How Amnesia: The Dark Descent Tricked Players Into Scaring Themselves - Videos for the 97.4%

https://youtu.be/sMl2la8-3-o

I always thought Penumbra Overture/Black Plague was scarier than Dark Decent tbh

Amnesia is great for pure horror, but Soma by far had the better story. I've never played another game that left me as... Empty, sad, and just generally fucked up as the ending of Soma.

Imagine a horror game like this one with its great atmosphere, and the developers gives you some options at the start of the game: Monsters ON Monsters OFF Monsters WHO KNOWS It would enhance the the atmosphere so big it'd make you paranoid.

Nah, it's a horror game. Your options are: Monsters SOME Monsters AS I LIKE IT

Amnesia was lightning in a fucking bottle, it came out at the exact perfect time for itself and shaped a lot of how the current gaming 'scene' on the internet works; at least indirectly. Coming out right at the dawn of face-cams... scarecams... the birth of pewdiepie... I don't even think other indie games like Undertale can compare to the butterfly effect this game exuded.

While it was good, I kinda broke the immersion when I found out breaking sight of the monster with something in front of you works to make him go away.

That's up to anyone's tastes. SOMA scared way more than Penumbra, because SOMA is extremely gloomy in its themes and story while Penumbra is a more generic horror game with implied horror, jumpscares and spooky monsters. Amnesia followed the same formula as Penumbra but did everything better.

Penumbra 1 & 2 for its pure tension and puzzles Amnesia for its atmosphere and mechanics and Soma for both its aesthetic and lore

I remember the ancient gaming times when Frictional just announced Amnesia and me patiently waiting for it to get done due to me enjoying their previous titles, and eventually come out it did.

I never found Amnesia scary at all, the sanity mechanic broke my immersion about ten minutes in, I burst out laughing at it and couldn't take the game seriously since I hadn't even met the monster yet, there was just a scripted jumpscare with a gust of wind knocking down a piano's keylid, which made the protagonist have a mild panic attack, hyperventilating and his vision blurring for about thirty seconds until his sanity regenerated The gap between my "argh what was that, oh a jumpscare it's fine" and his reaction was so big it made the whole situation hilarious, and the game was never scary again

It was still a very atmospheric and suspenseful experience though. The game would probably be much scarier if the monsters had much less of a warning and if the game had no definitive safe spots or the association that light meant safety.

monsters on - mediocre monster spawn rates monsters off - nightmare mode monsters who knows - switches last two options randomly for max unpredictable spookiness

monsters on: "default" monster spawning, you get chased at scripted times, random roamers spawn as planned monsters off: no monster spawns, sound design and scene lighting manipulation goes into overdrive to turn the environment effects from spooky to actively hostile to you monsters who knows: randomizer, any monster can spawn anywhere anytime

I don't know about scarier but I will say the Penumbra games are superior over Amnesia overall.

Penumbra has trickier puzzles and an immediate need for escape by way of various enemy types. It has a more old school, classical sense of video game puzzle solving, using either unlogic or open-eyed thinking. Amnesia's hiding mechanic feels tame and dull to me. I hate the idea of 'patience' instead of 'out-thinking' your enemy in a game. Amnesia mostly uses very simple logic and physics/obstacle at times.

These are the reasons why I enjoyed Penumbra more as well yeah. Don't get me wrong Amnesia was great too and it definitely was an engaging horror experience when it came out, but I really enjoyed the overall pacing and gameplay of Penumbra more with its mixture of adventure style puzzles and physics/logical puzzles wrapped around its sci-fi horror.

This is only semi related but I was playing Thief: The Dark Project recently and I got to the later "horror" portion of the games and it struck me how much it reminded me of playing penumbra or amnesia. I guess it's mostly due to thief being a stealth game but the sound design + running away from a certain enemy is very much the same feeling I got as when I played amnesia, and the game relies heavily on ambience to make you feel uneasy when there's no actual threat around.

Thief Dark Project is low key one of the best horror games I've ever played. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNSh-MJRwAA

I remember being 11-12 years old with a broken leg and stuck with a laptop and gaming magazines , on one CD they had the penumbra black plague demo and I decided to play it. After finishing some puzzles and being extremely on edge the fucking zombie came looking for me , I saw it and almost shat my pants , stopped the game and uninstalled. I also think penumbra is scarier but I didn't give it another chance after that :v , I did manage to finish amnesia though but that was years later.

You're probably right, Soma was very well-written but I would like to say that Amnesia: TDD was an incredibly well written game aswell and portrayed it's themes perfectly throughout the game. The way in which it is revealed piece by piece why Danial drank the amnesia potion. It really managed to get under my skin and tells a more or less subtle story about becoming a monster.

The first Penumbra is scary because they actually give you the means to defend yourself, so when you encounter enemies you're not sure if you should try to fight them or run away. When they take away your ability to fight you know you have no choice but to run, and to me that removes a lot of the tension.

how is it that these games seem to have the best ways to do horror?

I miss the days when a completely unrelated "upbeat" game would throw in some unnerving stuff. The video you quoted reminds me of Turok 2 and that had a similar kind of effect as Thief. One second you're shooting bipedal dinosaurs in a bright and sunny elf city and the next second you step into a save-point portal and this happens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOEF3gDVB38

those voices started giving me the heebie jeebies Half Life 1 freaked me out a bit aswell with the alien body horror towards the end

because they got competent people to do this back in old days it wasn't a rare to see developers know for game genre X to do games from other genres (like Westwood doing FPS or RPG, or Volition doing RPG), they got people on the deck who likes stuff and put it in the games

And I think simplicity really is what is missing nowadays. Starting with the fact that nowadays, everything seems hollywood levels of horror, instead of something like the examples above.

an anyone recommend a good SOMA playthrough? I'm way too scaredy to actually play it

There's a safe mode in the current versions. The monsters are still there but they're non-aggressive, and will only attack you if you deliberately get up close and personal with them, and even then will ignore you again after a while. It's still scary (can be a bit more unnerving even) but at the very least you won't have to worry about being actively hunted down, hide between exploration sessions and repeat parts. I think this is the most optimal way to play it too considering how narrative-driven it is.

I need to give the game another try. I personally found the monsters to actively drag down my experience of the game. I was hugely invested in the story, but the monsters just slowed the game to a crawl and deflated all interest in the game I had. This was before they added the options to disable the monsters. For that matter, I had very much the same response to Amnesia: The Dark Descent. At least George (what I called the monster) was trivially easy to hide from, and didn't take too long before he fucked off so I could continue exploring the mansion, soaking up the visual storytelling, and learning more about the protagonist's history with the mansion and its owner. Horror games aren't really the best medium for me, because I often find the horror parts of the games the least interesting.