Stumbling through Amnesia - Part 1

[davidn]

I keep on saying (now and then) that despite the impression that I may have given over the last few years, I'm not really a fan of horror games. Starting when I got my hands on Silent Hill some time around 1999, it's just been the case that I somehow get roped into playing them as people keep on giving me them to try. It must be said that I have a respect for things that scare me cleverly, though, and they have a great viral appeal in that you can pass them around either to spread the pain or just to see if people are as traumatized as you were.

I had told people... quite a lot that I definitely wasn't going to play Amnesia, then quadralien went and got it for my birthday, so I felt I should at least give it a try. And I didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to share my reactions with the world - though it must be said that the game has started slowly compared to my expectations, with only a couple of involuntary noises from me. In fact, I think the party that ended up most distressed from the experience was the plant ten minutes in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTsvrbo0tJw

I did about twenty minutes of it, then decided it would be better to upload it in multiple parts instead of one megavideo and edited what I had. Thanks to a Christmas present from Whitney's parents, I've now moved on from iMovie (which, to be fair to it, is pretty decent for a free program and can out-video Windows Movie Maker in virtually every respect) and am using PowerDirector, so having eliminated the need to work on two computers at the same time I can put these things together a lot more quickly.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Okay, it is pretty clever the way they let people invent their own fear without having to do anything more than spawning cupboards by putting in the capacity for performing an action hesitantly.

(I'd have been tempted to go back and try that big door again after you learned how to open the cupboards, though! Although it probably would have just been "it's locked" or something..)

"There's some sort of ghostly emission here.." I was going to ask, actually, whether you could see the intermittent spattered trail of blood you'd been following the entire way... it was light enough that I figured it would stand out in grayscale, but eight minutes in was the first time you commented on it..

Watching you put that plant on the table, suddenly I want to watch people re-enacting famous scenes from film history as clumsy in-game avatars or something. I can't even imagine how unplayable these are going to seem once some more natural form of interacting with these environments is invented...

Have you noticed that the leftmost column of pixels of your video feed seems to be wrapped around from the right side?

Did you ever figure out if tilting to one side was a bug, or if the character was meant to have a limp? (It seemed to go away in subsequent areas, or did I just stop noticing it?)

[davidn]

The game seems to go back and forth between two almost completely opposite scare methods so far - the interface allowing you to be hesitant like that, which is fear that's completely invented by the player... and making the player character react to things that aren't there, either by tilting the view a bit or by outright collapsing and making it difficult to move, making me scared of his own reaction to a bit of cloth on the wall of that corridor (I don't do well with things that are themselves frightened - the Ouch face in Doom is one of my most feared moments, and if I had had encountered a Sad Mac at any point when I was growing up, I would probably have died).

It's very surprising what you don't see when you're half-concentrating on talking as well as what's in front of you... as soon as I played back the video I could see that I was meant to have been following this very clear white trail for a long time, but while playing, it wasn't until I was made to look at the floor by being guided down a set of stairs that I even noticed it. The big door at the start is definitely locked, though - no hand appears over it once you've tried it the first time.

It seems that object interaction in first-person games sort of froze with Half-Life, when you were suddenly able to see objects allegedly in your hands floating in front of you... I felt quite sorry for putting the plant through that, bashing it on every available surface as I tried to get it upright again!

I didn't notice the misplaced pixels until you said that, but I did get an encoding warning message when I uploaded to Youtube. It's there on the rendered video on my hard drive as well, so perhaps I need to adjust the settings a bit.