first things first:
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH OH GOD WHY WHY LORD THE HORROR MAKE IT STOP
Amnesia: The Dark Descent is possibly the single most terrifying game I have played in my entire life, and I have played a good number of horror games. It is a game that is impossible to play alone, because it will simply kill you. So I did the most logical thing, and played with a group. There were four of us in total, and only one of us had the balls to play, and I am not ashamed to say it was NOT me. We played for almost two hours, and it was the most gut-wrenching, intimidating, and traumatizing hour and 45 minutes of my life (given, I live a fairly white-collar existence). The four of us all coped in our own unique ways, Teddy (the player) often paused to weep. Jon just wept. Avery, one of the most cool-headed and logically-minded people I've ever met, remained silent and frozen in fear. I gave the occasional yelp, and spent the majority of the time in a cowering position.
Now, in my experience, there are 3 types of horror games: the games where something jumps out at you around every corner; the games where several corners go by in which nothing jumps out at you, and then once you get nervous something jumps; and finally the games where every corner they build it up to something jumping at you, but nothing does. Occasionally you'll see something, but it will disappear as opposed to come for you. It gets to the point where you almost start hoping for things to come at you, so you can be sure it's actually there. Amnesia is the third type of game. It is, for starters, one of the darkest games I've ever played, speaking in terms of brightness. There are two methods of illumination in the game, torches and your lantern. Torches require tinderboxes to light, which you have to find around the game, and your lantern requires oil, which runs out at a decent speed and refills are much more scarce than tinderboxes. Even with these, the areas of light they create are limited, and most of the game is almost of completely dark.
The plot of the game is rather vague. Your character, named Daniel, awakes in a hallway with amnesia (hence the title of the game). The story is delivered entirely through occasional auditory flashbacks and journal pages you find scattered across the game, which thankfully go in chronological order.
Did I mention the zombies? Because there are zombies. Amnesia is not one of those zombie games where there will be hordes of zombies, or even small crowds. The zombies are always alone, and the encounters are spaced out. Mainly because you have no weapons. You entirely lack the ability of combat. You can run, and you can hide, and to be perfectly honest you aren't even very good at those. Zombies of course have the nasty habit of making their appearances right after you solve a puzzle, however this doesn't rule out the dreaded random encounter. You'll just be going about your business, and you'll catch a glimpse of a form at the end of a hallway, or nearby in a side-room, or, in one extreme case, directly behind you, the direct result of which was our quitting. After one puzzle, we were congratulated by a violent knocking on the only door out of the room, followed shortly by the sound of smashing wood, and finally our death. Good times.
The zombies aren't so bad. Amnesia's true terror doesn't lie in what you see. It lies in what you don't see, and what you hear. Darkness, and absolute silence, punctuated only by disturbing moans and screams, and disconcerting dialogue through either flashbacks or characters who you can never seem to find. To give you a feel for what it's like, it will get to the point where the zombies are the least scary thing there is.
The game also features a sanity meter. Sanity affects you're vision and the control you have over your character. Your sanity decreases slowly as you spend time in the dark, and more rapidly when faced with monsters, including but not (to my knowledge) limited to the zombies. As sanity decreases, the controls will get shakier and your vision will blur, both of which can become extreme and drastically inhibit game-play. You can regenerate sanity by solving puzzles.
All in all, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is an absolutely fulfilling game that will stick with you, even after playing. We called it quits about a half-hour ago, and Avery is playing Mario Party while Teddy goes back and forth between that and functioning as my editor. Mainly my editor, simply because Mario Party seemed to be too much of a challenge for him. Jon has left himself to dividing his time between watching the game and watching me write. The Mario Party came about as it seemed the only appropriate way to counteract the pure residual terror left over from our experience with Amnesia. It has been QUITE the evening.
tl;dr:
Gameplay: 8.5/10
Presentation: 10/10
Graphics: 7/10
Sound: 9/10
Overall: 9/10
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