Small review, thoughts & Hopes (SPOILERS)

**WindexGlow** · 09-13-2010, 03:01 AM

Having completed Amenisia after 6 hours it’s overcome Penumbra in nearly all aspects. It didn’t feel tiring as it kept itself fresh, without adding gameplay mechanics. Almost every note gave more depth. The camera affects were enjoyable, but they did get old in the later half of the game.

Pros
-Doesn’t get tedious
-Puzzles don’t repeat
-Extremely pretty
-Storyline kept me going, though the ending was disappointing
-Most levels felt unique from each other, yet they transitioned easily
-Kept me in an 18th centaury feeling
-Great storytelling
-Morgue was amazing. I felt like I shouldn’t be there, and that I should get away as fast as possible. The buzzing in the rooms with the bodies really heightened that.

Cons
-Monsters either killed me, or gave me no trouble. There were no situations where I went “Oh damn, that was close!”.
-Monster Spawn repetition. They didn’t spawn in the same areas, yes. But if you heard it than run in the other direction. After the third one I caught on that they disappear after the music stops
-The chained man got annoying. Fast. Someone over steam started messaging me about the game while in front of him. Thank god for mute!
-”everything not bolted down can be interacted with” is a tagline found in many docs. Yet there were a ton of things that couldn’t be interacted with.
-Doors didn’t have weight. Move my mouse a millimeter and it’s fully open.
-Few physics puzzles. It felt like most of the puzzles could be ported quite easily to Half-life, as you drug an item to something and it’d do the rest. The morgue corpse -- I drag the screw onto the head and it..does it? Well. That was easy.
-Some puzzles felt drawn out. The water section, for example. I know you were trying to make it feel like the water monster was there. But after the second runoff, I knew it wouldn’t come. So I splashed my way around the water with glee.
-Confusion of where I was going. When I first started the game, I had the expectation that I was going *into* the ground, that my goal was to go deeper and deeper.
In the end there were levels that had moonlight coming into the room. Was I going down -- or just following the terrain?
-How scared the player was (forgot proper name) was an annoying gimmick. If I got to a point where I felt drunk playing the game I’d find a safe little room with a candle than go afk for 5 minutes. Come back and I’m good as new. This should have been kept ‘internal’ and not shown to the player.
-Final scenes (Choir + massive caverns especially) felt massively out of place. There was no transition to them. One moment I can’t see 10 meters in front of me, the next I’m in a perfectly safe area.

Frictional has a very well working (and very pretty) 3d engine now. Amnesia is getting a massive amount of press for their size. Both of those add up into a more game-orientated (rather than developing the engine, training, tools..) development process for whatever game they make next. They just prove to distributors that “Hey, we’re good. Give us money”.

And to end it all up, I hope frictional’s next game has moments where *nothing* will explain why or what happened. For example, in the morgue area. One of the rooms has a cremator, with a body reaching towards it. How would players react if they look away and it simply disappears or changes it’s position. Or a door slowly opening.

**marzy** · 09-13-2010, 07:15 AM

Spoiler below!

**dvow** · 09-13-2010, 07:54 AM

(09-13-2010, 03:01 AM)WindexGlow Wrote: -Monster Spawn repetition. They didn’t spawn in the same areas, yes. But if you heard it than run in the other direction. After the third one I caught on that they disappear after the music stops

Not to be a dork, but the monsters don't actually vanish after the music stops. When the music stops, that just means they no longer notice you, and begin wandering away. In the prison I hid in the kitchen, and when the music stopped, went walking my merry way down the stairs and hall, only to run smack into the monster walking away. They seem to wander away until they hit a point where they despawn.

**nevers** · 09-13-2010, 08:16 AM

I found it perfect except for 4 things and I think they did a very good job taking the best of penumbra and fixing its flaws.

The 4 problems are:
- Endless repetition of the same phrase by the guy in chains. There should've been more variations of the same message or at least a limit to how many times he can repeat the very same sentence.

-Many objects seem way too lightweight. This is especially true for boxes which you can easily throw through the whole room and when they fall down it sounds like they're made of carton rather than wood and metal.

-The visual distortion and slowed down movement during the flashbacks got very annoying towards the end. I think either the effects should not have been as strong or the flashbacks should've been skippable.

-Barricading a room as shown in a trailer seemed kind of pointless since the monsters can't open doors and have to destroy them in any case and you never need more time to escape than it takes them to destroy the doors anyway (actually I'm not even sure if it takes them longer if the door is blocked). I would've liked to see more of this sort of gameplay in the game, like moving a table in front of a door to block it. That seemed like fun.