Line #66 Headscratchers/AmnesiaTheDarkDescent


1	!Per wiki policy, Administrivia/SpoilersOff applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. Administrivia/YouHaveBeenWarned.
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3	* So how exactly is Alexander the bad guy here? From what we hear near the end, it seems that all he wants to do is go back home, which he can't do because Wayer stole that opportunity. Now he's stuck on Earth, sustaining his life for centuries, waiting for that jerk to help him. But Wayer is all "Send me Agrippa! There is a big chance that I will just start completely ignoring you after that, but still, do it!" Alexander even agrees and starts working on it... and then Daniel happens. I feel as if Wayer is a huge jerkass that just screwed Alexander over.
4	** All of that may be true, but Alexander was willing to torture and slaughter hundreds, thousands of people. Most of them probably criminals, true, but he had no qualms about taking innocent lives... even those of children. That's not exactly "good guy" material there.
5	*** Also, keep in mind that the only reason this conversation took place was because ALEXANDER KIDNAPPED AGRIPPA in an attempt to get Weyer's assistance. It's absolutely sane that Weyer would have issues giving in to a kidnapper's demands, and want to make sure he can guarantee Agrippa's safety as a condition of help. Considering the rest of Weyer and Agrippa's portrayals, they seem relatively decent (helping Daniel after he dies even if they had no concrete incentive to after Alexander died) and might have been willing to help had Alexander not gone for kidnapping and torturous hostage keeping. Couple that with the fact that the reason Alex is on the planet at all is because he was thrown out from wherever his home was, and the fact that he remorselessly lies to Daniel and you for his own gain (something we have no evidence Weyer or Agrippa do), and you see the issues here. To put it this way: if a leader of FARC kidnapped your best friend or teacher and held him or her hostage in a cave with the mutilated remains of his previous victims around in order to force you to help him build something, would you do it?
6	* So why take the amnesia potion and then travel all the way to the other side of the castle? Why not just stay where the orb was shattered?
7	** Perhaps he didn't think it would be wise for his memoryless self to wake up in the center of hell without a clue as to why he got there.
8	** I've got a different explanation: Daniel was running from the Shadow. We know that Alexander meant to trap Daniel so that the Shadow would find him and consume him whilst he escaped to the other world; we also know that the Amnesia potion caused Daniel to pass out for a short while before later awakening and having next to no memory of his past. Having fed the potion to the people he had tortured many times before, he likely already knew that drinking Amnesia would have that side-effect and so hastened to get himself to a part of the castle that was Shadow-free before he passed out. Notice how relatively deserted the area he woke up in was; he fled somewhere safer whilst the potion knocked him out. Also, he wanted to write himself a note explaining to himself what he must do when he awakened; I doubt the Inner Sanctum had an abundance of paper and pens lying around...
9	* Daniel giving himself amnesia was totally pointless. He didn't need it to take out the Baron. He just did it to assuage his guilt, which he could have done after he killed Alexander. He just made his goal much harder.
10	** He was traumatized by the memory of what he had done to the point that he almost could not function. Giving himself the potion made him forget the actual murders (minus the one you have to re-do near the end in a flashback), making it so that he knew ''what'' he had done, but couldn't remember, saving his sanity and allowing him to function. Also, since he was obviously really torn up about that the fact that he realized he was a monster, he probably wasn't thinking in a terribly logically.
11	* Spoiler alert: At the end of the game, if you push over the three unstable pillars and thereby [[AntiClimaxBoss kill Alexander]], the ending thereafter states that Daniel has atoned for his sins. My only question is: in exactly ''what'' way has he atoned for his sins? The only one he's saved by his actions is himself. He has already tortured all of Alexander's prisoners to death in order to keep the shadow at bay, and preventing Alexander from passing through the portal doesn't save anyone else; by that point, Alexander had all the vitae he needed and just wanted to go home. It wasn't as if he was trying to conquer or destroy the world; if he'd succeeded, no-one except Daniel would've suffered from it. At most, the only "good" thing he accomplished was punishing Alexander, and maybe saving Agrippa. It seems as if the protagonist is [[EasilyForgiven very easily forgiven]] for all the horrible things he's done.
12	** He took out the man responsible for the deaths of thousands, his own torment and (temporary) fall to darkness, and even (apparently) placated the Shadow. I think he did ''plenty'' to deserve redemption.
13	** You’re making a mistake by taking Daniel’s words at face value. Daniel is an UnreliableNarrator, constantly presenting his version of the story, and the whole thing reeks of self-deception. It reminds me most of the infamous Milgram electroshock experiment. Daniel was ordered to continue torturing victims well after his conscience told him to stop. He shouldn’t have been so ready to trust Alexander, but he let himself believe the convenient lie that they were all guilty because it benefited him. He committed horrific torture on people with supposed crimes as petty as forgery. He clearly knew he was doing wrong -- at one point he protests to Alexander that their victim “will die,” then covers the pang of conscience with “too quickly, I mean.” In the end, he kidnapped an obviously innocent young girl and her family, presumably for the purpose of torture, but didn’t admit any guilt until she accidentally died. Even then, he only admits his actions were wrong, but still places all the blame on Alexander for corrupting him. Essentially he uses the Nazi defense of “I was just following orders.” The different endings are summed up by Daniel’s statement that he could understand killing a villain to save an innocent, but killing an innocent to save a murderer is a different matter. The good ending is when he sacrifices himself to save Agrippa, who had been kept in a state of living death for centuries. By giving up his own life to save an innocent (though how innocent Agrippa is is up for debate, but we have no indication he’s committed the sort of crimes Alexander and Daniel did), he truly atones, and Alexander dies in that ending too. However, by pulling down the pylons, Alexander and Agrippa both die. Daniel sacrifices an innocent to save himself, a murderer. This is the bad ending, but Daniel doesn’t notice because he’s too lost in self-deception. He has become just as much a monster as Alexander, but he congratulates himself on eliminating the supposed cause of his actions. Without accepting his own responsibility, he is bound to continue committing crimes, blindly blaming others the whole time for forcing him to do it.
14	*** Maybe a little, at the end, but mostly it was just my interpretation of the character based on his actions. I said Daniel was full of it as soon as he started talking about how he had "done the right thing."
15	*** Didn't Alexander only start murdering innocents when Agrippa ruined his first attempt at returning home? Oh, who knows. This game is full of unreliable narrators.
16	* The lantern. What does he light it with?
17	* The protagonist has to light torches and lanterns to hold back the darkness and keep his sanity. He will pass ''hundreds'' of books and pieces of wooden furniture just lying around over the course of the game. Apparently, those don't count.
18	** Burn a book? That's horrible.. he might have killed a lot of people, but he wouldn't burn a book!
19	** As a matter of fact, you can shove a book into a burning stove and it still won't burn.
20	** Also, light sources other than one lantern cannot be moved under any circumstances (there are plenty of candles around) and they can only be lit by a tinderbox, never from another light (including the oil lamp you carry).
21	*** There's a bit of a running gag among some parts of the fandom that Alexander had his servants glue all of the candles to the tables.
22	*** Those could be justified (Albeit weakly, like he doesn't want to risk setting the room alight), but on more than one occasion you come across windows blocked by ''curtains'' that you can't remove or pull aside to let light in. For a game based heavily around physics something like that is just silly.
23	*** Not pulling aside the curtains is justified by the fact that while being in the dark is bad for your sanity, ''not'' having dark to hide in is bad for your continued existence.
24	** Wooden furniture is likely justified by being difficult, if not outright impossible to ignite with the tools Daniel has on hand. A book would face a similar issue if it was closed, while it would probably burn up and go out too quickly to be much use if Daniel fanned out the pages to make it easier to ignite. There's also the risk of something else catching on fire if Daniel starts burning random objects (books tend to appear in living areas that also feature rugs and curtains). Plus, most areas where books and furniture appear already have candles and torches anyway. Why go to the effort of improvising a light source if you can just use ones that are already available and designed for that purpose?
25	** Speaking of which, why does darkness make you insane?
26	*** You're being hunted by a ''shadow''. Why wouldn't the dark make you paranoid and nervous?
27	*** Daniel is nyctophobe ; he can't stand the idea of being trapped in darkness. That also explains why his Sanity decreases when he's in the dark, whereas Justine's doesn't, since she doesn't share his phobia (her vision does blur and distort, but unless she's looking at a Suitor or walking in the Crypt, her Sanity remains crystal clear).
28	* You pass bandsaws, but can't pick them up as a weapon. Or the hammers nearby. Or the shovel. You can pick up a crowbar to open a door, but it's dropped immediately upon use.
29	** Would you, being an average guy, engage a huge freakish monster, that can knock down doors, in melee combat? I know I wouldn't.
30	*** Yes you would. If you failed to hide and were backed into a corner, I can conceive of nobody who wouldn't try taking it down with a crowbar as a last resort, even if they knew it wouldn't work.
31	** Perhaps Daniel just has the sense to know he doesn't stand a chance against the powerful monsters.
32	*** You never saw [[VideoGame/HalfLife Gordon Freeman]] give up when [[WhenAllYouHaveIsAHammer all he had was a crowbar]].
33	*** I saw Gordon Freeman give up when he didn't have his HEV suit though...
34	*** Even if he can't ''kill'' the monster, at least he might be able to use the crowbar / shovel / hammer to wound and distract it. In fact, when you throw crates and other items at the monsters, it actually delays them and gives you more time to escape. So wouldn't it make more sense for Daniel to keep his weapons instead of discarding them?
35	*** Didn't Daniel say towards the beginning of the game that he'd already tried fighting the monsters with weapons, and that it had no effect?
36	*** Then why does throwing a box at them work so well? Even if he can't kill them, I'm sure a crowbar in face will distract them.
37	*** I mostly thought that it was because of two factors: 1, Daniel is really scared and doesn't want to even go near those things, preferring to run as fast as possible. 2, if he gets too close, they hit him and wound him badly, causing him to drop the weapon and leaving himself vulnerable.
38	*** No. Daniel said that there was no way to fight back against the Shadow. It said nothing of not being able to fight back against the monsters.
39	*** This troper always assumed the shadow and the monsters were the same thing. Outside of being able to hit them with boxes sometimes, does the game ever actually differentiate the two in-story?
40	*** Umm yes, the game DOES distinguish between the monsters and the shadow. The shadow is that red gloopy stuff that appears on walls. The monsters are, well, the monsters, and they're demonstrated as following Alexander's orders at one point and you can even find a note that refers to them as "gatherers."
41	*** Daniel didn't know anything about there being actual monsters before the events of the game. Although he's distressed by the Shadow, he's obviously terrified by the horrible creatures which defy logic.
42	* In the level the entrance hall you need to dissolve the meat moss blocking access to the refinery, however attempting to leave the castle reveals that the door is blocked off by the same meat moss. Daniel could have escaped the castle right then and there by using the acid he found to dissolve the meat moss blocking the exit and gotten out of there. (however because the devs think of everything trying to do this has no effect)
43	** It could be that Daniel, in spite of his amnesia, still senses the shadow closing in on him, and, since his past self is all he has to go on for information, and his past self is saying to go deeper into the castle and kill Alexander, he thinks it would be better to follow his own advice and try to fix the problem instead of running away. However if they had thought of everything, they should have let you go out the door, walk a few hundred feet, hear the noises of some monster, and get dragged off into the swamp like some of the notes that you pick up hint at happening. Would have added some "My God... That was almost ME" paranoia to the game, [[SarcasmMode because God knows it needs more of it...]]
44	** This is something that the designers at Frictional are aware of, according to the [[WordOfGod in-game commentary]]. The dissolve-the-slime-barrier-with-acid puzzle was one of the first designed, and while that section of the game went through several redesigns, the puzzle stayed the same. In the original version, the MeatMoss did not start filling the entrance hall as the player progressed, but was added later, and kind of undermined the concept of the puzzle. However, by that point in development there was not enough time in the project schedule to come up with a different puzzle that fit the newer level design. They left it in because they needed something there for the player to overcome, but were not fully satisfied with the end result.
45	* In the 'Entrance to Cistern' there is a puzzle requiring you to lower an automatic ladder, except that for some reason a pipe is in the way. Makes you wonder if the ladder was put in first, and the plumber decided to mess with the engineer, or some lazy engineer decided to slap the ladder down early and call it a day
46	* At some point in the game, you have to inject yourself with the blood of a corpse to pass into the next level. Anyone ever wonder that just maybe that guy might have a different ''blood type'' than Daniel?
47	** Circumstances dictate actions, and at that point, it was do or die, so yeah
48	* What exactly is the sound we hear when Daniel is at low Sanity ? It's commonly described as "teeth chattering", but it sounds more like grinding that the clack-clack sound the chattering implies (unless my vocabulary is just plain wrong). Either way, teeth grinding does not sound like that either, unless your teeth are completely rotten. So what is this?
49	** TheCoconutEffect at work. It's a sound that ''communicates'' Daniel's teeth grinding, even if it sounds nothing like actual teeth-grind.
50	* Laudanum (the item which you heal yourself with) is actually Opium. [[FlatWhat What.]]
51	** It's by the same reasoning that you "heal" yourself with painkillers in ''VideoGame/MaxPayne', ''VideoGame/DeusEx'', and morphine in ''VideoGame/CryOfFear''. It makes the pain bearable so you can continue.
52	* After knocking all the pillars and interrupting Alexander's ritual, Daniel is spared by the Shadow and backtracks all the way to the Entrance Hall. But even assuming the Shadow withdrew its MeatMoss from the whole castle because it had no grudge against anyone anymore, how does Daniel manage it ? The elevator is completely trashed, for starters, and if I recall correctly other parts of the castle collapsed once Daniel had left them the first time. Did the Shadow magically reset the castle to the state it was in before Daniel's arrival ?
53	** When you reach the elevator leading down to the Inner Sanctum you find it to not only be broken but partially disassembled. Did Daniel break it himself to trap Alexander down there before going to wipe his own memory?
54	** There's probably many ways out, like staircases. Especially considering how elaborate the dungeons are, it seems unlikely to me that there's just an elevator leading to them. Same thing for the collapsed parts.
55	* Daniel frequently hallucinates about [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_hissing_cockroach giant Hissing Cockroaches]], which are indigenous to Madagascar... Despite his only time spent in Africa, to the knowledge of the player, is in Algeria, on the other side of the African continent.
56	* Why the hell are all of the Cockroaches I find in this castle Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches? They're quite large for any other species and they hiss. Did Alexander just happen to go on a trip to Madagascar, look at these and say "Aw, hell yes! I totally want a breeding pair of those!"[[note]]Apparently, this game is also set before they were even given a proper latin name.[[/note]]
57	** It's strongly implied that the cockroaches are hallucinations, as they only appear when Daniel's sanity is low, and they disappear mysteriously. Daniel was an explorer and archaeologist, so it's very possible that he has visited Madagascar, and had a traumatic experience with the cockroaches.
58	*** Or he just really didn't like bugs.
59	** In all likelihood, the cockroaches were ''supposed'' to be "horrific alien bugs", to emphasize Daniel's madness and the weird mystical shit going on in Brennenburg. It's just that the Hissing Cockroaches were the best possible model the producers could find, especially given that the game is set in Prussia.
60	* Thinking too hard about Justine, but: if you save all three hostages, they bang on the door at the end. Getting past Alois? Well, as long as you closed the door behind you, not too hard to do. Basile? He's the most sane of all of them, and as long as it was clear they weren't Justine, he would probably let them pass. But how the fuck did they get past Malo?! Unless Justine left a fully loaded shotgun laying around, I don't see how they ALL would have made it past him to the end chamber.
61	** They probably all just ganged up on him to knock him out or something -- Malo is still only human, after all. Alois and Basile might have even helped -- last time I checked, the suitors weren't exactly friends. Basile especially may help the hostages just to spite her, since that seems to be his main goal in life now.
62	*** Yeah, a human who can knock down giant steel doors with his bare hands while starving and who runs ridiculously fast for being half-dead. Maybe I'm just jaded after dying by his hand so many times, but it seems like even teaming up, they wouldn't be much of a match for Malo.
63	* Could the monsters' horrific body appearance be a hallucination? Hear me out, in Archives Daniel will hallucinate two of monsters. If memory serves me, Daniel in his journals and notes commented on Gatherers strange behavior but never their appearance(thanks to Alexander having them wear robes that concealed their appearance). And since real monster encounters start to happen past this point, that means that Daniel never saw any of Alexander servants before. Since we know that Daniel has fear of darkness and is bit insane and tends to have hallucination, that could mean that Gatherers in truth look different than presented in game.
64	* Is it possible to get vitae from something other than torture and death? Like, for example, using laughter instead of the screams of pain and fear? Would that still work?
65	** Probably not. Your body has very different chemicals running through you when you're terrified and in pain compared to when you're happy, most notably adrenaline, which is implied to be what vitae actually is. Also, it's not the screaming that's important, it's the chemicals in the blood, so getting people to laugh instead of scream would make no difference. And odds are, if that method worked, Alexander would have pursued it since it would have likely meant less hassle than torturing hundreds of people. Since Amnesia is a horror game, and not ''WesternAnimation/MonstersInc'', it almost certainly doesn't work that way.
66	* In the Cistern entrance, there's a large door that can't be opened by the player. In the Chancel, there's the exact same large door that can't be opened too. Does this mean that the levels are somewhat connected? Is there a map of all the levels aligned / in one picture to figure out?
67	** Most likely yes. During Daniel's flashback in the Cistern Entrance, Alexander says the sewers are only an alternate route to the Inner Sanctum but they wouldn't be using it.
68	* So what is up with the eviscerated corpse of a Grunt you find in the sewer? The game heavily implies a Brute did it, but if so why? Aren't all the gatherers on the same side being under Alexander's control? It is also implied the Shadow did it, which again begs the question why? RuleOfScary?
69	** Probably, but Brute seems to be so aggressive that it might have just accidentally killed the Grunt. Or if it was the Shadow... Well it's motives aren't clear so make out what you will.
70	* Does Justine really want to redeem herself, or just act like she is redeeming herself? She's trying to prove she won't take the easy way out by letting the victims die...but she tortured and used her friends and lover to prove that she is a good person and that she wouldn't give into her bad human nature (despite it being a bit too late), instead of doing the more difficult thing (for her) by being nice to them and not torturing them while also not kidnapping innocents to use in her crazy "redemption" experiment. Obviously Justine is an UnreliableNarrator and not a good person though even if she saved the three victims. [[CaptainObvious Justine has some serious problems]]. Or maybe this wasn't for her, since she's way past redemption, but for the player? It may be obvious to others but I was always confused about this whole thing.
71	* Why exactly Alexander has six different torture devices? And how he gets Vitae from Strappado and Brazen Bull victims since those devices don't cause bleeding?
72	* In the revenge ending, Daniel walks out of the Brennenburg castle, having placated the Shadow by killing Alexander. However, where are the Gatherers that previously infested the castle? Did the Shadow kill them all out of gratitude, or are they in some sort of dormant state due to their master dying?

Context Headscratchers / AmnesiaTheDarkDescent