The Changing Face of Death in the ‘Amnesia’ Series
Neil Bolt
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Frictional Games has spent over 15 years shaping its vision of horror, and nowhere is that reconstruction more noticeable than in its tentpole series Amnesia. At the forefront of the indie horror game boom, Frictional could easily have been tempted to cash in on the success of Amnesia: The Dark Descent and make a straight sequel. Instead, it continued to explore variations on a theme that stands out in an ever-growing horror landscape. How it dealt with death would end up becoming a cornerstone of the series.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent
The first entry, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, came along in 2010 and was built on the promise of the developer’s earlier work in the Penumbra series. It ended up becoming a cornerstone of what horror gaming would transform into over the coming years. How so, you ask? Well, you only have to look at its place in the rise of YouTube Let’s Plays. These creators used Amnesia’s scare value for entertaining theatrical reactions that have become a big part of digital entertainment in the past decade. The games that followed in its footsteps, such as Outlast, P.T., and any number of largely combatless horror (and non-horror) experiences were largely set on a path by Frictional Games’ breakout hit.
The Dark Descent’s terror was of a different breed to the increasingly action-heavy fare being served up in the mainstream horror titles. It was relatively slow, story-rich, and more focused on psychological terror in a manner that game goliaths such as Silent Hill had strayed further and further from. At the game’s beginning, protagonist Daniel awakens in a Prussian castle with a gaping hole in his memory. The only information he has to hand is he deliberately caused his amnesia and that something is stalking him. He must journey deep beneath the castle to end his torment and find out the truth.
Daniel has no weapons, only tools. His enemies are the horrors unleashed in the castle and the lack of light. These combine to create a stressful and terrifying soup. The darkness can literally do as much damage to Daniel as the monstrosities he encounters, his sanity slipping with exposure to both. You can create light sources with an oil-burning lantern and tinderboxes, but these are limited. Failure to do so leads to a mental decline which not only causes hallucinations and even death, but also brings a higher likelihood of monsters showing up. As Daniel is without weaponry, his only option is to run and hide. So a careful balance of light management and sneaking about is often blown to splinters by the sudden appearance of a monster.
Fear is equated with death. Fear of what stalks Daniel: the fear of helplessness. And the fear of the darkness enveloping him. All will kill him if he is careless. At the heart of what makes The Dark Descent work is this cycle of fear and mortality. Many imitators would try to emulate that and fail in the years that followed.
Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs and SOMA
Frictional Games would not return to Amnesia itself for a decade. At that time, the horror landscape had massively shifted, and what The Dark Descent did already felt dated because of the many imitators. Just how would the developer keep things fresh and relevant ten years on?
Part of the answer lay in what the publisher did in between. Frictional moved away from Amnesia and left it in the hands of Dear Esther developer The Chinese Room. That developer would make Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs in 2013. A game that was roundly criticized for not feeling enough like Amnesia, but in retrospect, that may well have been the point to some degree. Frictional in the meantime, went on to make SOMA, a sci-fi horror game that kept plenty of the qualities of the developer’s storytelling and inarguably surpassed anything Frictional had made to that point.
Except for one point. The monsters.
At launch, players were not fans of how encroaching the threats were on the storytelling. The design of them? Great. The problem was that it all felt a little too drawn out and formulaic, and ultimately it interfered with the excellent story. SOMA received plenty of praise otherwise, but this was a clear sticking point. It made death a frustration, not a fear, and given the haunting revelations of the game’s end, that hurt what it was going for. So how to address it?
The answer was ‘Safe Mode’. This was patched into the game two years after its 2015 release and all it did was keep the monsters relatively passive. As a result, the story was allowed to shine and the monsters kept their particular flavor in the mix. Frictional would take this learning experience into Amnesia: Rebirth’s design.
Amnesia: Rebirth
Amnesia: Rebirth pushes the series forward in time to 1937 and sees French engineering technician Anastasie “Tasi” Trianon and her team crash land in Algeria. Finding herself alone in the searing desert heat, Tasi stumbles upon a cave network and so begins a disturbing journey of horrors both body and cosmic.
Amnesia: Rebirth follows a similar formula to its predecessor. Darkness is harmful, limited light sources are available, no weapons, and there are monsters that hurt to look at and hurt more to meet up close. The biggest change is in how the consequences of darkness and monster encounters are handled. Tasi does suffer hallucinations and terrifying imagery if exposed to darkness for too long, but Amnesia: Rebirth also features sections outside in the hot sun. The excellent audio work creates a sizzling cracking sound as Tasi stays exposed to the elements and it makes for a nice flipside of the afflictions of the dark. Tasi is safe from the horrors of the darkened places, but the sun will kill her just as readily.
Then there are the monsters. On the surface, it’s exactly the same deal as before. Avoid the monster. If spotted, run and hide. What changes is the ‘punishment’ for being killed. Tasi doesn’t truly die. Instead, she is seemingly returned to a point slightly ahead of the encounter she was slain in and effectively skips it.
This was a point of contention among some players, but the brilliant thing about it is that Tasi isn’t really getting away with anything. ‘Cheating death’ does come with a price that the story reveals. An early revelation of the memory-impaired Tasi is her pregnancy. Now you’re not just fighting to keep Tasi from a terrible fate, but that of her unborn child. Yes, you get to skip an encounter if caught by a ghoul, but the incentive is there to avoid that. What impact is this having on Tasi and her child?
Suddenly every negative effect the game throws at Tasi feels deadlier and by the time Amnesia: Rebirth reaches its climatic confrontation, it’s clear Tasi’s pregnancy and past trauma has been used to manipulate her into a controlled survival. It’s no longer about Tasi’s life but that of her child. Whichever of the three endings players reach, the result holds a grim outcome.
With Amnesia: Rebirth, Frictional found a way to circumvent the frustration of its cat-and-mouse set pieces and keep the story flowing by using that as part of the narrative. On the surface, the impression Amnesia: Rebirth gives is that death is rather meaningless. The truth is the manipulation of consequences is used as a constant motivator to funnel Tasi toward a potentially more dire fate.
Amnesia: The Bunker
For the game’s detractors, what Frictional did with Amnesia: Rebirth may not have been concrete proof the series had chameleonic tendencies. There’s no denying the developer’s ever-shifting vision for the series with the release of 2023’s Amnesia: The Bunker though. In this WWI set sequel that once again sees a forgetful protagonist hunted by monstrous forces, Amnesia Rebirth’s approach to death is taken apart and reconstructed to provide more of the survival edge of the original, but with an emphasis on learning from your demise, experimenting with it even. With heavy shades of the immersive sim genre and the limited inventory of a survival horror combining to keep players on their toes.
The darkness is now relatively harmless to the player’s psyche, but its absence does make a roaming monster more likely to show up wherever the player is. Two light options exist, both filled with a new dread. The wind-up hand torch requires no batteries but needs constant loud pulls of its charging ripcord. Not ideal for the dark confines of a WWI bunker where the only other inhabitant is a monster out for blood. The other source is a generator that lights up the bunker. The catch is it needs fuel, which is fairly limited and doesn’t last long.
Amnesia: The Bunker gifts the player plenty of tools to feel like they can keep death at bay, but as noted with the light sources, there are always caveats and limitations. It’s the first Amnesia with a gun, but bullets are extremely limited, must be manually loaded, and all they really do is slow the monster down. Death is on delay, and when it comes to this game, you’re likely to have learned something.
It’s no surprise that Amnesia: The Bunker has refreshed the series once again, and shown that Frictional has a masterful understanding of repackaging its formula over and over in interesting variations. Most big names in horror gaming currently settle for crowd-pleasing familiarity with a sheen of newness sprayed on top (which is fine of course). Frictional isn’t afraid to upset the idea of what people think its games should be, and that makes it the most fascinating and exciting established horror developer around today.
Categorized:Editorials
