Then again, Mirror's Edge also gave you the option of fighting instead of running. Amnesia doesn't, which is one of the bigger reasons why it's the scariest game I've played in years.
Amnesia's also unusual for a horror game, which as a genre tends to put horror first, panic second, creepiness third and the actual game fourth. With Amnesia, you're also getting an engaging first-person adventure game that could have stood by itself had developer Frictional Games chosen to go that way.
It takes balls to do a horror game right. There's a reason that out of all the recent high-profile horror games of late, Dead Space and F.E.A.R. 2 gave you enough weaponry to level whole buildings, Resident Evil 5 and Siren: Blood Curse traded some of their series' spookiness for more gung-ho action and Alone In The Dark featured ludicrously overblown stunt sequences . Scaring players is about more than inserting jumpy moments and a quivering string soundtrack into a level lit like a seedy club. It's about a lack of empowerment and control, which is enough of an acquired taste that none of the big publishers will fund it.
Still, fans of horror gaming should definitely have Amnesia: The Dark Descent in their lives. It's a brave experiment in the genre, a more solid package than the Penumbra games and stops at nothing to make you truly, deeply uncomfortable. And after a hard day at school or the office, isn't that all we really want?
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