I recently played through Amnesia: Rebirth as my customary october horror game, and came away from it with a mix of positive, and bittersweet feelings. It's a game that does many things right, but that also has some major missteps that bring the whole experience down considerably.

Some spoilers ahead, but mainly about mechanics.

You play as Tasi Triannon, a pregnant woman trying to find her way through abandoned desert settlements after surviving a plane crash in Algeria. Needless to say, she's not as alone in these ruins as it first appears.

Already a big positive I want to point out, is how effective playing as a pregnant woman ends up being for a horror game. Not only does that make you feel extra vulnerable, it also adds a very good diagetic incentive to avoid taking damage/doing reckless things, since you could be hurting your baby. As we don't actually feel the pain our main characters feel in games, there's often a disconnect between player and character when it comes to being averse to taking damage. Worrying more about the baby, however, is very effective at bringing our mindset in line with Tasi's. We may not feel pain as she does, but we can all worry for her baby as she does, even if not to the same degree.

Moving on to enemy design, some of the monster encounters, especially the early ones where the creature can crawl out of the walls without much warning, are fantastic at building tension. You never have a clear idea of where the monster is, nor where it will be in two seconds. This leads to you never really feeling safe anywhere, which is very desirable for a horror experience.

This unpredictability in enemy design goes directly against the trend of some of it's horror contemporaries, such as Alien: Isolation and Outlast 2, which all went out of their way to give you a direct way of telling exactly where the enemy was, with their Alien Radar, or Camera Audio mechanics. Amnesia's approach is, in my opinion, much scarier for omitting that.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think removing those features would've been a good idea for those games, since it would've made their stealth much too hard, and raised player frustration to a degree where the whole experience stops being scary and instead turns to annoying.

Amnesia: Rebirth thankfully doesn't have to worry about that, for a few reasons, the major one being because the amount of time the monsters spend directly after you is drastically reduced.

In both of the previously mentioned games, having enemies on your tail was pretty much a routine occurrence. They would always jump at you, always search for you everywhere, and were overall always present as a factor for you to contend with.

In Amnesia, however, while moments like those are present, they are exeedingly rare, and are instead pulled out as more of a sucker punch, instead of as a core part of the gameplay loop.

The way your HP works in the game reinforces this idea. While having the enemy in your peripheral vision is a core part of those other games, it literally damages you in this one.

The HP in this game is linked to the fear level your character feels. This means doing anything that scares Tasi will lead to her taking damage, and this includes being in the dark, looking at the monsters, having the monsters be near you, getting caught by them, etc.

Not only does this system reinforce the idea that monsters being near you is not something to take lightly, it also allows the developers to sparsely use monsters, since the dark itself can be seen as an enemy. And indeed, the dark is what you spend most of your time contending with in Amnesia: Rebirth. This, however, is more of a mixed bag.

Your main way to combat the darkness is with certain limited resources, namely matches to light torches on the walls, and a lantern that burns oil to work. This means you have to manage when to use those items, and which of them to use as well.

This resource management is at it's best in the more puzzly sections of the game, where you're walking around in an interconnected set of areas, trying to figure out where certain items are, or where some equipment you need to use is, etc. It feels very tense to see your resources dwindle with areas still left to explore, so you have to think very carefully about which items you use. Will you be returning to this area often? If you think so, maybe it's best to use your matches to light torches. If not, maybe it's better to use your lantern and burn a bit of it's oil. If you're particularly low on both, it could even be better to just tank the damage and terryfying sounds that come with being in the dark, and run through an area quickly, praying nothing is around to hear you. It sounds simple, but goes a long way to build tension in those moments.

Where the whole system falls apart, however, is at the more linear sections of the game.

Having to handle the darkness in a simple series of corridors you have to go through becomes boring very quickly. Since you won't be going back to any of these areas, the decision making process of which item to use gets reduced to a very simple "just use whatever you have more of", with the goal of not being out of either one the next time you come across an actual puzzle section, where you'd ideally have both.

With this in mind, it's very unfortunate that you spend about as much time in the game in those linear sections, than you do in the puzzle ones. In my opinion, they dragged down the whole experience a lot, especially in the final third of the game, where they're more prevalent.

Sadly, that's not the only flaw that seeps into this final third, and this next one is an even bigger problem; the game's biggest, in fact: a sharp turn in it's enemy design, to something much worse.

Gone are the monsters that crawl out the walls of claustrophobic environments that we've been dealing with up to this point. Now, instead, we have to deal with the Watchers, a bunch of flying monsters with outlined cone visions for you to avoid.

Not only does the switch to this creature as the main enemy type eliminate the scariness of the previously mentioned unpredictability in encounters, it also falls back to the same gameplay loop a lot of other horror games use. Here's an area, here are a few enemies in more or less known locations, stealth past them. This game's main distinguishing concept with enemy design, pretty much gone.

Their outlined cone vision strikes me as particularly uninspired, since having such clear outlines not only makes them less scary, it also makes them way too "mechanic", if you will. Too "gamey". It takes your focus away from being immersed, and instead points it at overcoming a challenge, with clear, defined rules. It puts you into "problem solving mode". This is a bizarre thing for this game to mess up, given the lengths it goes through to avoid this kind of thing in other aspects. Hell, the first thing the game tells you when you hit New Game, is "This game should not be played to win. Immerse yourself in the world and the story.".

This issue of "problem solving mode" is a very integral challenge of making any horror game, since immersion is always such a big part of those experiences. Many aspects of a game can trigger this mode of thinking, not just the enemy design. In fact, the most common one is a game's difficulty balancing.

Did you ever find yourself playing through a horror game, and came across some really difficult section where you kept dying, and felt that with each death, it was a bit less scary? I put forth that this happens because your brain switched from immersion mode, to problem solving mode. You're no longer worried about surviving a harrowing experience in the shoes of your main character, instead, you're trying to figure out consistent rules in a software, trying to min-max your way to progress.

Of course, designers can't just make their horror games super easy to avoid this, since that creates a new problem, of a lack of tension, so the only answer is to try to strike a balance.

The features of Alien Radar in Alien: Isolation, and Camera Audio in Outlast 2, that I talked about earlier, are both designed specifically to help achieve this balance.

As I said earlier, Amnesia: Rebirth didn't have to add something like this "for a few reasons". The first one was it's sparse use of monsters, but the one I've omitted, was it's checkpoint system.

In this game, "death" is contextualized as Tasi going crazy and letting the darkness consume and control her for a while. Meaning she doesn't actually die, just gets possessed and wanders off somewhere else in the level. This allows them to respawn you past whatever thing killed you, or at least close to your goal, to avoid you repeatedly dying at one area, and resorting to min-maxing the segment. The enemy that killed you often gets moved elsewhere as well. It's a very effective system.

But it doesn't stop there. The way the game displays your HP also seems to be in place precisely to reduce the issue of "problem solving mode". Instead of having a visible HP meter, like the one that could be found in The Dark Descent, you instead gauge Tasi's fear level by the dark tendrils at the edge of the screen, similar to the bloody screen concept used by so many FPS games. The fuzziness around it means you're never quite sure how much HP Tasi has left, and therefore can't try to min-max it, or otherwise treat it as a consistent measure for you to game.

All of these systems are nothing short of genius, in my opinion, all very elegant solutions to combat this issue. With this amount of care put into all these aspects of the game, it hurts even more to see the entire final third of it populated by an enemy that only exacerbates the exact issue they tried so hard to avoid in other areas.

This is why the word "bittersweet" was the one I used in the beginning. This game nails so many things other horror games struggle with, to the extent I do not exaggerate when I say it could've been genre defining. Sadly, it has so many flaws that deeply permeate it, for so much of the playtime, that I can't even call it great without qualifying it.

This is about all I have to say on Amnesia: Rebirth. I have some other issues I could talk about with it's story, namely it's overuse of diversions, but this write up is long enough as it is. If you read this up to this point, I sincerely thank you, and hope you got something out of it. I certainly had great fun writing it.