Amnesia Collection Gameplay

The cult classic Amnesia horror series is finally available for PlayStation 4. This collection contains all three.

It’s probably safe to call Amnesia: The Dark Descent one of the most influential horror games in recent memory, with games like Outlast, Daylight, and even the upcoming Resident Evil VII taking a lot of inspiration from its design. Not only that, but its popularity with Let’s Players like Pewdiepie and Tobuscus helped shape the popularity of Youtube gaming, for better or for worse. So considering it’s legacy, it’s a surprise that the franchise has just now made its way to consoles. While a little rough around the edges and lacking any new content for longtime fans of the series, the Amnesia Collection has plenty of scares for a new console generation of players.One thing that has to be considered is that the Amnesia Collection is not an HD remastering, but rather a straight port of the game, which may be disappointing to some fans of the series. While the first game is only a little over six years old, it was fairly low budget at the time and it definitely shows, especially when compared to the improved visuals and more varied environments of A Machine for Pigs.

It would have been nice to have some improved textures or more detailed scenery in this re-release, but it’s not a deal breaker. While by no means ugly, The Dark Descent is six years old and showing it’s age.The game controls quite naturally, and some areas actually seem to work better with the PS4 controller than the mouse. For example, spinning one of the analog sticks to turn a wheel is much more natural than moving the mouse in a circle.

Also, every time you turn on your trusty lantern, the light on the back of the PS4 controller glows enough to light the entire room, which is a neat, immersive touch. However, all three games suffer a bit from issues with the hitboxes on small objects, which require a surprising amount of precision to pick up or manipulate. This leads to much frustration in Dark Descent when picking up tinderboxes, as well as a quick “move an object to the next room” puzzle in Machine for Pigs quickly turning into a longer “get the object unstuck from the space between the stairs” puzzle when I accidentally dropped the object in question. All three games suffer from a few physics quirks and visual glitches as well, though none will risk breaking your game.Of the three games on display, The Dark Descent is still the strongest entry in the series. You play as Daniel, a man haunted by a strange shadow, who has woken up with no memory and a note telling him to descend to the basement of the old castle he’s found himself trapped in and kill the Baron Alexander hiding there. What follows is a descent into Daniel’s and Alexander’s dark shared past, which is rife with Lovecraftian horrors and human atrocities alike. Gameplay mostly consists of adventure game inventory puzzles and tense cat-and-mouse games with the castle’s monstrous denizens, creatures so horrible that you’ll literally start to go insane by looking at them.

Sanity is important in the Dark Descent, as your vision will start to cloud if you spend too much time in the dark or around monsters. Not only that, there’s no way to defend yourself from the creatures, so get ready to spend plenty of time hiding or running away. There’s also a lot of resource management, as you’ll need to gather tinderboxes to light candles and oil to keep your lantern burning. Maybe he just wants to say hi?While lacking some of the polish or fancy scenery of its sequel, Machine for Pigs, the gameplay is varied, with fun adventure game puzzles and an emphasis on exploration, as there’s plenty of hidden text to find in the form of Daniel’s journal entries, as well as other witness accounts. The halls of Brennenberg Castle are dark and foreboding, and the monsters have unique, terrifying designs. One particular level, a chase through a flooded tunnel with an invisible monstrosity, is still one of the most memorable and terrifying moments of any game I’ve ever played.

The Dark Descent is also the real meat of the collection, as it’s almost twice as long as the other two games put together.Also included in the collection is Justine, a free bit of DLC for the first game released as part of a Valve ARG. As a reference to its creation, Justine plays like a cross between Portal and Saw, where you play as a seemingly mute woman forced to play a sadistic game in order to escape.

The setting and story are interesting enough and there are plenty of great scares, mostly due to an interesting new cast of monsters chasing after you. However, Justine suffers due to the fact that it’s needlessly difficult. There’s no way to save your game, and dying sends you back to the beginning. Considering that a full playthrough can take anywhere from a half hour to forty five minutes, that’s a lot of wasted time on each death, especially since the last enemy encounter is the most difficult one in the entire franchise. Overall, while Justine’s a neat little addition to the package and I’m glad it was included, it’s little more than a bonus feature compared to the other two games. A Machine for Pigs might be a huge improvement visually, but it loses a lot of what made the first game special.Lastly, there’s A Machine for Pigs, the somewhat controversial sequel.

Frictional, the developers of the previous two games, left development to the creators of Dear Esther on this game, and it definitely shows. The resource gathering, inventory system, and sanity meter have been cut, as well as most of the exploration. There are also nowhere near as many enemies to be found, and the few encounters you do have are made almost trivial by the inclusion of regenerating health. As a result, it’s also nowhere near as scary as the previous two games.While the gameplay feels much simpler as a result of these changes, it also allows for much tighter pacing. A Machine for Pigs has the best story of the collection hands down, ditching most of the Lovecraftian aspects of its predecessor in favor of a more personal story about a man and what he’ll do to protect his sons from a world going mad. It also helps that the cast doing the voice acting is amazing, even if the villain is a bit hammy at times, pun intended. Machine for Pigs has a great visual style and level design, guiding you down through the titular mechanized slaughterhouse at a breakneck pace.

There’s a good chance the game might lose you a bit towards the end, when the subtle world building is pushed aside in an attempt to raise the stakes so sudden it starts to feel silly, but the last moments definitely save the story, ending the series on an appropriately bittersweet note.

It is strange to say it, but you would be surprised just how much the Amnesia franchise influenced the horror genre. Back in 2010, there weren’t many games like Amnesia in the market, ones that saw the player have no way of fighting back. Fast forward a few years and you started to see indie games such as Outlast start to appear, which it undoubtedly takes some pointers from. You then had some AAA developers putting out similar types of games too, with Alien Isolation and Resident Evil 7 being the two obvious ones.Amnesia was also a trendsetter when it came to the Let’s Play scene as it helped usher in a new way of experience games, by watching somebody else play it.

This kind of thing was around before then, but Amnesia: The Dark Descent really was a bit of a sensation in this space at the time and caused a huge spike in this area.Amnesia Collection marks the first time that Nintendo gamers have had the chance to experience the game first hand. It was a PC only title up until 2016 when it released over on the PS4. This collection is based on that version, just with a slightly less amount of polish. It includes the first title, The Dark Descent, its expansion Justine and the sequel, A Machine for Pigs.All three titles are played from the same first-person viewpoint and they all share the same three basic gameplay elements, exploring your surroundings, interacting with objects and solving puzzles. Each game has differences, but this is ultimately what you will be doing in each title.

There are no weapons to be found throughout and darkness is your worst enemy. Each game also spends a lot of time building the atmosphere before any scares even come into question and the sound design of each game ties into this element to create an unsettling feeling throughout each game.To start with, the most popular and best title of the three games in this collection happens to be the original, The Dark Descent. It is one of those games that is often thrown into the hat of best horror titles ever made. While I wouldn’t personally go that far, I would certainly say it’s one of the best in the last decade. I played this title not long after its initial release on the PC way back when and loved it. Back then, I remember it being one of the most terrifying and nerve-wracking games I had ever played. While it doesn’t quite have the same oomph playing now, you will still want to pause the game every now and then to compose yourself.

It is up there with the very best.You take control of Daniel, as he awakens in Brennenburg Castle. It is dark, cold and he has a strong case of Amnesia, the only thing he can remember is his name. Even though the story in Dark Descent isn’t as well rounded or as prominent as it is in A Machine for Pigs, one of the key elements of the game is uncovering the mystery of what Daniel was doing before all of this happened.

It helps flesh out the story a little.When monsters are around, Daniel will lose sanity (which is measured the same way as health) by simply looking at it. You can avoid this by hiding in a way where you are no longer in direct eye contact with the monster and hope that it doesn’t find you. Even before monsters show up, you will learn that Daniel can also be hurt by losing sanity in other ways.Seeing unsettling occurrences or staying in the dark for too long are the two main ways and you must restore your sanity by solving puzzles or staying in well-lit areas. In order to stay safe in the dark, you must utilise a lamp, which requires oil and of course, this oil is hard to come by and that is what makes this feature work. The darkness is your enemy, so having an always-on light source simply would not work, nor would being able to fill it up whenever you felt like it.

It is just another way that allows the horror element of The Dark Descent to shine through.Naturally, with this being a nearly ten-year-old game, there are elements that are severely outdated by today’s standards. Enemy AI can be dodgy at times and the graphics are very sub-standard, this is the same for all three titles, but more so the first.

The cat-and-mouse mechanic has been done in countless games since, some of them, such as Alien Isolation, came out much later and therefore, was given more time to look at games such as Amnesia and perfect that particular feature.Next, we have Amnesia: Justine, which released as a free expansion to The Dark Descent around a year later. With it being an expansion, it is a much shorter experience and as such, it works out being a great title to separate the two bigger, main titles. The focal point here is test chamber-like challenge rooms, that aren’t unlike the type of things you would see in the Saw films. Justine also features a permadeath feature that can be annoying, but given that it only takes an hour or so to finish the game, it is less of an issue. I get why it is there as its main aim is to magnify tension because you know that one wrong move could prove fatal. Still, if I were to die right near the end, I am not sure I would want to pick it back up right away to go through the entirety of the game again.A Machine for Pigs rounds off the package, but unfortunately, I found this title to be the weakest of the three. There is no sanity meter and health is now restored over time, which are two things I wished would have stayed as they were before.

The puzzles don’t quite work as well here either, with them being all environmental-based as opposed to item based as it was in The Dark Descent. It is more linear, too, and this means it is a shorter experience, around half the length of The Dark Descent. I am innocent game.

One improvement is the story, which is maybe due to the linearity of the game, as I felt that it was a bit tighter here than in the previous two entries. It is still not going to blow you away, but it is certainly a step up.The Amnesia games are some of the best horror titles to ever be released, but things have moved on and its dated graphics, lack of polish and some performance issues hinder the Nintendo Switch release. Ultimately, however, if you are a fan of horror games, the package is worth it alone just to play The Dark Descent, one of the most influential games of the past ten years. Just be aware that, as the darkness in these games, time has not been its friend.Version Tested: Nintendo SwitchReview copy provided by Frictional Games.