Amnesia: Rebirth - Told A Machine For Pigs to hold it's beer

Now it just displays jumpscares more frequently which I can't say is an improvement. I guess the fake mechanic this time is the health system since you can't actually die and instead just see jumpscares for a bit and are teleported forward.
Supposedly in this one the sanity mechanic is tied more closely to the story and has an actual impact on it, so the more you fuck up the worse off the MC becomes. That was the whole point of making this game - tying the mechanical side of Amnesia to the narrative side of Soma and giving it all lasting consequences.

Im a little bitch so those kind of games actually scare me but ill play it nevertheless.
 
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I think Eternal Darkness nailed the sanity mechanic. Haven’t seen it done as well since.
Eternal Darkness was great, but what made it so effective was the fact that directly fucking with the player wasn't really an established concept at the time and it caught people by surprise when the more meta moments happened. I don't know if that magic can be recaptured.

Regardless, Amnesia and Soma were both all time great games for me for different reasons. I hope the new one really nails it. Maybe it will make up for Routine vanishing off the face of the earth.
 
I haven't seen a game with fake mechanics in a long time and it was very surprising that they got away with it in the internet age without anyone calling their bluff
I did, and I doubt I was alone, but you'd be shouted down by fanboys screaming "Ur just 2 sCaReD!". It's like how any criticism of Dark Soul's is shouted down with variations on "git gud".

Eternal Darkness was great, but what made it so effective was the fact that directly fucking with the player wasn't really an established concept at the time and it caught people by surprise when the more meta moments happened. I don't know if that magic can be recaptured.
I think it can. Games like Undertale and Doki Doki Literature Club are all meta (I think, never actually played them myself).

There's new effects you could do, such as having a fake dashboard, fake texture pop-in, or having FMV so it looks as if the channel changed. Maybe put a YouTuber in the corner fake reacting to your gameplay.

Though it is a trick that has a certain shelf life and needs to be used sparingly.
 
So far, the story is interesting and the atmosphere is decent, but it doesn't really feel like I'm doing much but walking. There's some small puzzles here and there and I'm sure I'll meet the monster soon, but christ, in the original game I was already sneaking by the monster and on the second hub. And I know that Amensia held off on you meeting the monster for a while in the first few hours of the game, but it still made you paranoid and scared of the creature through excellent sound and level design before it truly appeared as a threat. That's another thing, instead of the quasi hub/star progression, the levels have mostly been giant hallways, making it kinda easy to miss notes, especially in the gate world where everything is so smoggy.

And the protag's commentary is so damn unneeded for the most part. She's either ruining to mood with her 'Oh, that's so weird' reaction to scary shit or making very obvious observations to the player. "That corpse over there might be the writer of the note he was gripping in his hand!". She works in some of the emotional scenes, but in the casual gameplay, she just ruins the mood.
 
I think Eternal Darkness nailed the sanity mechanic. Haven’t seen it done as well since.

Eternal Darkness is by far the gold standard and I'm surprised no one has really tried ripping off the way it broke the 4th wall, with only Arkham Asylum doing it once.

Eternal Darkness is overall one of my all time favorite games, I'll always be heartbroken that it never got a sequel.
 
I finished the game. It's okay. I feel it's a 6-7/10.

The jumpscares are really annoying, especially when you've flipped through all your matches/oil trying to figure out where the hell to go.

The game has way too many characters for its own good. It tries to tell a fairly simple story in a complicated manner. There are literally two gay characters that serve almost no purpose in the story other than being gay.

The game has far, far too many detours because "It's a horror game so your transport doesn't work/something goes wrong". This leads to some severe pacing issues in some parts of the game, and not all the setpieces are worthy of that detour.

Some "puzzles" feel obtuse and sometimes are a matter of figuring out that you need to move some object somewhere, even though there's a large portion of useless interactables around the environment.

Having the ancient civilization explained rather than being a mystery like it was in A Dark Descent takes a lot of the mystique out of it. It's more interesting as a question and less interesting as an answer.

The motherhood thing felt really cringe at times. Press X to check baby.

Overall, I think Soma was far more competent at telling a more complicated story. While The Dark Descent did a decent job at progressing a story along and having decent pacing.
 
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I sure love it when the protagonist in my horror game keeps running at the mouth endlessly, really does wonders for the ambiance and sense of tension. I also didn't like SOMA because it was too preoccupied with telling a grand tale to actually be scary or have any gameplay in it. These guys peaked with the original Penumbra and everything since has been iterative at best and retrograde at worst.
 
Feels like there haven't really been many good efforts at horror games that aren't PT ripoffs with ABOOGABOOGABOOGA! jump scares in a while (at least, that I'm aware of), so maybe they figured they'd make something that wasn't really horror again.

Honestly, from looking at some clips of it, it seems boring as fuck. Enjoyment of the game seems to hinge wholly on whether or not you like the protagonist herself, and if you find yourself apathetic - whoopsie, there's not really a lot to keep you going through the intro. The amount of dream sequences and flashbacks is also something that's distinctly love-hate -- I really, really do not like that device.
 
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I finished the game. It's okay. I feel it's a 6-7/10.

The jumpscares are really annoying, especially when you've flipped through all your matches/oil trying to figure out where the hell to go.

The game has way too many characters for its own good. It tries to tell a fairly simple story in a complicated manner. There are literally two gay characters that serve almost no purpose in the story other than being gay.

The game has far, far too many detours because "It's a horror game so your transport doesn't work/something goes wrong". This leads to some severe pacing issues in some parts of the game, and not all the setpieces are worthy of that detour.

Some "puzzles" feel obtuse and sometimes are a matter of figuring out that you need to move some object somewhere, even though there's a large portion of useless interactables around the environment.

Having the ancient civilization explained rather than being a mystery like it was in A Dark Descent takes a lot of the mystique out of it. It's more interesting as a question and less interesting as an answer.

The motherhood thing felt really cringe at times. Press X to check baby.

Overall, I think Soma was far more competent at telling a more complicated story. While The Dark Descent did a decent job at progressing a story along and having decent pacing.
Does 'Press X to check on Baby' ever mean anything, or is it just a gimmick that gets a few extra lines?
 
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I sure love it when the protagonist in my horror game keeps running at the mouth endlessly, really does wonders for the ambiance and sense of tension. I also didn't like SOMA because it was too preoccupied with telling a grand tale to actually be scary or have any gameplay in it. These guys peaked with the original Penumbra and everything since has been iterative at best and retrograde at worst.

The protag talking to herself constantly is irritating.

Does 'Press X to check on Baby' ever mean anything, or is it just a gimmick that gets a few extra lines?
You eventually get a blue aura around the screen at times. Checking the baby when that happens reduces your fear. I've noticed it sometimes comes at very unopportune moments though.

I looked at the writers for the game. I figured that the game was written by white dudes wearing t-shirts and fedoras. Wondering if the people working on this game had a pregnancy fetish.
 
A game badly received that revolves around a pregnancy fetish. I wonder what other M game that reminds me of...

I'm not a huge Amnesia fan, but I was excited about this title (Especially because I unironically adore AMFP and SOMA please don't hate me). I'm really disappointed by what I'm hearing about it.

I actually thought it would be about aliens or something. That was the logical conclusion I saw for the series. Old castle, steampunk machine, underwater scifi. Aliens was where I was seeing it going. Now I'm not disappointed it's not about aliens, just disappointed that it kind of just went... Nowhere?
I haven't played it myself, or even seen a stream, but, I've heard it revolves a lot around trying to make you feel things about characters that are never introduced or have any impact in the story, which I absolutely can't stand. Nothing I hate more about writing than trying to get free emotional impact out of zero investment from the writer.

Oh well, I'm sure I'll hear a lot more about the game overtime and watch some streams. That's how I learned about AMFP. Maybe I'll warm up to it in time like I did that title. But from what I'm hearing, I'm doubtful of that. Even if everyone hated AMFP, at least it had an intriguing story. I'm not hearing much about that from this title.
 
One thing I've noticed is just how uninteresting a lot of the notes and flashbacks are. In the first game, they developed the setting, told interesting mini stories and overall built up the atmosphere and the players want to find out how fucked up everything got. Daniel's flashbacks gave us a window into the fucked up things he's done and how they affected him, they communicated interesting tidbits about the character. In this game? Most notes have just been very samey sounding exposition that just tells you where to go and a bit about the lives of the people there (they're not even as engagingly written as the first game either). The flashbacks don't really tell us much about the character nor act as a window into intense and atmospheric scenes, just either 'Muh Baby' or 'We're fucked, aren't we?'.

Machine for Pigs sucked and tended to get a bit pretentious in it's notes, but they were still at least interesting to read. Maybe I just miss how verbose the characters were in the first two games, with the language here being more casual and simple.
 
Walking simulators are just a reincarnation of adventure games, in first person.
As far as they go Amnesia/Soma were very nice, Soma especially had a great story imo.
Here's the thing most people don't want to admit:

Most adventure games were fucking boring. LucasArts solved the problem by making them funny and Sierra solved it by making your many, many deaths hilarious.
 
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