Amnesia: Rebirth

Title: Amnesia: Rebirth

Format: PS4, PC

Price: USD 29.99

Strange bunch, us humans. We find fear entertaining, and not in the sadistic way of enjoying someone else’s fear. We actively seek out being scared ourselves. What makes something scary? A perennial topic for horror fans. Some movies and games put ‘jump-scares’ first and foremost, whereas others rely on story and atmosphere. The original Amnesia: The Dark Descent was notable for doing both, and doing both extremely well, and I was a huge fan. So, how fares this third game to bear the Amnesia title? Pretty well, pretty darned well…eventually.

Sequels are notoriously tricky, whether it be a band’s second album or the next movie in a sequence. On top of the usual challenges – do the same thing and you bore the fans, change too much and you can enrage them – horror faces an additional challenge: how to recreate suspense in a sequel after resolving it in the original title. Frictional Games, who developed the original TDD as well as the similarly Lovecraftian Penumbra predecessor series, seemed to want to dodge this question entirely for the second game, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, leaving that to developer thechineseroom while they went off to make Soma. While similar graphically and sonically, and apparently set contemporaneously to TDD, MFP was a linear borefest dominated by the developer’s academic pontificating about Marxism (I very much disliked this game. You can find my original review elsewhere).

Frictional is firmly back at the helm for Rebirth and it’s much more of a direct sequel, set roughly a century after the events of TDD and with, ultimately, a number of plot and backstory linkages. The game sets out to raise the pressure immediately, opening with a plane crashing in 1937 in northern Africa. We are with protagonist Anastasie “Tasi” Trianon, her husband, and other members of the expedition as they hurtle to the ground. Then, Tasi awakes, alive, but alone. The others are gone and she has no memory as to why, so she sets off to find them.

This is, then, a very different environment to TDD’s claustrophobic (if expansive) gothic castle. The graphics are not exactly cutting edge, but they are compelling in their depiction of the world, and the game does have a very definite sense of place. More than one place, in fact, as there is the desert and the nearby fort, ancient ruins underneath, and, well, someplace else entirely. Once the player reaches the fort, its design, decoration, history and the maps you will see of its surrounding area are excellent world building. For me the ambience was like a cross between Indiana Jones and the beginning to The Exorcist, in terms of time and place, and hidden dread.

The musical score is good quality and unobtrusive, and the voice acting is notably very high-quality, which you get to experience a lot as Tasi is not a shy narrator and one also fairly prone to flashbacks. This is a function of her finding out what happened to the rest of the mission team. She has been through all this before and forgotten it, so seeing certain places, or people, will prompt a previously blurred out drawing in her sketch book to complete, and a voiced flashback of that scene will ensue.

Story is where the game really stands out, both in depth and characterisation. The plot happens on multiple levels, including Tasi’s family challenges, the expedition, what’s happening now, and of course the supernatural past which is influencing the present and tying all of these strands together. If you like horror/dark fiction where there are characters to care about and not just knife-fodder, if you’re a parent, or just an empathetic person, this is a world with some well-fleshed out characters in situations of distress and peril. The high-quality voice acting only makes this better.

Gameplay has not evolved since the original TDD, or frankly from Penumbra. Tasi can move, jump, and crouch. Objects are once again in two categories: useful items, which, when clicked on, will vanish and reappear in Tasi’s cavernous trouser pockets, and non-useful items, which when clicked on will then be subject to good old Frictional Physics, and be hauled up visibly on screen in front of you, and can then either be dropped or propelled ahead, most often to no utility. The same method of interacting with the world opens and closes doors, which means sometimes it takes a minute to figure out if a door is locked, or you just pushed the wrong way, let go of the button at the wrong time, or accidentally chose to pivot over backwards and stare at the ceiling. One nice addition is matches. TDD’s tinder boxes were a one-time use item. A match, once struck, will burn down, and can be used to light more than one source if you’re quick – the trick being, moving quickly risks blowing them out. To round out core gameplay, I have to note there is also a noticeable overuse of Tasi falling through the floor when she gets near her objective.

OK, so the gameplay is a little old school, but its functional, and we have a strong story, well voice acted and paced. Surely this is a good game, then? Yes, it is, but it’s not a great game, and for two key reasons: first, while it’s interesting, it’s not actually scary. Second, while the story is deep with multiple layers, sometimes the exposition is off, there are inconsistencies, and some oddly weak and occasionally anachronistic writing.

As with many games with an amnesiac protagonist, in TDD the game revolves around what had happened to you, the player, who is often in immediate peril. In Rebirth, a lot of time is spent finding out what happened to your fellow expedition members. The problem being, because Tasi doesn’t remember what happened to them, they don’t really mean very much to you the player, and so it’s hard to care about them beyond intellectual curiosity. There isn’t much development of these other characters, and what little is done usually happens after whatever happens to them happens. Again, I will say it’s an interesting world and the expedition feels and looks authentic, but their fate is simply interesting, not emotionally engaging.

With Tasi, she remembers her past, just not her time in the desert, and indeed her backstory is full and nuanced. The problem is, she is seldom threatened. Whereas in TDD the protagonist could not escape the castle, and the Shadow and its minions felt omnipresent, in Rebirth the various monsters can be avoided, and Tasi can escape from the building they’re in. Only one late game section in a maze feels genuinely tense, but even this is undermined because Tasi can’t die; she will simply lose control of what she’s fighting for a short time before recovering, some distance back (aka “a checkpoint”).

Finally on the scary factor, there is probably too much exposition of the Big Bad. In TDD, as with many successful Lovecraftian works, we are told there are powers and worlds beyond, but we don’t actually see them, just their malign influence in our world. Our imagination is what makes these elder gods terrifying. What happens in Rebirth ties in with what Alexander Brennenberg was doing, and indeed who and what he was, and that is nicely designed and well-written. Rebirth then takes us over the threshold and show us point blank the powers behind – and immediately renders them less terrifying as a result. What is most disturbing in Rebirth is still the written records and captured memories, hinting at foul practices and dark powers. Imagination does the rest.

It’s ironic also that for a game with so strong a story, writing is a weak point. The issues are varied. The game begins telling me to fear the dark, but then the first thing that tries to kill me is direct sunlight. Tasi will freak out in the dark, but taken to an alternate world of malign powers who revel in torture, she’s quite fine with that, with no sanity impact at all. I guess that’s all we would ever need to defeat Cthulhu then: just make sure the lights are on. Within the opening minutes of the game, we are introduced to a mixed-race relationship and a gay couple. Of course, there were interracial marriages and gay relationships back then, and they would have been subject to prejudice at best and persecution at worse. Horror is a broad genre and that could have been an interesting lens to look at those struggles in our less-than-tolerant past. Instead, these are treated with a very 21^st century attitude of ‘it’s normal and beautiful,’ and that’s when they are commented upon at all. In addition to the anachronism it also felt like box ticking: here’s a mixed race couple, here’s a gay couple, all good, now let’s get into the portal to another dimension and never mention this again, eh?

This is further compounded by Tasi as narrator. While at times it seems a senior editor has been at pains to ensure an authentic voice, and Tasi will be all “oh my dear heart,” “Oh Christ,” “Mother Mary,” and “in God’s name,” at other times I guess the editor was on their tea break, as Tasi is dropping s**ts and f-bombs left, right, and centre. It’s not just that the swearing doesn’t ring true for an educated French woman in the 1930s. It’s the way she uses the f-word in very early 21^st Century manner, that being as a shorthand for emphasis or emotional underlining. It’s jarring, anachronistic, and damaging to willing suspension of disbelief.

I honestly didn’t think I was going to finish the game. After the first hour, the needle was tacking hard over to “dislike.” Initially clumsy story exposition, a confused pass through the other world, often no clear path to follow there or in the cave and an overdose of belief-wrecking swearing and I was ready to go controllers-down. I’m glad I didn’t, as once Tasi reaches the fort, the game hits its stride and tells a detailed and compelling story. It’s just not a very scary one. 7