How does Penumbra compare to Amnesia?

[Sexbad]

I really don't get these comments about Amnesia not having as much story. The entire point of the game(besides losing your mind) was learning about what lead Daniel to inducing amnesia to begin with, and why he begs himself to kill Alexander.

The only real difference is that in Penumbra you read everything; there is very little voice acting besides one particular character. Amnesia has a lot more story-telling devices.

For me, Penumbra felt much more story-oriented because it had a whole lot of world building going on as well as Philip's personal tale, while Amnesia mostly focused on the characters.

Penumbra had an extensive system of logs that connected pretty much everybody together in some way. The notes in Shelter's kennel, for example, had an excellent callback to the spider eater near the hatch you fell through. Every environment that was fucked up was fucked up in some sort of significant event.

Amnesia doesn't have as much of that. It has a few healthy exceptions, like the stories of the prisoners in the prison and nave and such, but it rarely goes as deep in history as Penumbra. It is mostly, "You have made progress; here is more stuff." Instead it works up the creepy vibe mostly through the fact that it is set in a spooky medieval castle--after all, a whole lot of bad shit happened in castles, whereas mines and laboratories are comparatively innocent, both aesthetically and historically.