The Amnesia Collection puts together Frictional Games‘ modern classic Amnesia: The Dark Descent and its mini expansion Justine with The Chinese Room’s collaborative spiritual successor A Machine for Pigs. It’s a nice package overall that’s a bit late coming to the Xbox One, but an appreciated addition all the same. It’s priced well at $29.99, the majority of which can be easily justified for The Dark Descent alone, which is still enjoyable 8 years after its debut, and comes with an optional harder difficulty setting this time around. The Justine add-on and A Machine for Pigs round out the package with a couple more strange stories and creepy locales for players to immerse themselves in.

The Dark Descent in many ways perfects the balance of exploration, stealth, horror, and narrative that Frictional Games first introduced with the Penumbra series back in 2007. It’s a game of remarkable creative integrity: every element of the experience interacts with the other elements in such a way that no part could be removed without greatly weakening the result. Most impressive are its art and sound direction, narrative pacing, and balance between exploration and scripted sequences to create a sense of horror and tension.

The gloomy Brennenburg Castle and 19th Century setting make for a locale that is both unsettling and fascinating at the same time. Daniel, the amnesiac protagonist of the game, wanders through its vast halls from one strange chamber to the next. The deeper he goes, the more bizarre the architecture becomes, revealing laboratories, elaborate tunnels, prisons, torture chambers, and occult structures. Light and darkness are balanced cleverly, with the amount of light around Daniel suppressing his gradual descent into madness. As his sanity depletes the screen becomes unfocused, blurring and swaying as strange insects and eerie crackling sounds manifest around him. The light of his lantern or candles and fireplaces he can light with collectible tinderboxes also attracts enemies, however, and that’s on top of being limited by the resources at hand. The Dark Descent is very much a survival horror game in this sense, albeit one that forbids combat. Daniel can only run, hide, and avoid looking at monsters, lest their ghoulish forms drain his sanity faster and alert them to his presence. The sound design is excellent at capturing the enormity of the castle as growling monsters, distant cries for help from unseen prisoners (or are they just memories? Ghosts?), and Daniel’s shaky breaths echo off the walls and into the darkness.

The amnesiac protagonist is a common storytelling trope, a cliche even. However, The Dark Descent uses the idea quite well by connecting the player’s explorations in Brennenburg Castle with narrative developments. There aren’t a lot of proper cutscenes in The Dark Descent, just hazy memories, usually auditory, that Daniel experiences from time to time as he enters different rooms. Even his initial motive, an order to kill the castle’s owner Alexander, is wrapped in mystery since its delivered by a letter Daniel wrote to himself before losing his memory. This design choice allows The Dark Descent to mostly give the player autonomy to uncover the story as they explore the castle through scattered pieces of Daniel’s journal and the writings of Alexander and other characters found along the way. This is particularly important for maintaining good pacing, as the game rarely forces the player to be passive and still for exposition longer than several seconds.

Most of what the player is tasked to do as Daniel is sneak around Brennenburg Castle while solving various puzzles to make their way deeper into the structure to locate Alexander. Occasionally there are monstrous enemies roaming the halls with Daniel that the player needs to evade. Sometimes enemies are introduced in scripted sequences that proceed in a linear, action-packed fashion like a chase. More often, though, enemies exist within a general area of the castle and may cross paths with the player during regular exploration. This adds a great feeling of tension to creeping through the dark corridors, not being certain whether the sounds of dragging chains and low grunts are part of the ambiance or a sign that an enemy is close by. The puzzles that provide the other large portion of The Dark Descent’s gameplay are often elegant and clever, calling upon the player to manipulate various items in physics-driven solutions, or to search around for tools to use in some interesting manner elsewhere, like combining a fungus with blood and a strange animal secretion to make an occult potion.

The Justine expansion drops the player into the role of an anonymous woman caught up in a Saw-like series of puzzle rooms with other trapped victims. She and the player are guided along by recorded messages from the enigmatic and quite insane Justine Florbelle, who orchestrated these “tests” as part of her exploration of the human psyche. Unlike The Dark Descent, Justine cuts to the chase and doesn’t bother with much suspense. The player moves between each elaborate puzzle or trial, tasked with finding a solution and escaping while potentially saving the other people trapped in Justine’s experiment, too.

Justine is a short-lived but entertaining mini expansion with only loose connections to The Dark Descent’s story, although its environments are clearly recycled from that game. It’s a nice slice of horror with its own intriguing backstory and plot twist. It suffers from one considerable flaw, however: dying at any time restarts the entire game from the opening, unskippable cutscene. It’s possible that the developers thought that Justine was short enough that any players being forced back to the beginning by an untimely death wouldn’t be too annoyed as they replayed everything up to their loss again. But since the player can be killed seemingly instantly by the enemies that pop up occasionally, it seems like a recipe for frustration to set the player up for easy death without any safety net to prevent a tedious retracing of steps through the whole game again.

The last piece of The Amnesia Collection is A Machine for Pigs, and it’s a polarizing game that strikes half its notes right and the other half poorly. If The Dark Descent is a game whose various design elements can’t be removed without harming the end result, A Machine for Pigs is what happens when exactly that decision to remove design elements is made. Much of the gameplay found in The Dark Descent (sanity, health, puzzles, etc.) is stripped away entirely or minimized greatly in favor of a narrative walking simulator in A Machine for Pigs. This isn’t entirely unexpected since co-developer The Chinese Room previously made a name for itself with its narrative walking simulator Source engine mod Dear Esther. However, coming from The Dark Descent and Justine, A Machine for Pigs is a strange beast in ways that aren’t always appealing.

What does work well in A Machine for Pigs is its setting and narrative, for the most part. The art direction retains the moody atmosphere and eeriness of The Dark Descent, but with a distinctly steampunk flavor. The player follows an amnesiac Oswald Mundus, a wealthy industrialist with a remarkable factory built under his property and the streets of 19th Century London. Mundus awakens in a cage, his house empty and his young sons nowhere to be found, and so he sets out to find them. He is guided along by a mysterious voice on the telephone to delve far below into the heart of the machine he has built his factory around. There, after repairing damage caused by an unknown saboteur, the voice tells him, Mundus will be able to rescue and reunite with his boys.

The sprawling underground factory and machine Mundus constructed, along with the London streets, Mundus’ estate, and a nearby church provide a wider variety of locations for the player to journey through compared to The Dark Descent. The detail put into these areas still looks top notch 5 years later, creating a believable illusion of architecture with purpose and direction beyond just providing levels for the game. One of the weaknesses of A Machine for Pigs, though, is the linearity of the whole game. Impressive at the setting tends to be, the player doesn’t get to do much exploring. Doors are frequently discovered but are inexplicably locked and serve only as decoration as the player is funneled towards the next cutscene or piece of narrative exposition. The physics-based interactions of The Dark Descent are notably absent from the vast majority of A Machine for Pigs, further reinforcing the notion that the environments are for looking at, not playing with.

Also infrequent are puzzles or enemy encounters. Gone is resource management as Mundus has a lantern that will never run out of fuel. Gone also are the health and sanity bars from The Dark Descent, which works against the sense of threat the grotesque enemies might otherwise project when they do make the occasional appearance. For the most part, the player walks along the only path the developers leave available, encounter a cutscene or read a note that fills in a little more backstory, and then heads onward to the next one. Around the two-thirds mark the game begins to introduce a little more gameplay involvement that comes about halfway towards the experience The Dark Descent presented. Unfortunately, the game also begins to grow narratively weaker at about the same time, as much of the story and its twists is delivered in a heavy-handed manner from the outset that steals much of the potential surprise and mystery away from the player. Where a relatively conventional but entertaining story might have ended on a semi-ambiguous but satisfying conclusion, A Machine for Pigs extends it for another hour-long act that takes the carefully designed setting and atmosphere and plunges it into such fantastical strangeness that it’s almost a different game and story entirely by the end. Much of the satisfaction, or lack thereof, will be dependent on how much the player enjoys the story and the relative absence (and then late emergence) of puzzles and enemies in the gameplay.

The Amnesia Collection makes for a solid package overall, providing three fairly different game experiences tied together by a common thread of presenting an adventure game steeped in horror and varying amounts of action. Chances are good that there’s something enjoyable for most who are curious about trying these games for the first time. It doesn’t offer much to incentivize previous owners of these games to double-dip, but with its budget price tag that’s easy to forgive.

8/10 

Check Out the Amnesia Collection Xbox One Release Trailer:

Amnesia Collection is available for Xbox One.

Michael Schreiber

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I've been gaming for 22 years, ever since my mom picked up a secondhand NES, and I've played on just about every gaming platform out there since. I think video games are one of most innovative and artistic mediums in the world today, and I'm always curious how developers will surprise me next.

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