Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: Maybe it gets better after the first 90 minutes?

[quote name="fabio"][quote name="Rafiki"]I liked Amnesia for the most part, but the blur effects, impaired hearing, and so forth (I wouldn't mind removing the heavy breathing) are designed to make you as vulnerable as possible because being vulnerable (in general, aside from the game) is what scares people. So they make you defenseless except for running and hiding, and then impair you for looking at enemies. So if you want to avoid enemies and the impairment effects, you have to run and hide and turn your back (!). But you also get penalized for hiding in the dark too long, forcing you to come out into the open and make yourself vulnerable again. But now your vision and hearing are messed up, making it harder to keep track of enemies. They do have Eternal Darkness insanity effects, but they're very infrequent and mostly stupid. There was one really good one, though. I liked the game but thought it could have been way better, but I also thought whoever designed it really understood what they were doing and was pretty impressed by it.[/quote] But that would go against the rule of thumb that the opening part of a horror game is always the best part. If it sucks in the first half hour, it's never going to get better and will suck the rest of the game. Even Silent Hill 2 sucks when you're not looking at it in retrospect. You know what should scare me? The enemies themselves! The insanity effects in Amnesia are like a milder version of getting hit with a flashbang grenade, which has evoked plenty of "goddammit"s but never any scares. Horror should be atmospheric, not gamey. When I'm juggling light resources with sanity loss from hiding in shadows versus being eaten, it feels more like <i>trying</i> to play a horror game while someone nags me about needing to pick up more groceries. I kept hearing that Penumbra was a primitive prototype experiment that was perfected in Amnesia, but so far Penumbra was the superior experience.[/quote]