Amnesia: The Dark Descent
John Brand, Staff Writer
June 15, 2012
Filed under Gaming
Amnesia is a survival horror video game created by Frictional Games. The game starts off with Daniel (your character) waking up in a dark room in a creepy castle. From there on, you must find your way through the castle looking, unarmed, for a mysterious orb while solving puzzles and evading The Shadow along with two other creatures: the brute and the servant grunt. Both of these are severely disfigured humans that, if given any chance at all, will try to kill you. These monstrosities aren’t all that intelligent though. If you hold up a large enough object in front of your face, they will walk right past you or you can throw something at them to momentarily stun them.
This game is arguably the scariest game on the market right now. If you play in a dark room while wearing headphones it feels like things are behind you or right beside you. There is no fixed sound track to the game so at times all you can hear is dead silence and the heartbeat of you and your own character. Not having a sound track adds other elements to the game such as being able to listen to your surroundings very carefully. This allows you to escape those monsters without them even seeing you. You can adjust the brightness of your screen at the beginning of the game or at any time in the start menu. Most of the times you will be in near pitch black rooms trying to complete your task which actually makes the screen brightness option not useless for once and helps the game become immersive. The graphics aren’t great like Mass effect 3, but they do have one thing that is superb; blending. The darkness blends in with everything else making it look realistic. If the blending was terrible, you would notice different shades of black in some areas, or some objects don’t have any lighting/shading. The scare and thrill of this game doesn’t just come from those elements. There is one element that makes this game different and that is the fact that you are unarmed: you have no weapons, and you cannot under any circumstance kill these things. Knowing this and still playing the game is scary. They will chase you and try to murder you and all you can do is run and attempt to hide. Let me say that running away from these things in the dark with your headphones on will near give you a heart attack.
The fountain of youth...
The audio, graphics, not being able to fight back and brightness settings blend together to create of the most unique game playing experiences you will ever have.
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