How Amnesia: The Dark Descent Tricked Players Into Scaring Themselves

[Seth2492]

Honestly I wouldn't really hold Amnesia and SOMA together in the same light. They're both horror games but they do horror in completely different ways.

In Amnesia you walked around in pitch blackness constantly hearing sounds from further within the mansion, dreading to light a candle or your lantern since the monster could appear at any time and go boogaboogaboo. The thing about Amnesia is that once you see the monster the effect kinda wears off; you know what it looks like now so it's not as scary seeing it again (though the water "monster" is still spooky since it has no physical body - it just is). Also Frictional modeled a guy with a dick so it's truly the scariest horror game ever.

SOMA, in my opinion at least, is a more effective horror game since the entire story is meant to fill you with an existential dread as your character has to come to terms with being a copy of a man who died long ago, and the questions of morality when interacting with the "surviving" crew. The nice thing about SOMA is that the few monsters you do encounter behave differently from each other, and have a different visual style so the sense you got with Amnesia is lessened in turn when you don't know what new monster you might see.

[Bread_Baron]

I disagree because navigating around the monsters is fun and serves the narrative by making you experience just how horrendous things have gotten, like reading all of Terry Akers' messages and then having to hide as his proxy tries to hook you up to the WAU. I've seen a few people say that hiding from the monsters makes exploration difficult but the only time I found that true was trying to use terminals in Tau as Jin Yoshida was hot on my tail.Other than that the monsters complement the story very nicely and never significantly effect the pacing between story chatter.

Overall I'd say SOMA is designed to be a lot less scary than Amnesia for the sake of the narrative, and that's down to the protagonists. In Amnesia, Daniel is always panting and going insane and you're utterly alone for the most part, whereas in SOMA Simon and Catherine are pretty unfazed by the monsters and have good banter while they're getting on with things, so the player is encouraged to feel the same way.

[Murk]

I've never been much into horror games but I kind of stumbled into one when playing Thief: Deadly shadows.

Turned out that Robbing the Cradle is actually kind of a big deal as far as horror goes. Which is pretty nice to hear because it wasn't exactly very relaxing. And once the lights are on it gets a lot worse.

[Barnek]

The dialogues and the moral choices are handled to the player really well. Play it for the story.
In my opinion it would go perfectly even without monsters since some parts of the game feels like a movie.

As said before if you like to slow down and derail to read the notes there is a Safe Mode to dumb down the ai a bit and not be pressured by monsters that much, but it can kill a bit of the expectative in your first time.