A mask might have a smile on it, but underneath the person could be filled with homicidal rage. The main reason is because they obscure essential body language that we use to determine a person’s attitude and danger level. A person? A monster? It doesn’t know so it starts sending a fear response in case of emergency. Suddenly it can’t tell what it’s looking at anymore. The reason is that your brain thinks it’s looking at a person’s face when it looks at the doll, but then it realizes that the eyes are wrong. We all know that dolls don’t actually come alive and kill people a la Chucky, but you can still feel a little weirded out by a particularly life-like doll, that has, say, completely black eyes. Both are objects commonly referred to as creepy, things that people feel vaguely unsettled by. The essence of what people commonly call “creepiness” is actually your brain feeling confused and uncertain. Your brain can’t tell, so it sends an alarm out, telling your body to ready to fight or flight. Maybe it’s a flesh-eating abomination unto God. Maybe it’s just a mentally handicapped cripple, trying to call for help. The thing is, you don’t know what this creature is. You can’t really see it in the gloom, but you know that whatever it is, it isn’t human. It looks vaguely humanoid, but the proportions are all wrong. Then a hunched figure slowly hobbles into your field of vision. You are in the cellar, and you just hear this eerie moan. The first time you play, you have no idea what these things are. But it’s the monsters that are truly terrifying. The castle, the experiments, even yourself, are all a mystery. Throughout the game, you are faced with the unknown.

Lovecraft famously wrote in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” that “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” This is what Amnesia really captured, and it’s something that no other game has so successfully conveyed since, in my humble opinion. The main reason that the game is scary is because it presents you with the unknown. But I would still say that all these things only assist the game in being frightening, but are not actually the core reasons that it is. The game also had suspenseful music, great pacing between safe hub-like areas and dangerous areas, and good (for the time) graphics. So that’s a good start, but doesn’t inherently make the game scary. When you play the game, you immediately feel the sense of vulnerability. Just looking at them will kill you eventually. It did not give you any weapons or traps or any other means of fighting the creatures. It made you, as the player, totally defenseless. Playing in the dark, alone, with headphones, I actually had to take frequent breaks because I was getting so stressed out by the experience!Īmnesia had a unique style of gameplay that has since been dulled by legions of imitators ( Outlast, Layers of Fear, etc.), but at the time it was a huge departure from other games. And a lot of people (myself included) did find this game very intense and nerve-wracking. It’s faded a bit now, but in it’s time Amnesia was considered the ultimate scary game, a game that would leave you shivering in fear. What i really want to talk about is Amnesia as a “scary” game. the “let’s go into the basement” cliche.īUT, The game starts to get interesting as you head down into the castle. Admittedly, this is a really cliched beginning. With the door to the outside inexplicably locked (but it’s unlocked at the end of the game?), he heads down into the depths of the castle to unveil the mystery. In Amnesia, we take the role of Daniel, who awakens in a crumbling nineteenth century with no memory of how he got there. That’s a shame because Amnesia is actually a very well designed game that succeeded in translating many difficult concepts into a “fun”, interesting game. An absolute swarm of these things came out in the wake of Amnesia, and I think it kind of left a bad taste in the mouths of serious gamers.

There’s a good chance that the main thing that you associate Amnesia with is letsplays and reaction videos on Youtube.

Dark descent game