![]() ![]() ![]() And if you spend too long in darkness, you’ll start to lose your marbles that way, too. Oh, and if you look at what’s chasing you for too long, you start to lose your sanity, the screen warping as you slowly lose your grip on reality. There’s no means to fight back, and your only means of preservation is hiding and hoping that the ‘thing’ that keeps following you goes away, or simply turning tail and praying you escape with your life. You awaken with a bout of – you guessed it, the forgetsies – in a spooky old castle, where creatures made of flesh and shadow are relentlessly hunting you. Many of its most recognisable attributes have been reused countless times in the last decade – specifically that first-person view with a focus on running, hiding and uncontrollable sobbing – but as familiar as it might seem, it’s how Amnesia rarely over-complicates itself that really makes it a winner. It might have been made on a budget for an old generation of hardware, but time hasn’t dulled the potency of its scares.Ĭollecting together The Dark Descent, its Justine DLC and its sequel-of-sorts A Machine for Pigs, Amnesia: Collection is still one of the best examples of how to freak out a player with shadows, a perpetual sense of vulnerability and a growing air of dread. And with so many great (and a fair few not so great) horror games on Nintendo Switch, it’s fitting a game that was siloed away on PC for so long should join the ranks of portable fear. It’s the game that helped put the 'Let’s Play' format on the map, and while the series has long been showing its age – the original game is almost a decade old, and you can really tell – it’s still one of the most unsettling franchises you can play. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is one of those games part of a very select club that not only redefined the genre in video game form, but established a template that many would imitate (and most would fail to surpass). There are countless films, books and TV shows out there that claim to conjure blood-curdling chills, but very few of them really stay with you, like a splinter burrowing beneath the skin. Anyone can throw together enough blood, guts and gore to make a butcher green at the gills, but proper, unsettling terror is a rare thing indeed. Pure horror games like Amnesia are becoming increasingly rare, and what really scares us is the thought that The Dark Descent will never be bettered.Horror isn’t easy. What would be even better is some hint as to what new game they’re working on, as they apparently have two secret projects underway and it’s now four years since SOMA first came out. We’d still definitely recommend the collection as a whole though, and hopefully this means Frictional’s more recent, but otherwise unrelated, sci-fi horror SOMA will also be coming to Switch eventually. In that sense it’s still an acceptable sequel, even if on its own merits it’s not a particularly good game. In terms of horror though A Machine For Pigs is still extremely effective, and understands that your mind will create imagined details far more horrible than anything it could actually show. Ditching most of the puzzles and not having to worry about the oil supply in your lantern is one thing, but A Machine For Pigs even gets rid of the sanity meter, which seems… insane. But in a video game that’s a problem, because it means that much of the actual act of playing the game isn’t much fun. The Dark Descent is all about the journey, while A Machine For Pigs is more concerned with ensuring the destination is worth reaching. Starfield planets were purposefully designed to be ‘boring’ says Bethesda A very scary walking simulator, with a much more involved storyline than the original, but still a game with very little in the way of actual gameplay. And true to form they stripped out almost all the gameplay from the original and turned it into a walking simulator. Frictional only played the role of overseer for the follow-up, and instead it was developed by Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture creators The Chinese Room. What is more disappointing than ever though is A Machine For Pigs. And it’s great that Frictional has also included the oft-forgotten DLC, which follows a completely different protagonist and scenario. But despite these problems, and the obviously aged graphics, its power is largely undiminished on Switch. The Dark Descent was never perfect – the voice-acting is mediocre and the ending was doomed never to be satisfying, since the game is much more interesting when you’re inventing your own theories as to what is going on. Amnesia: Collection (NS) – it’s not what you see but what you think you see ![]()
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