Amnesia: The Dark Descent Review

Written by Micah Messer

I don’t play a lot of horror games, but Amnesia: The Dark Descent is, far and away, the scariest game I have ever played. It’s not hard to tell that true survival-horror games are hard to come by these days. After this year’s E3, which showed off Resident Evil 6’s explosion tsunami and some of Dead Space 3’s more action-centric gameplay, triple A survival-horror games seem to be on their way out. So what is a true survival-horror enthusiast supposed to do? Well, you can turn to a small indie developer named Frictional Games. Amnesia focuses so much on scaring the crap out of you and immersing you in its world that, for better or worse, there’s little else to the game at all.

The story here is actually pretty decent and well told. You play as Daniel, a man who wakes up on the floor of a room in the absurdly creepy Castle Brennenburg, with no memory of past events. The story revolves heavily on you recovering your memories, usually through notes written by your past-self, or conversations that come back to you after visiting certain areas. As I said, the story is pretty well told, albeit somewhat reliant on you finding and reading the majority of the notes scattered throughout the castle. But as long as you’re opening drawers and searching desks (which you’re going to want to be doing anyway) you’ll find enough of them to keep you in the loop.

Get used to this level of vision.