First Impressions: Amnesia ~ The Dark Descent (PC)

I've been playing this game for a bit.  Steam says that it's been for about three hours, which is pretty decent amount of time to get a general feel for a game.  Some might even say, that it's the first impression of the game.  Eh, eh?

I started this game a few weeks ago, one night because Conklederp wanted to watch me play a game.  Any game.  And I had this game called Amnesia: The Dark Descent from the Humble Bundle 5 and all I knew about it was that it was an FPS survival horror game.  Sounded like fun considering it was probably around 11pm and I didn't have work the following morning.

Upon booting up (do people still say that?), the game lets you know that there will be enemies in the game and that it would probably behoove you, the player, to run the fuck away from them as you are unarmed and they will most likely kill you.  That's always a good thing to know.  And as the game was progressing, it gave out hints/reminders that running away from "monsters" will keep you alive even though I spent three hours in the game before I came across anything that could kill me, outside of the invisible bipedal water monster bastard.  But that's getting ahead of ourselves.

Once the game started, I had to acquaint myself with the controls and basic mechanics so that I wouldn't go spinning in circles instead of sprinting forward at the first sight of danger (a la Slender: The Eight Pages).  Your health meter is represented by a physical heart that subtly decreases in size and healthy-looking-ness as you accrue damage and you're given a textual example, such as "A wound is bleeding quite badly."  I was also excited to find out that the game implemented a "Sanity Meter," which, to my own knowledge, has only existed in one other game previously.  I believe the game also said something about if your sanity dropped too low (by witnessing horrific events or by being in the dark too much, that crazy shit would happen and you would die.  Now you're able to regain sanity and health by completing puzzles in game, but that just usually means that you'll be healthy for the next set of darkened hallways.

That brings up another point about the game: the Darkness comes.  Ho-fucking-boy does the darkness come.  Throughout the game, or at least the first four hours of it that I've played, you will periodically find tinder boxes to light candles/torches and lamp oil to use in your hand lamp.  This must be some pretty thin oil too as your lamp will burn through a half-full canister in maybe a minute; probably less though.  I rarely would have my lamp "on" for more than a couple of seconds in order to preserve what little oil I did have left.  And the tinderboxes, I would hoard those like ink ribbons.  The early areas in the game tend to load you up with tinderboxes making you think that you'll be able to find one in every bookcase or desk drawer.  If only we knew then what we know now four hours in.  The game will also give many options for lighting things to give you light.  In a single hallway, you'll easily find three or four torches that you could light and while it would make the hallway nice a pretty, it would not be advisable as you would be out of tinderboxes and left in the dark.  This did in fact happen and I was scared near shitless the entire time.

At the moment, I'm currently in a large hall area with a fountain containing either a corpse or just the statue of one.  The only sanity effects I've witnessed have been warbliness of the screen and once cockroaches were crawling over the screen for about 20 seconds then disappeared. I'm enjoying the game, but sometimes I'll get frustrated with not having any lantern oil and having to sprint between lit candles, so much so that I feel like it takes me out of the game.  So with four hours of game play in (I played another hour since I began writing this article, hence the one hour discrepancy), I'd like to try to finish and figure out what the hell's going on.