Things that would have made Amnesia scarier

[soulsweeper]

There are a few things for me that are important.
First is the protagonist. The main protagonist must be someone players can identify with. To feel empathy and sympathy. It also makes the player want to keep the character alive. Daniel is good in most cases, but in order to make it better. I'd suggest a young female character.
The gamer audience is getting older, but most are young or can remember being young.
I don't want to come across as sexist, but a female character removes that whole "balls-of-steel", macho BS.
People expect young men, like Daniel, to be strong and brave. It's a society thing.

That's an interesting point. I agree that there's certainly more pressure on males, but I doubt that changing protagonist's gender would really help with the issue you've mentioned. People are just used to assuming a role of total badass in their games, including female characters. Some players find it very appealing and don't want to try different approach. They might learn to enjoy the game anyway, but they're not the main target of Amnesia and I hope their tastes won't influence too many design decisions in future games. Not that I'd mind playing a female character, I enjoyed Justine and I'm a woman myself.

I thought Amnesia was pretty scary already, but if I had to change something, I'd try to make game mechanics less obvious and monsters' senses a little bit sharper. Now you can get pretty close to them, as long as it's dark. They're not even alarmed by Daniel's loud breathing and gasping. It took me a while to discover this, since I usually tried to put as much distance as possible between me and monsters and didn't really feel like testing them, but eventually it became obvious that I didn't have to be THAT careful.

More penalty for losing sanity would've been nice as well.