Amnesia: The Dark Descent

For about the first 4 or 5 hours, this game is really great. It's tense, atmospheric, scary, interesting, well designed, fun to play... so why then did I stop playing and never finish it? Because I died. I was searching a room, when I heard something getting closer. I was in water and knew it could find me if I was in the water, so I tried jumping up onto something that was in front of me. But for some reason I couldn't. I tried jumping up onto another nearby object. Nope, can't do that either. I heard it getting closer. I was panicking trying to climb up onto ANY nearby object, that for mystical reasons were not scalable. And right as I was in the middle of yelling at my screen in frustration, it got me, and I was bumped back to the loading screen. Oh right, it's just a game. That's all that was ever going to happen. Reload. Oh there are strategically placed, specific boxes along the hallway that I'm supposed to jump onto. Because it's a game, and that's how the designers want me to play, I guess. I'll just jump onto them as they're conveniently placed. What is there to even be afraid of? I'm not hiding from an otherwordly entity, I'm solving a platform puzzle, because it's a game. Oh I ran out of boxes? I need to run and close the doors behind me? Well if that's what the designers want me to do, I have to do it. Hmm, there's a lot of scary sounds, and heart pumping, but I know that if I just run and close the doors I'll be fine because I'm not actually running away from anything, I'm just in an interactive cut scene, doing what the designers want me to do. Once the veil was pulled, I couldn't get back into it. Far too much of the game is built upon these arbitrary limitations to player agency, and once I saw the strings being pulled, it ceased to be scary and just became annoying.

more than a game, it is Fear itself ! play it if you dare, play it if you want to be scared. but don't if you are here for challenge.

I tried playing this game on stream, and encountered several critical problems, one of which eventually made me stop playing. 1. "Continue game" causes the game to just crash in all circumstances. 2. A room somewhat filled with water would crash my game after staying in it for short while. Only way to fix this was to adjust graphics settings. 3. The rightmost gear in the machine room permanently disappeared and I was unable to progress. This wasted hours of my time and eventually I chose to ragequit. Both problems 2 and 3 have been reported by other people according to Google searches, and should've been patched long ago, or better yet, been found during playtesting. Up to the point I got, the game was OK, but not overly memorable either. There were a few mildly interesting plot points, but without playing the rest of the game, I can't say whether those plot points are adequately developed, or just silly bits of meaningless intrigue, to try to pretend that the game has some semblance of a story.

This is mainly a review for Frictional (Fraudulent) Games. There's a bug that made one of the cogs disappear, effectively ruining the game. I contacted you people and was told support is closed for this title. Absolutely disgusting service.

Great game!