The harsh desert sun of North Africa is as deadly and frightening as the dark. Too long in the sun, and the mind is addled. Dehydration sets in and, eventually, death. The dark offers respite from the sun but contains other terrors. There are the remnants of a camp where my fellow travelers rested after the plane crash. Corpses litter the cave, some dead from injuries sustained in the crash, others felled by more mysterious means. Deeper in the cave is darkness and the shambling of some thing, a creature bent on rending flesh from bone.
To escape, Tasi Trianon—the protagonist of Amnesia: Reibrith—can run towards the light of the desert or slip into the solace of her own memory. But Tasi’s memories hold cold comfort and monsters far more horrifying than anything she’d encounter in the desert or the dark of the caves.
This is Amnesia: Rebirth, a sequel to 2010’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent. In both games, the player controls a protagonist as they explore a haunted location. In The Dark Descent, that location is a Prussian castle in the mid 19th century. Rebirth begins in the deserts of North Africa but traverses through several settings in and out of the desert. Rebirth is an evolution of everything The Dark Descent began. A truly great sequel that builds upon its predecessor’s legacy.
WIRED:Focus on story, uses the tropes of Lovecraftian fiction to deconstruct colonization, terrifying encounters in the dark recesses of one woman’s heart.
TIRED:Creepy rather than scary, may be easy for Amnesia die-hards.
In 2010, Amnesia: The Dark Descent turned horror games on their head. Players explored the castle while facing down monsters they couldn’t fight, and sometimes couldn’t see. Other horror games had pitted players against unbeatable monsters, but it was rare. In 2010, Resident Evil was lighting up the box office with its Milla Jovovich–led action movie franchise. Resident Evil 5 was a poorly received action game.
In The Dark Descent, players were largely powerless. It struck a chord. People were just beginning to gain popularity on Twitch and YouTube streaming video games. PewDiePie had just begun to stream on YouTube. The Dark Descent’s tendency to create dynamic moments of pure terror when one of its monsters scared a streamer into fits of screaming terror made PewDiePie a star.
If you’ve ever watched your favorite steamer scream at the top of their lungs while pursued by eldritch horrors, you can thank Amnesia developer Frictional Games for that. Their 2015 followup SOMA, was a cerebral creep through an abandoned underwater facility. Amnesia had a story, but it was a game driven by pure visceral terror that played well on YouTube. SOMA was a heady and story-driven experience.
