AMFP Member Review Thread

[atticman]

I love how all the negative reviews are coming from people who've signed up for the first time just to complain.

I never saw much of a point in joining before hand to complain about the delay times or other banality that tends to pervade forums in off-seasons. But when a new game is released and this is the only way to get have my voice heard as a customer, I'm certainly going to come out of the woodwork to say that I paid for a sequel to a 10 hour, survival horror game with action and story, not a 4 hour Amnesia-themed portfolio for an art-grad's writing that may as well have transpired in a theme park ghost train for all of the gameplay intensive bits that there were. It wasn't a challenge, it was an inconvenience. A great looking, well written inconvenience that actually looked as though it would surpass the first game for a while, but ultimately dropped its heart and soul to deliver us journal entries and ensure that we didn't miss out on the great yarn that TCR was so keen on telling.

As I've said, bait-and-switch.

Can anyone tell me where in the game this TDD-esque moment (00:33) was? Because I didn't experience it. Not to say that a moment from a year ago should or should not have been cut from the game, but that advertisement made the game appear to be in the same horror vein of avoidance, hiding, and survival as TDD, which was the element I missed the most in AMFP.

[video=youtube]http://youtu.be/4CagMNLxa9M?t=33s[/video]

Which is interesting, because now that I really think about it, as well-written as the story was, it would only have been bolstered by TDD-esque gameplay.

What's Mandus's motivation? To find his kids. Why? Because he continues to mention that.

But as we continue through the game, after each set piece, Mandus makes a huge to-do about what he's facing and how he's overcoming adversity. A game should never have to tell a player how difficult or scary their experience is, the player should be able to make that determination from first hand experience.

If the story was primarily about one man's quest for redemption by overcoming the most hellish machinations of his fevered mind, should he not be utterly broken by his quest? Should the experience not shatter every visage of sanity that the man has? Should the experience not have the same weight and horror as TDD? That way, at the end of everything that Mandus has struggled through, instead of a scrap of paper or scribble in a journal telling us how we are supposed to feel, the player could know first hand the hell they've gone through, and experience the heartbreak themselves.

Also, in regards to character development:

Spoiler below!

It is worth noting that merely mentioning the children in past-tense doesn't tug at the heart strings as much as say-

A flashback (using the mansion environment with more light) or a simple voiceover during one of the unconscious periods where you hear Mandus speak lovingly to his children, or they have a simple piece of dialogue back and forth. Just something to experience/see rather than read.