In the developer Frictional Games set the tone for independent horror games on PC with Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Strongly focused on the story, he generated his anxiety through an intensity Of atmosphere and an emphasis on helplessness. With Amnesia: Rebirth, it feels like Frictional has completely refined its particular approach to horror. You are trapped in a deadly and stuffy world, struggling against the limits of your character and even against his perceptions. Rebirth is Frictional’s best game yet, mixing a deep and secret story with the signature mechanics that the developer has refined over 13 years of horror games.
Amnesia: Renaissance continues Frictional’s specific approach to history and horror, which consists of avoiding conflicts, hiding and managing your character’s own panic. It also complements the story told in The Dark Descent, although you don’t need to know this game well to follow this narrative. (The narrative does not connect to amnesia: a machine for pigs, the sequel to The Dark Descent in 2013.) you play as Tasi Trianon, a French woman who participates in a mining expedition to Algeria in 1937. In the first moments of the game, the expedition plane undergoes supernatural shenanigans that cause it to crash in the desert. Tasi wakes up shortly after, alone on the plane, with few memories of what happened and strange black tendrils sneaking into his Vision. In search of survivors, she discovers that the strange bracelet she wears when she wakes up can open portals to a dark and damaged parallel world. Tasi searches for her friends in caves and tunnels, and the story often draws her into the Alternate Dimension as she tries to find her way.
Rebirth brings back the main mechanics of The Dark Descent, and really, all the Frictional games have similar ideas. You follow the path of the survivors, collect notes and discover clues about what happened. Exploring the caves, you quickly plunge into darkness, and as in the dark descent, The darkness increases tasi’s anxiety and has noticeable effects on his psyche. However, you are not dealing with a loss of mental health that changes your perception of the world as in this game. Instead, tasi’s growing anxiety causes the black tendrils to reappear and her heart begins to smack, and when she is too scared, the darkness completely overtakes her, causing her to get lost and wake up somewhere else without remembering how she got there.
The darkness plays with tasi’s panics as a mechanic while she plays with her panics by fueling most of the panics in the game. The more scared Tasi is, the less reliable his senses are.
You’ll start to see terrifying flashes across the screen as she gets more scared, and Rebirth plays up her inability to see much around her with a sound design that emphasizes the resonant and oppressive nature of the places where you work. As in the previous games, the game strives to aggravate your anxiety by disturbing your perception, as the protagonist sees that more and more scary things are an effective way to action anxiety. When things get scary or harmful, the images in your Vision start flashing to create a panic of jumps, and adding sounds and movements to your periphery makes it more difficult to trust your senses. You constantly hear things that might be hiding out of your sight, and Rebirth acts on you by having a hard time telling if these things are hallucinations, ambient sounds or real harmful waiting in the dark.
Your main goal is to move forward and push back the darkness with all the light sources you can find to control the panic of tasi and evaluate which pressures are real and which are imaginary. Scattered everywhere are matchbooks that you can find by exploring the surroundings, usually by looking under or inside objects. Matches quickly go out when you light them and try to move, but you can use them to light torches, candles, sconces and other light sources while you explore. You will spend a lot of time lighting all the flammable things you can find, but this has the disadvantage of having fewer places to hide from anything that causes those annoying chewing noises somewhere out of your sight.
As in the other Frictional games, you can interact with pretty much everything you see in Rebirth, and in fact, you have to simulate real-world movements with your mouse or a controller to perform basic actions such as opening a door or moving an object.out of the way. In addition to controlling the lighting, Rebirth’s main mechanical thrust is to use these body interactions to solve puzzles that block your progress, which are often solved by carefully searching for clues from the environment around you. Although none of the puzzles are particularly difficult, it is certainly possible to falter here and there if you are looking for a solution that is not immediately intuitive. For the most part, the obstacles Rebirth puts in your way are inventive without being annoying, challenging you to do things like find the chemicals you need to improvise an explosive or find a clever way to run a short cable through a wall.