| Title | Amnesia: Rebirth will probably not launch as many screaming careers as the original |
| Author | Nick Diamon |
| Posted in | News |
| When | March 6, 2020 |
It’s a new Frictional Games title. Amnesia: Rebirth, despite the name, is not a reboot or HD remake of the original Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It’s a new horror tale in the Amnesia storyverse…
Dark Descent is one of my favorite horror games every. So intense. I actually had difficulties to go on in some places.
So yeah, hyped.
I hope they lean more heavily into world-building, atmosphere, tone, and so forth, and just ditch the stuff about having to reload to get past an indestructible monster whose patrol path you misread. It doesn’t look like that’s what’s going to happen.
Still, whatever the guys who made Soma are doing next, I’ll be there on day one.
-Tom
Out on October 20.
Just before Halloween. Twitchoween gonna be spooooooky.
What a pleasant surprise. After the considerable gap between the first reveal and the launch of Soma, I was expecting Frictional to follow a similar schedule here so I had tuned out a bit after the announcement. I’ll definitely be playing this on Halloween! :)
The first gameplay presentation is out alongside a decent preview feature on IGN that I’ve linked below:
“While the game will have a bunch of moment-to-moment scares, that is not the only level we are focusing on,” said Thomas Grip, creative director on Rebirth. “One crucial thing that we learned from SOMA was working with narrative pay-off on longer time spans. As the player plays more and more of the game, the deeper, longer-lasting dread will slowly creep up. Just like with SOMA we are taking quite a few risks here, but from what we have seen so far people who have tested it have come away deeply affected.”
“You really need to experience it yourself. The thing we are aiming for this time is thematically quite different from SOMA. Instead of SOMA’s grand post-human exploration, in Rebirth, it is closer to home and deals with the things we are willing to do for our loved ones.”
Looking good. I don’t really like watching horror movies (although I enjoy reading about them), and most horror novels really don’t do anything for me in the scares/dread department, sadly, but I like horror games…at least some of them. I never finished the original Amnesia (and spoiled myself on it later), but I remember it was pretty damn tense and had great atmosphere. This one ought to be good.
After reading this lengthy feature on Eurogamer, I think Rebirth will be the game I have to pickup this month. Just six days out from launch.
Rebirth, then, is essentially a culmination of all the studio’s learnings so far, and an attempt to address those perceived weaknesses with earlier games. “We’re trying to do what we did in Soma in terms of the overarching narrative,” says Grip, “but we’re trying to get back to better lower-level gameplay - which I feel we had in Amnesia - and then combining those two together to form a really coherent and nice package.”
I hope they pull the following goal off:
“I’m slightly annoyed by games where the story is, like, the notes you read,” Grip elaborates, “and I think the story should really be what you as the player are actually doing in the game. I don’t think that was a focus for the first Amnesia game very much, apart from, you know, running around and being scared by monsters, but now there’s a much bigger focus on the player character being an active force in how this story unfolds.”
I am gonna end up buying this and not playing it like the other Amnesia games, because they seem too scary.
Same here :-)
Rebirth’s available for pre-load on Steam (just 13GB) and the early reviews I’ve read are, for the most part, pretty positive outside of some complaints about scares wearing thin towards the end and slight jankiness.
So, did anyone buy it?
The fact no one has posted impressions here, and also in other forums I barely have heard any buzz apart from the review day, and in fact I have seen a few times comments of people surprised it’s a new game because with this title, they thought it was a remaster or something like that…
all together makes me think they have a dud in their hands, sales wise. Which is worrying, because I remember they weren’t very happy with Soma sales, relative to the long development of the game.
I played the opening, but it didn’t grab me like Soma. I couldn’t really bring myself to care about any of the characters or the premise. I also didn’t really care to explore caves. The only thing worse would have been sewers.
But I didn’t get very far, so…
-Tom
I’ve been meaning to check it out, but it’s just been a bit back in the queue. Also, Hades. But now that I think I’m going to give up on Pathologic 2, I might hop over to that while I’m still in a Halloween-ish mood.
Yeah, it seems to be taking longer to get going than SOMA did, although IIRC, SOMA had a bit of a slow opening as well, just not this slow.
But those caves; wow, I thought I’d never get out of there. I don’t think you can really get lost in there, but it sure felt like I was a couple of times. I guess my advice would be: When in doubt, just forge ahead, and use your amulet. It not only opens portals, but is a direction-finder as well.
Once you’re well into the caves (saying any more would be spoiler-ish), the suspense begins to ramp up considerably, to the point where I nearly couldn’t take it, but that’s probably just me. I tried to conserve on my matches (you don’t get an actual lantern until the end of the caves), which resulted in my toppling off a cliff, which amazingly didn’t kill me, or even injure me, near I can tell. Which is fine. At that point I was making progress and didn’t feel like dealing with any setbacks.
I’m an explorative sort of gamer, so I’d say I was in those caves roughly an hour. At first I thought I was going to hate that section, but it got quite interesting toward the end, even though I don’t really know what’s going on yet. But yeah, by the end, I was very ready to come out into the daylight.
And once that happened, the game is looking quite beautiful again, and looks like it’s going to keep getting more interesting. I’m thinking this is structured a bit like a “SOMA-in-the-desert”, gameplay-wise. Story-wise though? It’s far too soon to tell. I’m really hoping they pull it off. I have yet to read any reviews, and I must say that it’s been kind of fun going into a game blind, not really knowing anything about it. I rarely do that, and it happened here by accident, because I just found out about the game’s existence only a week or so before it released, so avoiding reviews was pretty easy.
My impressions. I’m at… near the half of the game? Beyond the half point? More than 4 hours played at least.
I remember reading some interview where the devs said they tried to do a mix of Soma and Amnesia, taking the best of both parts, the stronger narrative focus of Soma with the atmosphere of Amnesia.
And while I don’t agree it’s the best game done by mixing their two previous games, I can totally see how it’s exactly the mix they referred to. It has indeed a more focused story with a pair of clear plot threads to follow, with mysteries that tease the player, while the gameplay itself is wholly lifted from Amnesia Dark Descent.
And well, I’m not sure that second point is good. Man, I liked Amnesia a lot, but now I notice how dependent it was of being a novelty and not knowing the tricks it uses. It’s funny, because as I said before, the game title is super bad if only because I’ve seen son many times people believing it’s a remaster or remake, but in a way, it IS a bit of a remake because how similar it is.
Again the oil and matches economy.
Again it’s all for nothing because you can see in pure darkness thanks to a blue tint that appears, in fact a few times you see better that way!
Again the same adventure sequences/puzzles interacting with objects, and the same scripted moments running away from things.
Again the game trying to fool you with hint messages like ‘crouch to be silent’ when you hear something (no enemies appear the firs two times is used)
Again trying to fool you talking of recovering your sanity and avoiding darkness, but truly it seems there is really no game over condition with insanity and you recover at specific points.
So what remains of interest is the story, that well, it is decent-ish but nothing super spectacular. It’s all told by audiologs/notes as usual, and the character are flimsy (you forget about your beloved husband super fast!) There are a pair of mysteries going on that propel the drive to go forward for the player, I’m at a point where the story turns about ancient otherwordly (alien? our ancestors?) civilizations with magitech that were in contact with the romans/egyptians.