Trivia / Amnesia: The Dark Descent

• Acting for Two:
  • In Justine, Emily Corkery voices Justine and provides the grunts for the girl, when the game doesn't reuse Daniel's old sound effects. Also counts as Significant Double Casting.
  • Wilhelm and his companions in the Wine Cellar are all are voiced by Dan Zullo.
  • The dialogue between the girl Daniel murdered and her mother in the prison are both characters that are voiced by Lani Minella.
• Creator-Driven Successor: To Penumbra, another first-person survival horror game by Frictional Games that forced you to run and hide from your enemies rather than fight them.
• Dummied Out:
  • Apparently, the character of Daniel's sister Hazel (though occasional references to her are still present in the below mentioned developer's commentary and in some late-game Loading Screen notes).
  • The "Sanity Potion", which restores the player's sanity by one level, similar to how Laudanum restores health. It isn't used anywhere in the main game, but is still fully functional and can be placed into maps via the level editor. Was likely not used because it either would have made the game too easy; wouldn't have been terribly useful, since sanity is passively replenished whenever you solve a puzzle; the devs thought it didn't fit the setting, as drugs for treating mental illness were extremely primitive and largely ineffective in the Victorian era; or didn't want to trivialise it by having a potion that can just make people more sane with the click of a button.
  • The "Large Oil Potion", which provides twice as much oil for your lantern as a regular bottle of oil. Doesn't show up anywhere in the game (save for one of the ending cinematics), but is fully functional and can be placed into maps with the level editor.
  • A kind of currency called "thalers", which were meant to be used for opening special treasure chests. Models for bags of 10, 25, and 50 thalers still exist in the game files, but are completely useless and don't show up in the inventory menu when picked up. A few custom stories do use them, though.
• DVD Commentary: Developer Commentaries are able to be toggled, and appear in-game in the form of the Frictional logo (a 6-sided gear) surrounding a microphone. Since most players will want to go the first round without the commentary, this gives a bit of a boost to its replayability. The commentaries are a Pre-Order Bonus.
• Lying Creator: One of the tips in-game notes that the lower your sanity gets, the easier it will be for monsters to find you. As the lead developer recounted the development in an interview, he noted that that tip is, simply put, completely false. There is no code in the game that makes it easier for monsters to find you if your sanity is low. The reason this tip was included was because it made players absolutely terrified of losing their sanity and making the game more difficult, therefore making the game even more tense and stress-inducing.
• Meaningful Name: It is possible that Malo de Vigny was named after St. Malo - a port city located in Brittany, France.
• No Budget: Would you believe that Frictional Games, the developers of Amnesia, had to work for no pay for a month or two? It's impressive that it turned out as well as it did, given their methods of motion-capping the monsters.
• Referenced by...: SCP Foundation: SCP-2786 is a metaphysical entity that can insert itself into horror narratives, where it attempts to portray itself as a brave hero and alter the story itself. One of these is listed as the videogame Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
• Significant Double Casting: In Justine, the same voice actress does the voices of the silent protagonist and Justine, because they're both the same person.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Much like other Frictional games, there is a folder in the game's directory that is password protected titled "super_secret". This folder contains a plethora of development footage, development information, and cut content, as well as early concepts that didn't make it into the final game. For example, early concepts of the Grunt and Brute show that the former was initially meant to be a clothed, warped old man, while the latter was meant to be a massive hulking beast resembling a cancerous growth.
  • Frictional originally planned Amnesia to be a casual Torture Porn game, but changed it after Penumbra gained more popularity.

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