Throughout the castle, Daniel finds tinderboxes that enable him to light candles and torches to drive out the darkness. The game does a very great simulation of the need to adjust your eyes to the surroundings for a few seconds after diving into the darkness, too. Compared to a game like Eternal Darkness, however, the “sanity effects” are rather subtle, no fourth-wall breaking stuff here. Most of the castle is shrouded in darkness, but there is an immediate sense that the shadows are not good for Daniel’s health – when staying in unlit areas for too long, his senses get twisted, he starts hearing noises and hallucinates about what may lie in the shadows. One by one, the notes reveal a truly bleak view into ancient horrors as well as the darkest voids of the human soul, and the fact that the majority of it is written by the player avatar himself makes the narrative feel all the more direct and “close to home.”
Like in the System Shock and Bioshock series, pretty much all of the narrative happened before the game, and it’s left to the player to unearth the records of what happened. The player remains in control during those, but the sight typically gets so bad that it’s not feasible to do anything that goes beyond continuing to walk down a straight corridor. Sometimes Daniel also gets visions of the past when he crosses locations that used to be familiar to him. The entire game is played through Daniel’s eyes as he makes his way through the murky ruins, finding pieces of his own diary and other documents along the way, which gradually reveal the horrors that happened before the fateful drink of oblivion. Following a strange trail of purple freckles through the darkness, he soon stumbles upon a letter written by himself, telling him he drank an amnesia-inflicting potion to forget certain incidents, and one dreadful instruction: Find and murder an old man named Alexander of Brennenburg in the castle’s Inner Sanctum. I’d even go as far as recommending to disable the in-game tutorials the mechanics are not that complicated.Īmnesia begins with the protagonist waking up inside a dusty old castle, barely clinging to the memory of his own name – Daniel. This article does its best to avoid heavy story spoilers, but analysis by definition is the very antithesis of both, and if you actually care about immersion and the power unfamiliarity, the experience will be the better the earlier you quit reading this article (or any kind of review) and start playing the game already. The game’s appeal is all about mystery and the fear of the unknown. It is difficulty to try and write about Amnesia: The Dark Descent in a way that does justice to the game, as any kind of detailed recommendation cannot help but to defeat its own purpose.
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