

Crafting Nightmares: Why Amnesia's Dark Descent terrifies audiences

Mike Bracken's picture

Amnesia: The Dark Descent Screenshot

When it comes to horror, I'm genuinely jaded. After spending most of my adult life writing about countless films in the genre and reading everything from H.P. Lovecraft to Richard Laymon, I'm largely desensitized to jump scares and gross outs. That doesn't mean I don't appreciate the efforts of those creating scares, though. In fact, I find the opposite to be true. I think I appreciate a well done film, book or game even more now because I have such an intimate understanding of how fear is created. Much like a good joke, scaring people appears deceptively simple—the truth is, it's not. What scares us is arguably as broad and subjective as what makes us laugh. What one person finds terrifying or hilarious may not faze me at all, and vice versa. Trying to discover universal fears and keep them fresh and frightening is a huge challenge.


The brainchild of Swedish indie developers Frictional Games, Amnesia is one of the creepiest video games to ever grace a PC monitor. The title stands as the company's master thesis on creating fear in games and provides an interesting template for horror game creators looking to make their mark. Any developer in this subgenre would be well advised to study what Frictional has done here—there's much to learn.

Amnesia is the studio's fourth release, coming in the wake of the three titles in their Penumbra series. Those experiences feel almost like test runs for Amnesia—one can see the Penumbra DNA in this newest title, but it's been refined to such a degree that Amnesia feels only tangentially related to the earlier games. How did Frictional Games achieve this? What sets Amnesia apart not only from its predecessors but most other survival horror games? The answers are threefold, and less complicated than gamers might expect.

One of the commonly accepted truths of horror in books and films is that simpler stories are often the most effective. This is part of the reason why something like John Carpenter's Halloween (babysitters are stalked by a masked madman) is an enduring classic while Legion (featuring a war in Heaven and other assorted nonsense) is quickly forgotten. Amnesia seems to understand this—but it does something that most books, films, and games have rarely managed to pull off: it's a simple story that creates the illusion of being something much deeper.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent Screenshot

This quality is largely attributable to the influence of author H.P. Lovecraft. The guys at Frictional clearly adore Lovecraft (so much so that they named their 3D game engine HPL in his honor), who created the elaborate Elder Gods mythos and gave us evil monsters like Cthulhu and books of forbidden knowledge like The Necronomicon. There's a rich mythology running through all of Lovecraft's fiction, but it's largely window dressing. When a reader digs beneath the surface of Lovecraft's work, the themes revolved around issues of mankind being powerless to change its fate (and our fate was almost always to meet a horrific end at the hands of unspeakably awful monsters older than time and space) and how man's quest for forbidden knowledge often led to destruction. A reader can choose to delve into the mythos Lovecraft created, but the tales are effective even without the elaborately constructed details. You don't need to know the history of Cthulhu to find The Call of Cthulhu terrifying.

Amnesia gets the significance of Lovecraft, and runs with the same ideas. The game is ostensibly about a character named Daniel who awakens in deserted European castle with no memory of who he is or how he got there. The rest of the player's time is spent unraveling that mystery (the revelations, which I will not spoil here, are decidedly Lovecraftian in their construction) and potentially thwarting a great evil.

However, what Amnesia is really about is moving through a creepy and desolate location filled with monsters who will kill the player on sight. It's almost like a classic sleight-of-hand—Frictional pulls off a brilliant misdirection by crafting an elaborate mythology, but the reality of the thematic content is much simpler. The benefit is that the title resonates with a wider range of players. The terror of being killed by unstoppable monsters is more universal than being creeped out by exploring a haunted castle and stopping evil from other dimensions.

Still, the story is arguably Amnesia's weakest point. The game features multiple endings and none of them are particularly satisfying.

The second element that sets Amnesia apart and puts it above so many of its brethren is the gameplay.

Frictional builds on an idea they first started exploring in 2008's Penumbra: Black Plague—de-emphasizing combat in favor of stealth. It's a brilliant idea, and amnesia takes it even further. Players in Amnesia are always potentially in danger, but unlike countless other survival horror games where the player can take the fight to their attackers, Frictional provides no recourse other than running. It's "fight or flight" simplified to a single option.

The idea of continuously running from attackers doesn't sound all that exciting on paper. However, the execution of the concept ratchets Amnesia's tension level up to a point where it's nearly unbearable.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent Screenshot

With no way to defend himself, the player is forced to proceed with caution and plan methodically. Opening doors is legitimately frightening when you have no idea what might be on the other side and no real way of confronting an enemy if one is there. Without weapons or melee attacks, the player is completely defenseless. There's nothing to fall back on—there's just running and hiding.

Few games make the player feel so helpless. Even the incredibly intense Fatal Frame games gave players a camera that could stop the ghosts stalking them.

Amnesia offers no such tool for survival—the only lines of defense are ones players concoct for themselves. Gamers quickly learn to close doors behind them because it prevents a monster from launching a surprise attack from the rear. Upon entering any room, it becomes second nature to note where the shadowy corners and closets are—those are the best hiding places. When a game makes the player this vulnerable, this powerless, it becomes infinitely more frightening.

Finally, the game returns once again to its Lovecraftian roots with the presentation of its monsters. The creatures skulking through the dark hallways of the castle are spooky enough, but become even moreso because the player isn't allowed to look at them. To stare at the creatures is to court going insane (which makes maneuvering the main character very unreliable) and will also draw their attention if they haven't spotted Daniel yet.

Because the player never gets a really good look at the enemy, the mind starts to fill in all sorts of horrible details. They must have wicked claws and slavering jaws filled with sharp teeth. We imagine that if we look closely enough, we'll be able to see the meaty remnants of previously devoured victims embedded between those teeth.

Lovecraft utilized the same techniques in his writing—the horrors confronting his characters were always "too terrible to describe" and relating them to the reader would "surely push one over the precipice of sanity." It's a simple trick that writers and filmmakers still employ today because they understand that the audience will concoct something far more terrifying (and personal) than they could ever accurately relay on their own. Sometimes less really is more.

While I would never go so far as to call Amnesia: The Dark Descent the "scariest game ever" (only because I've still yet to play a game that actually scared me), I think it does so many things well that it's not only a chilling experience for players, but a game worthy of study by developers looking to spook their audiences. Developers can take the concepts Frictional has used to create tension and transfer them into their own vastly different games with minimal effort because the beauty of Amnesia's success lies in its simplicity. Here's hoping that they do—while shooting an endless stream of zombies in the head never gets old, I'd love to play more survival horror games that emphasize the horror elements as much as the survival.

Category Tags
Platform(s): PC  
Developer(s): Frictional Games  
Series: Amnesia  
Genre(s): Horror  
Articles: Editorials  
Topic(s): Pop-culture   Game Design & Dev  

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To be completely honest as a

To be completely honest as a horror-game lover I found Amnesia to be lacking. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it because I did, especially because it's one of the few survival horror games that focuses more on the survival aspect.

My main issue with the game is that the enemies were not scary at all. They were entirely predictable; how they would find you, how they chased you, how they patrolled. If I know how something behaves it's no longer scary. For the most part there was only one real enemy type and the lack of diversity lead me to think "Oh, it's him again" rather than "Oh shit, it's him again!". If they had broken the mold a bit and made the enemies more intelligent it would've gone a long ways towards making the game more frantic for me. I never actually felt helpless because of how easy they were to dodge, and I only hid in a closet once throughout the game.

Additionally, madness was such a throwaway trait that I never bothered to manage it and I still completed the game easily. I was expecting something more along the lines of Eternal Darkness where the game constantly would mess with your head as you went mad, but there were only a few small changes and the rare event to go with it.

To give an example of a relatively silly but scary game: Ao Oni is a clocktower-esque horror game made in RPG maker with the silliest monster ever. Yet it manages to be scary by making (or, making it seem that) the demon you're running from is semi-intelligent, stopping at nothing to hunt you down. That's the kind of thing I'd like to see more in horror games.

Again though, it's still a great game and very frightening for a lot of people. Didn't quite get me though.

Thanks for the comments. I

Thanks for the comments.

I think you have the same kind of jaded approach to this stuff as I do -- I don't think most people notice the patterns in how the monsters chase you or patrol. I suspect, since we both play a lot of survival horror titles, that we're more apt to notice it than the average player. While they never scared me, I can appreciate how they did scare folks who don't spend as much time with these sorts of games as you and I do. I think the decision to penalize players for looking at the monsters is excellent because it works on two levels -- it lets you imagine things, and it helps hide the fact that there's not a lot of enemy variety. For a small studio like Frictional, I think that's pretty inspired.

I was glad they didn't go with the gimmicky Eternal Darkness insane effects, personally. I don't really think faking a blue screen of death or stuff like that really adds anything to the game. They might get you the first time, but after that it's more of an annoyance than anything. I wasn't the world's biggest Eternal Darkness fan in general, though.

I'm going to have to check out Ao Oni -- I haven't heard of it before, but it sounds interesting. I don't think anyone's made the "perfect" horror game yet, but I do think Amnesia does some things really well and is a step in the right direction.

Thanks again for the comments -- I definitely get where you're coming from.

I enjoyed Amnesia more than

I enjoyed Amnesia more than the Penumbra games, and found it more chilling than Dead Space or that one scene in Dead Space 2. I'd like to say it was also better than Eternal Darkness, but my memories of that game are too faded now to be impartial. And Fear/Bioshock/re4 had moments, but when you have weapons, it's a different impact. In terms of pattern recognition, a good comp for me would be the very first time I played Left 4 Dead, before I knew what to expect.
In terms of the review itself, did you play the game in a darkened room, and with headphones? I find locking down the external static creates a much more heightened immersion for me when gaming.

Finally played Amesia?


I'm pleased to see you finally bent to Richard's incessant praise of Amnesia. By far the most effective aspect of play is definitely, as you put it, the idea of flight and inability to really look at the object of horror. This is why I'm surprised you didn't mention Call of Cthulhu at all - which I feel is the most overlooked horror game around. You don't have a weapon for the first 1/2 of the game, and even when you do it's very pitiful. And 'insanity' keeps you from being able to look at the object of fear.

Keep up the great work. I always enjoy reading your stuff!

Yeah, finally caved to

Yeah, finally caved to Richard's demands and played the game -- really glad I did.

I was going to talk a bit about Call of Cthulhu -- which I love -- but I held off because I was really thinking about doing a bigger Lovecraft games piece at some point. CoC would be a centerpiece in that article. You're completely right about it, though -- it does some very similar things.

Thanks for the comment -- and glad you enjoy reading the articles.

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