Yes, Amnesia sees the return of the sanity meter, a mechanic that I enthused about when it appeared in Eternal Darkness and will gladly enthuse about here. It is also where you may view your current state physical and mental health. As such, like all adventure games, it implements an inventory screen, which is where you may also view your collected notes, journal pages, and mementos (or objectives). or you recover inventory items that allow you to remove / alter the obstacle blocking your way. In order to overcome these obstacles, you either make use of the environment around you in first-person perspective - pulling switches, moving rocks, etc. And the internet hasn't been the same since. Two years later, Frictional Games released Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Black Plague, the first expansion, reduced combat significantly, to the point where it was almost extraneous as a game mechanic. The results encouraged Frictional, and they released two followup expansions: Black Plague and Requiem. It did not work well.Īside from this setback, however, the game was reasonably well-received and fairly well-distributed via the Humble Indie Bundle. A sci-fi horror with isolation and paranoia elements reminiscent of The Thing (the movie, not the execrable video game), Penumbra also featured its own take on combat: a strange, click-and-drag system that required players to manually swing equipped weapons. Their first title, Penumbra: Overture, came out in 2007, and was a modest venture for a company getting its feet wet. Luckily, while pretenders to terror like Dead Space or The Darkness or Manhunt were revelling in their ability to showcase all new ways of destroying a human body (none of which elicited much of a response me aside from a dull yawn), there were studios quietly working in the background, trying to capture just an ounce of the magic of the classics.īy now, you'll almost definitely have heard of these folks. And so they lost touch with their scary side. They solidified the fear by letting us shoot at it. The majority of "horror" games of the 2000s failed to understand us. Faced with a void we do not comprehend, we fill that void with our invented nightmares: spiders will poison us while we sleep, small spaces will suffocate us, the gays will destroy the fabric of our society. The phobias we experience in daily life (arachnophobia, claustrophobia, even dare I say homophobia) all derive from a confusion or ignorance of our surroundings. It's fear of the unknown that drives all our other basic fears. Horror is at its most successful and frightening when not everything is explainable or quantifiable. Figuratively because by virtue of the interface, you are making your player aware of the mortality of the horror around him. Literally because popping enemies from a distance with large-calibre weaponry smacks of safety. Shooters distance you from the horror, literally and figuratively. Why? Because in my opinion, shooters are not very good horror. If you've followed my reviews, you'll notice a conspicuous absence of shooters (with one or two exceptions). But more than that, gameplay-wise, the shooter took over as the new face of horror. I've talked a little bit about this already in my review of Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and how big franchises seemed to take over the mainstream gaming scene. Somehow, not longer after the turn of the millenium, the genre seemed to slide into dull repetitiveness. Having come back to it now, I'm not sure I can think of a better way to summarize my feelings. In private conversation with them, I confessed: " I'm trying to figure out a way to talk about the latter 2000's without simply saying "everything sucked." Will come back to it." The most difficult part of doing things that way, however, was arriving at the period roughly encompassing the mid-late 2000s. When I was first talking to Less and Peter about how I wanted to write about Horror in video games, I deliberately planned out my approach as a timeline, because I wanted to try to plot a trajectory of how I think the genre has progressed.
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