Amnesia: Collection (PS4, 2016)
Amnesia: Collection brings together three games released under the Amnesia name between 2010 and 2013. I'm going to cover the three of them individually, in chronological order.
The Dark Descent, released in 2010 for PC, is a first-person horror game with puzzles in it. You play as Daniel, who wakes up in a mysterious castle sure of nothing but his own name. As you progress through the castle you learn about how it and everything in it got there through a combination of collectible notes, flashbacks, and the story you encounter as you play through the game.
I'm not sure which aspect of the game to start with so I'll go for gameplay first. It's all relatively straightforward. You have health and an inventory where your consumables and puzzle solving objects are kept. You have a lantern you can use for when it's dark, and you pick up oil to power it as you move through the castle. The most interesting aspect of this is something else called Sanity, which is effected by things that happen in-game. Unlike most games with enemies in it, there's no way of fighting back. The biggest threat to Daniel is himself, as a combination of seeing enemies, staying in the dark too long and "unsettling events" causes his Sanity to deplete. The results in a number of things, strange sounds start playing, you'll hallucinate and see cockroaches on the floor and crawling on the screen, eventually leading to the screen becoming blurry and your controls imprecise if it deteriorates too far.
The Sanity meter combines well with the focus of gameplay being on progression rather than combat. In a first for me in my limited experience of games with horror aspects, I actually felt threatened. Daniel's sounds and movements coupled with the atmosphere of the castle makes him feel genuinely vulnerable, and makes me genuinely fearful for what might happen to him. Although the graphics look dated in a basic sort of way and the inventory reminds me of Windows XP-era games, the immersion present in The Dark Descent is some of the best I've ever experienced. The sounds of the castle and of Daniel, the music, it all combines to create something which is unique and always evolving relevant to the situation you're in. I was so creeped out by it I couldn't actually play it for long stretches at a time.
Moving through the castle and trying to avoid the enemies, which you learn the origins of as you progress, feels like a legitimate expedition despite the linear nature of the level design. There isn't really any exploration in the sense of being able to do things in your own order. If you look everywhere you can access, you'll be able to complete the puzzles that hinder your progress. This isn't really a criticism though. You want to look everywhere you can to find out about what's going on, and when you do you're constantly cautious of any potential threat. The game handles the notion of 'threat' really well actually. It's easy on the jump scares which makes them more impactful, while the bulk of the fear generated is through more subtle, uncertain means. What was that noise? Did I see something move? I did see something move! And now it's not there. This constant uncertainty is dually effective, as it helps explain Daniel and helps keep the player invested in Daniel and in the game itself. You want to survive, and you want him to survive.
As you progress and pick up the notes scattered around the castle you learn how Daniel got there, and what he's being pursued by. Although it's slightly more fantastical than I would hope for and than the early game suggests, it's relatively straight-forward and consistently threatening. Man from 1850s Britain goes on an archaeological expedition. Man finds strange Orb in tomb. Men man consults regarding the Orb die in mysterious circumstances. Man is seemingly followed around by The Shadow, a fleshy substance which stretches around the castle and makes a sound like a combination of Jurassic Park's T. Rexes and an earthquake. Man is contacted by mysterious man in Prussia who says he can save him, but who forces him to torture people to save his own life. You know, the easy stuff. The ending was something of a letdown for me in all honesty, but it doesn't diminish the experience you had getting there.
The game is quite short and, as I said, the ending is... well, out there. Literally. I think as a standalone experience though you can't really hold its length against it, because it doesn't feel like a short game. You can basically sprint through it when you know where everything is, but on your first go you'll take a lot longer. There are a lot of unique and distinctive areas to visit. The puzzles aren't really hard, there were only one or two leaps of logic I had to cheat to figure out. Whatever issues you might find to criticise don't really matter though, mostly because you're too fearful to focus on them for too long.
I was going to say I'm not a fan of horror games, but a more accurate thing would be to say that I'm not experienced in horror games. Usually it's teamed with survival or some similar genre, with a Dead Space or a Last of Us. Whatever The Dark Descent is, I enjoyed it, and I want to do it again.
Justine... well, Justine doesn't really do it again. The Dark Descent was and is so popular that it has a level editor feature on PC that allows custom stories to be created and shared by anyone. Justine was created by the same team that did The Dark Descent, and has the same mechanics and premise as the original, although it's not set in the same castle. I don't want to spend too long on Justine because it's short and not as clever as it thinks it is.
Effectively, the game comes down to three rooms with three men imprisoned or tied up in some way. You can either kill them to progress or find a way to open the relevant door without killing them. The leaps in logic I couldn't make in The Dark Descent are multiplied tenfold here, which doesn't help you enjoy the game any. The slight backstory you get to Justine the character isn't particularly engaging either. While The Dark Descent had genuine subtlety and uncertainty to its story, the unnamed voice giving you commands throughout Justine is painfully obvious to identify, and the payoff isn't as satisfying as the game thinks.
Another area where Justine suffers is in the enemies. All the gameplay from The Dark Descent is retained, including the enemies. Where before they just shambled about and attacked you if they saw you, now they call you a c**t and are explained in much more, and more trite, detail. The story of Justine is effective in that it's self-contained and detailed, it's just that the detail isn't very interesting and undermines the premise of the vehicle that's carrying it.
While this is saved to an extent with the game effectively featuring perma-death - you die and it's back to the start - you can complete it in about twenty minutes. I know it's not a full game and it's unfair to compare it to The Dark Descent as a result, but going from one to the other is jarring when you consider the similarities.
A Machine for Pigs is similar to Justine in that it was intended to be a mod for The Dark Descent, but developed into something else. It's not created by the same people who did the first two games and despite carrying the Amnesia name, it shows.
You are Oswald Mandus, a man who wakes up in a mansion haunted by the visions of his two young children who he's trying to find. As you progress from his mansion to his factory and underneath it you learn what happened to the children, who Mandus is, and what his factory was doing before a mysterious saboteur shut it down.
Gameplay-wise it's obviously inspired by The Dark Descent, but is lacking in several areas. There's no Sanity meter, and very little sense of threat from enemies anyway. The lantern doesn't require anything to power it, and in fact starts flashing when you're approaching an enemy. These changes sound minor but they turn the game into much more of a sightseeing tour than something where you're desperately trying to stay alive. There is also no inventory which would make the game's puzzles much more awkward if it had any. Most obstacles to your progress involve picking something up and putting it somewhere else, and often the things in question and in plain sight in the same room.
Any sense of subtlety you might have hoped for with this being an Amnesia game, well, there isn't any. The physical locations themselves aren't as cramped and claustrophobic as The Dark Descent's. They also somehow manage to be more linear at the same time, with the game feeling like something for you to look at rather than interact with in a meaningful way. The enemies... I can't really go into detail with the enemies without spoiling the story, so I'll keep it simple. They're half man half pig. They turn up one at a time. They only ever pose a real threat about two times. Near the end of the game there's some sort of electro pigman that seems to have been cross-bred with the guy from The Running Man that was covered in fairy lights.
While the game has a reasonable premise for a story, the features I've just described undermine any attempt at legitimate social commentary the game might have tried to make. It's one thing to say that people (in 1899) are being dehumanised and turned into animals bred solely for work and slaughter, but the way it's done in the game veers so wildly between ridiculous and attempted sincerity that any impact it might have had is crushed. Imagine a song by a band with a quiet/loud dynamic - a song by New Order from 1981 perhaps, their first single even - where the loud is thrash metal and the quiet is elevator muzak. Better yet, look up ClownC0re on youtube and you have a reasonable approximation of the two things this game tries to bring together.
All of this might have been salvageable if the story wasn't so entirely predictable. Like Justine, there's a mysterious voice popping up at various points, goading Mandus and telling him what to do. You'll listen to about three of these messages and immediately figure out what's going on. I think this contributes to the sense of predictability any of the horror elements of the game possess, because it's hard to be scared of something when you know what's going to happen. That's not the mark of a good horror game, and the presentation here doesn't compensate for it. Literally in some instances, as in locations where the game is at its darkest the colour mix seems to be all wrong, and everything turns varying shades of blue.
Considered on its own, I might have been confused by A Machine for Pigs. Connecting it to the other Amnesia games, I realise there's a chance that this somewhat original story was conceived without a vehicle on which to deliver it. The result was seeing it cobbled to a game engine with mechanics unsuited for what it was trying to do. The game ultimately feels constantly at a sense of unease, as if you're expecting things that don't come, then don't appreciate what does. Ultimately this is a shame, because I think there's a basis for something 'real' and believable in it, which would be pertinent for a modern audience as well as its turn of the twentieth century setting.
It's unquestionable to say that the quality of the Amnesia: Collection varies, but it's a mark of the original game's quality and popularity that I'm able to sit here pontificating about things it inspired. That seems commendable to me.
