Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs Discussion Topic Part 1

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Aye, player death and its consequences are the most challenging problem thechineseroom will have to face with this game. (I think we discussed it about 10-20 pages ago ) Its a paradox in a way: The player has to be afraid of dieing, but as soon as he really dies, all tension is lost. Making the game more difficult for example will increase fear of death, but will also increase the number of player deaths, thus diminishing the overall experience as the player gets used to it.

Having something with a little more impact happen upon player death is one way to deal with the problem. But it depends: The quick respawn in Amnesia was an attempt on Frictionals side to keep the player in the "flow" as much as possible. It worked in a way but it also made death meaningless after a while. Having a long black screen for example would be the other extreme - a lot of impact but it will completely break the flow. I don't know which is better?

I think an interesting idea would be to play with uncertainty as a horror element. Trying to keep the player in the dark for as long as possible on what exactly will happen when the monster catches him. The problem with that is that due to their previous gaming experience, every player will automatically assume that he will simply get killed when the monster gets him. So the first step would be to break that apart and make the player "unlearn" what he knows about how games work so far. But it would take an actual game designer to figure out how to do that, not an artist like me