Unforgettable horrors await.
Amnesia is a series of Survival Horror adventure video games created by Frictional Games, starting with Amnesia: The Dark Descent in 2010.
The series is an anthology of different horror stories that take place in a variety of different historical settings, with a variety of common themes and plot elements linking each game together, though not every element appears in every game.
- An emphasis on physics-based interactions with the in-game world, commonly used for puzzle solving purposes.
- Puzzles that are a deliberate throw-back to text adventure and point-and-click games, involving combining and using items on different aspects of the environment.
- Very few, if any, means of fighting back against enemies, leaving stealth as the player's best option for survival.
- A Sanity system, in which the player character's sanity gradually drains the more they view events that scare them, stay in the darkness, or otherwise do stressful things.
- Last, but not least, an Amnesiac Hero. Obviously.
Entries in the series
- Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010):
Spiritual Successor to Penumbra, set in the late 1830s in a Haunted Castle in Prussia, following the dark descent of former British diplomat Daniel into the mysteries of the castle and his own past. This game is the one that fully brought the studio into mainstream recognition. Even though they nearly tanked during the unintentionally prolonged development, they released the game in September 2010 (at first, as a digital purchase only). To their surprise, the game eventually took off really well and received an immense amount of praise from critics and gamers alike.- Justine (2011): A free DLC for Amnesia: The Dark Descent with a new, standalone story. It was developed as part of an ARG to promote Portal 2, and shares several plot parallels to the original Portal, casting you as a silent woman who struggles to solve a variety of sadistic puzzles set up by the titular Justine and escape her "Cabinet of Perturbation" in a similar vein to Glados's test chambers.
- Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (2013): A Non-Linear Sequel to The Dark Descent in its same universe, A Machine For Pigs employs similar themes, and is set in industrial England. Opening at the end of 1899, Oswald Mandus awakens from fevered nightmares of a monstrous machine, only to find it is both real and located beneath his manor. The first Amnesia game developed by The Chinese Room, Frictional Games oversaw its creation and took credit as its publisher. It was met with mixed reviews by comparison.
- Amnesia: Rebirth (2020): The third game in the franchise, and the closest to a linear continuation of The Dark Descent, focused on the plight of Anastasie "Tasi" Trianon after her expedition to the Algerian interior ends in disaster, leaving her confused in the abandoned wreckage of an airplane, alone in the middle of the desert sands. With the threat of death looming over her, Tasi sets out to find her husband Salim, the rest of her expedition team, and make it to safety.
- Amnesia: The Bunker (2023): Another Non-Linear Sequel in the series, The Bunker dramatically shakes things up by offering players the one thing that they've never had in the series before: A means of defending themselves, in the form of a revolver and grenades. It is set during World War I in an underground bunker that serves as the game's open-world. This entry casts players as Henri Clément, a French soldier stuck alone in the bunker with only a pull-operated flashlight and a revolver to guide him.
Through each of these games, the protagonists must fight both to stay alive and to stay sane, struggling to find their way out of unnatural and hostile locales, avoid monstrous creatures out for their blood, and reclaim their lost memories in the process.
But mostly, they find nothing...
Don't forget... Some tropes are too important to forget...!
- Amnesiac Hero: Duh. Each protagonist has come down with a severe case of amnesia, generally only able to recall their names and where they are from. In the case of Justine, the protagonist can't remember anything at all.
- Body Horror: The enemies that the player must avoid are all malformed and mutilated in one way or another in each entry of the series.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: A recurring element of each game so far is the frequent practice of torturing others, commonly for the purpose of harvesting Vitae, a substance that can only be created through immense suffering and pain.
- Cosmic Horror Story: Each entry of the series, barring Justine, either has shades of this trope or runs with it.
- The Dark Descent has Daniel on the run from a strange, semi-corporeal entity known only as the Shadow, which is hunting Daniel for his involvement in disturbing one of its Orbs. Alexander is also revealed to be an uncaring alien who is trying to return to his home dimension, human lives lost in the process be damned, and he, too, is hunted by the Shadow.
- A Machine For Pigs revolves around the titular machine, which is sentient, and believes that what it is doing is for the greater good. By its logic, killing enough people and harvesting enough Vitae can prevent the horrors of the twentieth century. Said machine is implied to have been created using the Orbs first mentioned in The Dark Descent, and requires Oswald to sacrifice himself in order to permanently shut it down.
- Rebirth sees Tasi in the aftermath of one. Tasi ends up exploring the home dimension of Alexander from The Dark Descent, which has been left to rot following the devastation brought by the wrath of the Shadow, leaving only a single survivor in their empress. Just like Daniel, Tasi, too, ends up hunted by the Shadow for tampering with the Orbs.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: While these games are horrifying, no doubt about it at all, the consequences for death are generally rather lax, as the games usually have generous auto-saves. Worst case scenario, you just need to make your way back to the room you died in, which is generally not far.
- Justine averts this, however. If you die, you must restart the entire thing from scratch, as there are no checkpoints, and you cannot save. Thankfully it's not a very long DLC.
- The Bunker likewise averts this by having only two auto-saves, one at the very start and one right before the end. The only way to save your progress is to light the lantern in your save room at the center of the map note , but you need to venture out far away from it to get the items necessary to escape. If you die at any point you will lose everything up until your last manual save, which can be a major setback depending on how risky you were with exploration.
- Multiple Endings: Every entry in the series so far, barring A Machine for Pigs, has multiple endings that can be achieved primarily through choices the player makes towards the end of them.
- Non-Linear Sequel: While each entry in the series may have small nods to one another through documents, themes, and plot elements (like the ever-present Orbs and Vitae), they are their own stories with their own characters, mechanics, and conflicts.
- This is, however, partially subverted by Rebirth. While the story it tells is focused on Tasi and her expedition team's plight, the story ties back into The Dark Descent's narrative in a variety of ways, such as giving the players a look at Daniel's expedition, Alexander's destroyed homeworld, and having the Shadow play an integral role in the story.
- Nothing Is Scarier: A deliberate tactic used in each entry. Several times, the darkness obscures horrors that may or may not actually be there, sounds of enemies are never revealed to actually belong to a monster, explanations are not given for what exactly many of the horrors even are, and it's all done for the sake of making the player's imagination run wild with horrific possibilities. Was that growl from a monster that's stalking the halls, or did it just leave?
- Villain Protagonist: "Villain" depends on how one sees each protagonist, but each of them are at the very least incredibly morally grey.
- Daniel tortured dozens of people to death to save himself from the Shadow that now haunts him. Granted, this is because he was being manipulated by Alexander, and upon coming to his senses he swears revenge.
- The protagonist of Justine is Justine, a sociopath who drove three of her suitors insane through mental and physical torture before kidnapping three other people to use them in a sort of "game" she set up for herself to prove to herself that she wasn't the monster she had become.
- Oswald created the Machine, which is created for the sole purpose of industrialized human slaughter, but justified it as a way to harvest Vitae and prevent the horrors of World War I.
- Tasi is the least villainous, but still has some shades of moral ambiguity. After losing her first-born daughter to a disease, she will do anything to save her soon-to-be-born second child, even if that means potentially dooming the rest of her expedition team.
- Henri is the first protagonist to subvert this. The most villainous thing he does is cheat at a bet to see who would take a patrol. He immediately felt guilty over it and went after the man who had gone, Augustine, when he didn’t report back. He still ultimately caused the events of the game by unknowingly giving an injured Augustine water contaminated by the Harvester mutagen, making him an Unwitting Instigator of Doom.
