The Power Gamer

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

This game was recently introduced on Steam (Sept 8th) released by Indie developer Frictional Games, along with a demo and a ridiculously awesome video.

Now, being an avid fan of Doom3 and other games designed to scare the piss out of you, I was sold instantly by this video. But for those a little more skeptical:

The game starts and you have no story, no knowledge of whats going on (hence Amnesia?) You’re groggy and can’t move around very well, and hands are trembling making it hard to manipulate objects. Slowly you start to recover as you wonder around, quickly discovering a journal entry or two giving you a basic idea of whats going on. (This story is slowly revealed across the course of the game in this manner) Now, all this time you’ve been hearing footsteps, and the occasional whimper… walking past certain doors blow open with a gust of wind. Once you get a while into it, not only are you attempting to hide (you don’t get weapons!) from these creatures, you’re attempting to manage your sanity (looking at creatures, staying in the dark etc will hurt your sanity, while staying near light, and solving puzzles with help your sanity.

Puzzles! There are some very cool and sometimes tricky puzzles to help advance your story. The object manipulation system is done quite well, similar to how its done in Oblivion with picking items up etc, but the coolest part is, the doors. As demonstrated in the video, the player flees a monster and hides in a cupboard… but all the door opening/closing is all done with mouse gestures allowing you to slowly and carefully peek out of a crack in the door if you’re careful (or if you’re like me and have random spazz attacks, suddenly kick the door open and get eaten.)

However I must recommend wearing a diaper/nappy while playing this game due to its tenancy to scare the shit out of you.

Its only £12.99 on Steam at the moment… so play the demo, get addicted and support these indie developers by buying this awesome game.