If AMFP would be released before TDD, would you feel diffrent about it?

[Alardem]

Funny - I played A Machine For Pigs after having neglected Penumbra and Amnesia for several months. After my initial disorientation with the fact that most doors and cabinets were locked and objects were there only to be looked at, I acclimatized by the time I left the mansion and found the game a thoroughly tense and unnerving experience. Even the unlimited flashlight ended up not bothering me, as there still remained the danger of alerting enemies to your presence and stealth would thus often be conducted blindly.

Tonight I played Amnesia 1, and got up to the Back Hall. I have to say that the insanity mechanic really irritated me, reminding me that my character's feelings differ from my own. I have mixed feelings about gathering lighting resources too - while hunting around for more light sources encourages exploration and ideally makes you feel like you have barely enough to continue, in practice I wind up hoarding tinderboxes while walking around with a dizzy character. The Water Monster is still a fantastic chase sequence, one that only the Tesla-Pig in A Machine For Pigs matched.

I wonder if AMFP could have improved upon the mechanics featured in the first game, rather than excising them.

• If light-bulb/battery hunting feels a little silly, maybe you could have given the flashlight a very short life (10 seconds) like in many first-person shooters.
  
• making sure that you can't take out the flashlight when carrying objects
  
• Mandus is supposedly ill - perhaps his coughing and dizziness would impede his stamina or make it harder for him to remain quiet
  
• For me, the insanity mechanic doesn't actually make much sense - it feels more like a punishment for progressing too fast rather than a genuine emulation of a real person's fear, and decreasing it as a 'reward' for completing puzzles only makes sense when using video-game logic. In short, it feels like a game imposing arbitrary limitations on you. Rather than make the character faint and walk like a drunk man, you could increase the intensity of the sound or randomize events so that more creatures could be hallucinated, pictures could change, or sounds could be imagined. I'm at a loss for what events would affect the protagonist's sanity, however, as the story makes it quite clear that he's a lost cause...