir part in TDD, which I love, but it’s honestly maybe even better. I changed my mind from thinking that Frictional just seemed to forget how to make a scary game after TDD (SOMA was not very scary imo) to that, actually, they seem way more confident and refined in their tricky designs. They play the long game of queuing your expectations and building your confidence up to effectively disorient you later on. Unlike many horror experiences, I thought that contending with the confusion of navigating these levels was essential and, miraculously, never actually frustrating. I made it out alive of some locations, but I probably couldn’t tell you what that level actually looked like to help you navigate yourself. It was luck! Sheer survival!!
Excited to hear what others think about this as they finish it.
Also: did anyone else get really tripped out at that part just outside the fortress, where someone asks Tasi to translate a sign that reads “WELCOME TO THE END OF THE WORLD” in English, and then says that they can’t read French? That was really strange to me.
I wonder if the matches were a late addition. I almost never use the lamp; I forget I even have it. And there are oil refills everywhere, way more than you’d ever need.
I’m guessing that I’m close enough to the end of the game that I’ll get there tonight.
I think this game is at its best when it expects you to enter a place that the character really wouldn’t want to, but without explicitly pointing that out. For example,
When you have to re-enter the Quartermaster’s quarters.
When you have to jump down into some really unpleasant red liquid.
When you have to walk past a monster (and ultimately not just one).
Some of the chase scenes are like better versions of chase scenes in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.
I just finished the game. There are three endings, none happy, and you can get them all in the same run if you’re willing to sit through the final speeches a few times.
The environments are pretty well-realized from the beginning, but they just get better as you go along. While it’s rare that anything is brightly lit, there’s good use of color in places.
One of the notes made me think I had the game figured out, but I guess I was wrong. I thought that Tasi might be one of the people in the capsules in a trance state, being fed hope and fear to generate vitae, her experience being the dream generated in this way. But there ultimately didn’t seem to be any hints that this was the case.
Aside from the ending, another earlier part seemed to have a choice that could affect the story somehow. I got the impression that I could choose from two or three methods of torturing that guy to extract vitae, or leave without doing that at all. I went with the blue option.
This is the first game I’ve played where I feel like my ~2016 Radeon RX 480 graphics card is no longer up to the task. It’s doing its best, but I can’t seem to get a smooth framerate going. I’m not a framerate guy, but it’s pretty distracting in this case.
That happened to me with SOMA. I had everything at very low settings and my graphics card still could barely handle it. And despite that, it was one of my all-time favorite video game experiences. (I played it again a few years later on PS4 to get the full effect, only I didn’t get the full effect because I tried “Safe Mode.”)
(I didn’t even consider trying this game on my computer.)
