Episode 101 - The Chair Scare - Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Some podcasts mustn’t be forgotten. It’s Halloween season! Every year we put out our bowl of candy for all our podcast listeners, so thank you for joining us again this year and I’m glad to see so many of you are wearing costumes! For our first Halloween episode here on the main podcast, we’re going to be talking about Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the game that effectively resurrected horror games in terms of public perception. And the expected mechanics of the genre, honestly. Amnesia came out in 2010, and the Resident Evil 4 effect was in full swing, with very few survival horror games releasing and mostly not abiding by the methodical gameplay and anemic resources of genre games of the older generations. Amnesia, however, came from a team who had been making horror games for several years in which you were mostly helpless against those who sought to do you harm, and that ethos, as well as an expanded budget, are what really made this game take off. The game spikes that lack of agency in action with a narrative that by design forces both you and your player character to learn the specifics of your predicament as you go along and creates a cocktail that still manages to be scary even after a decade. We’re going to be talking about preserving fear over the course of the game’s runtime, mechanics by way of object physics and sanity meters, and we somehow fit in a mention for coconut crabs, for what it’s worth. So that’s Amnesia. I genuinely think this game holds up after so many years, but there have been a million iterations on this formula after this game exploded. Are there games that did it better, or does the original still hold true for you? Have you played the game’s sequel, or the newest entry that we didn’t mention because when we recorded this we didn’t realize it was a thing? Let us know over on our discord. Hope this game has you in a creepy mood (one that lasts for a couple weeks, anyway) because we have one more game planned for the season, and while it may fall outside of October, hopefully you’ll still come back for more next time, when we’re going to be talking about Luigi’s Mansion 3!