Many details are open to interpretation and yet open a wiki, and you’ll be assaulted with a hundred clarifications and intriguing lore. What I assumed would just be a narrative device, and musical callbacks in common actually builds a rich universe with The Dark Descent despite being officially ‘standalone.’ It’s the kind of world that has tiers of understanding. What might be surprising to many just looking at it is how direct a sequel this really is. Sometimes this even includes picking up an item or stumbling upon something off the beaten path. Periodically you’ll be interrupted by flashbacks, only this time you’re much more cleverly dynamically afforded them the moment you see something notable. If you’ve played The Dark Descent before you’ll know a bit of how this works. It’s soon revealed she’s mysteriously retracing her own steps past the Kasbah walls, caves, and oases. You play as Anastasie “Taxi” Trianon, an engineering drafter who wakes up alone in a plane with amnesia, of course, and an unknown affliction after she, her husband, and team crash land in the desert on their way to colonial French Sudan. The way it challenges your expectations of the environment means a lot of rich textual discourse will come out of Rebirth’s narrative, I hope. The way it threads grounded, personal stories with the more spectacular to find meaning is frankly unparalleled. It allows you to draw implications naturally yourself between its parallel stories. Rebirth thrives on its themes of pain and empire. Was there anything it could explore as fundamental as the existential horror of that underwater pilgrimage? Yes, surprisingly. The big question for me was what post-SOMA Amnesia narrative would look like. It’s not only the first time it’s been done, but with competition, I think it would still rank the best. It introduces a surprising mechanic that is surely a first for games and gives proceedings an emotional centre of mass rarely seen. The most interesting aspect of Rebirth is revealed early on in the story, but I think I’ll keep tight-lipped about it regardless. It’s much easier to use such an environment to amplify feelings of isolation. There’s certainly a tease with a one-off mechanic of having to seek the shade to escape the sun’s glare that they’d plumb the depths of this environment of its horror, but it’s hard to convey the horrors of searing heat on your skin and dehydration. It doesn’t last long of course, but Rebirth uses the promise of a return to brilliant light to better pace proceedings with moments of respite. You know this the moment you step out of a plane wreckage into the blinding, bullying sun of the Algerian desert instead of a dark, claustrophobic corridor that is the mainstay of all horror games now. Still, it’s actually how its narrative plays out with an absurdist scenario that is fundamentally as beautiful as it is horrifying that makes it leaps and bounds better than almost anything else out there for me. Enough has been said about its existential horror. I’ve played it over two dozen times, and I find it intoxicating each and every time. I wouldn’t hesitate to call 2015’s SOMA my pick for all-time favourite. The natural question is ‘how has Amnesia been ‘rebirthed’ for 2020?’ I knew in my bones that at least part of the answer would be that it’s rebirthed in SOMA’s image, Frictional’s mid-decade release revelation. Those nights of playing The Dark Descent as the only Steam game in my library on a Macbook Air 2011 and trackpad are well and truly behind me. is becoming an old hat horror influence now. Well, time has seen fit to transplant us all into 2020 where even P.T. Call that a second horror legacy, if you will. Not only do we owe a decade of first-person horror innovation to the landmark release, but you could say the whole modern landscape of YouTube and streaming entertainment evolved from the protozoa of user reactions to the game. Scratch that, they are – I’ve read the interviews. It’s been over a decade since Amnesia: The Dark Descent had us castle rambling and light source scrambling, and Frictional Games must be intimately aware of the horror legacy they birthed in 2010.
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