Amnesia Bundle (Xbox One) Review

 

This may be my first time attempting a review of a compilation rather than an individual game, and what a great little compilation it is! Also, beware of mild story spoilers throughout.

Amnesia the Dark Descent is a horror game that I was really excited about when it was first announced, as it was made by the same developers who made Penumbra Overture and Penumbra Black Plague, both of which I had played with some friends when I was younger and really loved. But like many games I am interested in, it took me forever to make time for actually playing the darn thing. But I’m glad I did!

(spoiler warnings here, I will discuss the story-lines of the three campaigns)

All 3 games follow a different protagonist in their own story. In The Dark Descent, you play as Daniel, whom as the title suggests, has given himself Amnesia in order to forget something that broke his mind.  In Justine, you start off seeming like a prisoner who is escaping from a dungeon, making your way through a series of trials. Lastly, in a Machine For Pigs, you play as a wealthy man named Mandus, whom awakens in his house with his children missing and sets out to find them. To avoid any major spoilers, I don’t give away the twists for any character’s story, but I do feel that the narrative for both Justine or A Machine For Pigs were pretty confusing when playing through them - I ended up having to look up their stories on the Amnesia wiki to make full sense of what was going on (especially on Machine’s story). That said, all three stories do still maintain a great, chilling atmosphere all the way.

As a side note and small spoiler for Justine, the game’s trials consist of both solving puzzles and deciding whether or not to rescue or spare people that you find imprisoned.  one of the characters you can kill or save is a priest. I’m tempted to revisit that particular campaign just to do a play-through where I kill him, just for that.

(spoilers end here)

As for how the three campaigns play, they’re all pretty similar but some of the core features are changed or removed in Justine and A Machine For Pigs. You will move through your environments scavenging for items, exploring and solving puzzles in order to progress the story. There is no means of fighting any enemies, you simply have to avoid them! Coming to this trilogy from Penumbra, I felt right at home with the game-play but a new feature that isn’t in Penumbra is the sanity system. Whenever you lingered in dark areas or witnessed disturbing things, your sanity level would decrease.  I like this mechanic a lot because it added anxiety even when moving through areas that had no enemies. All enemies counted as disturbing sights too, which discouraged the player from looking directly at them - this is a brilliant idea as well, pushing players to maintain their fear of the unknown (and also being why I found it pretty obnoxious that so many YouTube thumbnails for the games show the monsters in plain sight).  In normal mode, losing your sanity will cause hallucinations, warped vision and eventually a panic attack that makes it hard to move. In Hard Mode, losing all your sanity will just have you be literally scared to death. Thankfully, in either difficulty, you can also heal your sanity by solving puzzles or relaxing in well-lit areas for a while.

Another interesting mechanic the game has (that is shares with Penumbra as well) is what I like to call “physics based object interaction”. By that I don’t just mean you can push and knock things around, but that when you operate things like dresser drawers, doors, machinery, etc you have to use a button to grip it and then push things around with the analogue stick. I mostly like the way this control style feels, it makes things more immersive, but just as in Penumbra, it occasionally would make things awkward during a chase sequence.

As I mentioned before, there are some game-play changes in each story. In the main story, you could play in Normal or Hard Mode. In addition to the aforementioned sanity system change, Hard Mode also requires the player to have 4 tinderboxes any time they want to save. The Justine story used the normal-style sanity system, but also doesn’t let you save, making it pretty challenging in it’s own right. It does however, give you a lantern with infinite oil, which is nice. Lastly, there is A Machine For Pigs, which does allow you to save, but also eliminates both the sanity and the inventory system altogether - a change I didn’t care for, as it was a enjoyable part of the tension and game-play in the other two stories.

The visuals in the game are all very nice and eerie, just as they were in Penumbra.  I liked the gruesome choice of representing the player’s health and sanity by showing an actual heart and brain in various stages of decay. The game uses a much more gothic and Victorian aesthetic compared the the more modern environments seen in Penumbra. The soundtrack For Daniel and Justine’s stories are composed by the same fellow who did Penumbra, so it is fantastic as well.

While a very scary and fun game with a great atmosphere and terrifying stories, this compilation does have some nasty bugs. I encountered instances in both “The Dark descent” and “Justine” where I clipped right through  a wall and fell out of the level, which was pretty frustrating in both instances. A Machine For Pigs presented me with some very bad bugs as well, such as parts of puzzles getting glitched out and forcing me to load an earlier save file. In one part of my play-through, I actually had two puzzle sin the same map repeatedly glitch out on me and it got so frustrating I almost gave up on finishing the story. The only other bug I found was a more harmless one where occasionally if you exited a body of water and walked on dry floor, you would still hear splashing with each step.

All in all, this bundle is definitely worth getting, even with the bugs. Great atmosphere, freaky  (if sometimes a bit confusing) stories, and challenging game-play make this a horror classic from a pretty great developer. Another nice thing about these games us If you get the games on Steam, they both have a “nosteam” launcher in their folders which allows you to play them in DRM-Free form (something that is sadly missing from the Penumbra titles on steam).  Now I really need to finish the Penumbra trilogy and try that SOMA game sometime…