Who Also Does this...?

[spukrian]

I haven't done this but I'm gonna try it next time I play through Amnesia.

I'm playing through Amnesia this way now and so far it doesn't really work.

Spoiler below!

In the early game the monster doesn't disappear after it killed you OR it does disappear but reappears as soon as you pass over the trigger again. So basically it is less time consuming to just run, hide and avoid the monster untill it leaves.

Though it seems like it's working for most but not all encounters in the prisons.

If it's a design error or player error... well, I'll save that discussion for another day.

Let me get back to this point. The first few times I play the game I play the way the designers intended. this goes for both Amnesia and Penumbra. It also goes for other games of a similar type (e.g. System Shock 2). However, when I've played the game a few times, I'd like to experiment. Can I play this game a different way? How much can I break the "rules" the designers have put in place? How much freedom do I really have?

To take System Shock 2 as an example. It has some RPG mechanics, mainly statistics which you choose how to improve during the game. Now, for Normal difficulty at least, the "best" character to play the game with would be an "all-round" character, i.e. knows some guns, knows some hacking/tech and knows a few psionics. However, the beauty of the game is that you can play it and finish it with a character who specializes in one field. Sure, it is going to be much more difficult than usual, but by now you have played the game so many times you know just about everything there is to know about the game and you appreciate the challenge.

Another example to look at are the Thief games. You can play them in almost anyway you want. Personally I prefer to play on the hardest difficulty and knocking out every guard with a blackjack. Others prefer "ghosting", where they don't use violence and finish levels without being seen or heard by anyone. If you really want to, there's nothing stopping you from setting the difficulty to the easiest setting and playing as an assassin, killing everyone that crosses your path! However what I enjoyed the most is using the game mechanics (jumping, grabbing ledges, rope arrows and stacking crates) to reach places the designers didn't intend you to find, that's definitely "breaking the rules" that the designers put in place!

What about Penumbra then? Well, if you killed all the dogs in Overture, try to get through the game by sneaking past them. And vice versa, if you usually avoid them altogether, then maybe you should try confronting them this time. And there's more, you could try to find as many alternate solutions to puzzles as possible (granted, not that many but they are still there).

This is where Amnesia isn't as good as Penumbra IMHO. There is just one effective way of dealing with enemies (running and hiding) and most, if not all, puzzles don't have any alternate solutions. However there is one new way I have found of playing the game: try getting through the game without ever using the lantern or any tinderboxes for that matter (maybe someone else has tried this?). It actually made the game less scary.

Now, maybe I should bring up some contrary examples of games where it is difficult or impossible to "break the rules", but that will have to wait for a different post. To conclude, yes, at first you should play the game as intended, but later on you should be able to play the game any way you want!