So, in a bait-and-switch worthy of one of the craftier sanity mechanics featured in Eternal Darkness, I've decided to go ahead and write about a different horror game:
AMNESIA: THE DARK DESCENT!
But seriously, if I was at Eternal-Darkness level fuckery, this article would be about My Little Pony.
If you know Amnesia, you know that it's a pretty scary game. It has fantastic atmosphere and great first-person mechanics, mixed with a sanity system and a complete inability to defend yourself.
If you don't know Amnesia, the game is basically the equivalent of playing through an H.P. Lovecraft story. I took a Gothic Literature class in college, and this is basically the distilled version of that.
The gothic tropes we have in this game are (in no particular order):
-- An evil castle in the evil forests of Germany
-- A corrupt and evil Baron
-- A plucky British main character
-- An Algerian dig-site, complete with
-- A crazy artifact linked to an ancient evil, and
-- Racism.
"The men were superstitious and fearful. They argued loudly and I felt their strange language getting to me." Those crazy Algerians, with their strange and obnoxious language!
If this game were any more gothic, it would wear baggy black pants with too many jingly-bits and listen to nothing but Tool and Nine-Inch-Nails.
Strangely enough, though, it works. I'm always a fan of getting away from the overused tropes in any particular genre, but there's something to be said about using elements from a language we're all familiar with. Nothing says 'horror' like a Bavarian castle, in other words.
Neuschwanstein Nonwithstanding.
The mechanics of the game are likewise limited but freeing: everything in the game is done by grabbing things and manipulating them. Basically, the only way to interact with the virtual landscape is with your own two virtual hands.
Like, say there's a door in front of you-- the only way to open it is to click on it with your crosshair and pull it open like you would a real door. You can ease it open, maybe peeking through to see if there's a monster ahead, or you can slam it shut if there's a monster chasing you.
It's the same with most of the objects in the game, from set-pieces like brooms and books to puzzle-solving levers. If there's a closet, you can open it by hand and pick up what you find inside. If there's a desk, you can pull open the drawers individually and see the odds and ends inside roll around.
if there's anything on the ground, you can pick it up and indulge your neuroses.
This is one of the most refreshing mechanics I've seen in a game, hands down. Especially in a survival-horror game like this one.
Instead of finding a set of medallion-shaped pixels that you need to use to click on a set of statue-shaped pixels in order to raise a staircase out of the floor to get to the next level--I'm looking at YOU, every-Resident-Evil-game-ever--you can just use a box to climb up.
There was a moment fairly early in the game where the ceiling of the room I was in collapsed, blocking the door to the exit with debris. I'd been so programmed by videogames to think that debris means an impassible barrier that I was stuck inside for a good five minutes before I found out that I could just move the debris aside and leave.
now if only i could break the window and leave, all my problems would be solved!
So, what are the designers of the game doing by making you directly manipulate the environment to play the game?
The answer to this rhetorical question is "making horror." Anytime you get the player to slow down and think about the world you've made in a way that they should in real-life, you've automatically immersed them just a little bit more. You put the responsibility to react to the horror on the shoulders of the player as a person, rather than the player as a character.
Does it work?
Yes and no. For this mechanic to work, you have to have complete dedication to it in your game. Otherwise, each instance of the more conventional game-mechanics looks sloppy by comparison.
the brain in my item-grid is telling me i should take it easy.
This is a fine line to tread. On one hand, dedication to this mechanic means you've got an immersive game which makes the player treat it--and react to it--more like the real world. On the other hand, menu mechanics are really hard to do realistically.
I mean, how do you make a realistic health-bar? Or keep track of the important items you have without the use of an inventory?*
This is a question that is really important if you're making a horror game like Amnesia. I've heard it called a 'physics-based puzzle/horror game,' but 'physics-based' doesn't really give credit to the whole virtual-hands mechanic-- I'd call it more of a 'realistic horror-explorer.'
The key term there is 'realistic.' If there's one thing that Amnesia is going for, it's realism.
pictured: realism
Or, if not realism, then mechanical verisimilitude ('verisimilitudistic,' sadly, is not a word.)
For those of you who aren't snobby-former-English-majors, verisimilitude is the quality of seeming real or true; Amnesia, through its use of the virtual hand, is trying its damnedest to achieve verisimilitude. You can see why that would be really handy in a horror game-- if you feel like what's happening in a horror game is real, you'll probably be scared.
The biggest thing you can do in a game to achieve verisimilitude is to keep the player from noticing the mechanics. That's why the simplicity of Amnesia's virtual-hand is so great: it's so easy to remember "click & drag" that you forget you're using a mouse and a keyboard. The only time you're brought out of the action--mechanically speaking--is when you have to go into your inventory to pull out a key or refill your lantern.
or organize your skull collection.
So, What Would I Do Differently?
This is a tough one. Amnesia does a lot right with regards to mechanics. The only fault I can find in such an innovative, fun and overall scary game--again, mechanically speaking--is the menu.
It's surprising how much a menu can affect game-play, especially when it's one of your main avenues of interaction with a game. I mean, in any given game, you spend a pretty considerable amount of time just clicking options and hoping something works, right?
So when a menu just doesn't flow with the rest of the game, you spend a considerable amount of time looking at something that seems a little bit worse than the rest of the game. Then, eventually, that's all you can think of.
Like how all anybody says about the statue of David is that he's got a tiny dick.
For answers, let's look at a couple of other horror games and how they implement inventory menus (and let's do it briefly, because this article is tedious enough.)
First up? RESIDENT EVIL 4! Or any other Resident Evil, or Diablo, or anything with an inventory that makes you consider space when picking things up. This is a cool mechanic because, A.) you actually have to consider resources versus capacity in an interactive space and B.) I've always had a boner for Tetris.
I'm not saying this is a good mechanic to have for Amnesia, because it falls into a lot of the same traps as the current menu-- it breaks up the flow of a verisimilitudistic (HA!) game by introducing a theoretical carrying case. In a game that wants to be as real as possible, introducing an intangible dream-space where you keep your flashlight is just... off. It doesn't work. What I do like, however, is that a space to maintain an inventory exists, and it takes into account the objects that you're storing.
Second, let's look at DEAD SPACE! While I don't particularly like Dead Space as a game in and of itself (another article, I guarantee you) I do really like the way it handles a menu. Instead of pausing the game to take you into a time-null item-zone, the menu of Dead Space is a hologram that the main character projects from his spacesuit onto the world at large. It's basically the equivalent of looking at a menu at a restaurant: you can go through it at your leisure, but the waiter can still come up and attack you with shoulder-blade-scythes made of hideous bone growth if you're not careful.
call stephen king, i've got the BEST idea.
It's a pretty standard menu, but I really like the fact that it's integrated into the game-space in a way that no other menu had been before it.
So why not take advantage of these two mechanics together, and just have the main character in Amnesia carry a satchel around?
Like, hey, you find a key! Cool! When you grab it, there's a brief animation of your character putting it away off-screen. Then, when you need to unlock the door, press the menu key and WHABAM! Your character pulls up his bag.
Instead of a grid, let's run with the whole virtual-hand mechanic and just have a bag. No organization mechanic, just a space where the things you pick up are stored. Using the physics mechanic you already have in place, create a space for the player dig through the things they've picked up, having to move spare matches and lamp-oil out of the way to find the key again.
It takes a second, but the flow of the game isn't really interrupted in the way it would be with the item-grid method. You're still in the world, and you're still using the one main mechanic to interact with it.
Which, interestingly enough, means you're still in the world, being forced to interact with it.
hey
Say you've found a key by sneaking past a terrible necrotic beast-monster, except now the monster knows that someone's been nearby fiddling with his key. Sneakily, you've got to make your way to the locked door and unlock it. But, just as you reach the door, you hear a shuffling behind you! The monster!
hey you left your wallet back there
Quickly, you pull up your satchel, pawing frantically through the things you're carrying with you--matches, lamp oil, laudanum--until you find the key! Hurry! Put it in the lock! GO! THE MONSTER IS RIGHT BEHIND YOU!
dude i'm just trying to help
I make this suggestion because it doesn't break the flow of a horror game. In a horror game, flow is everything. If you have a chance to catch your breath in an inventory menu, you've kinda missed an opportunity to keep the player freaked out, which--ultimately--is your goal.
Instead of taking a breather and filling your lamp with oil while you're paused in the middle of a dark corridor, why not make the character mindful of when they should use the inventory? Make them look through their bag by a lit candle in a safe study. Make safety hard to come by. Or, harder to come by than a simple button-press.
"But Keller!" you say. "What about the health and sanity gauge? WHERE WILL THEY PUT THE HEALTH AND SANITY GAUGE?!"
To you, crazy blog-reader, I say: "Why not just have the character check his pulse?"
This is a really quick fix that engages the player much more than looking at a picture of a brain in the inventory screen does. If you press a key, it brings up your characters arms-- one hand puts two fingers over the wrist of the other and you hear a heartbeat. If you're calm and healthy, it goes bom... bom... bom... and so on. If you're going crazy, however, it goes BOM BOM BOM BOM BOM because you're about to pass out and shit yourself.
Again, this is a mechanic that forces the player to find somewhere safe before they can know how close they are to dying. It takes a second longer for the player to figure out how they're doing than it would if they could just look at a health readout. It engages a different sense than a health-bar does, and keys you into sound as a central dynamic (which always is/should be a central dynamic in horror-games. But I'll get into that in a different article.) Best of all, by checking your levels with this method you're standing still while a monster is standing behind you.
dude wtf come on
So, WWIDD? I would have an inventory that used the same virtual-hand mechanic as the rest of the game, and forced the player to consider when and where to use it. Likewise, I would replace the health and sanity readouts with checking the character's pulse, which is more interesting and fluid than pausing a game for an inventory screen (also, I didn't touch on it but I'd say get rid of the health bar entirely, like Portal did. Just focus on sanity.) (also, it would make more sense for laudanum to be used as a curative this way. Just sayin'.)
But, honestly, other than these two things I wouldn't change much with regards to the mechanics of Amnesia: Dark Descent. It is a pretty rad game and I suggest you check it out if you haven't already.
NEXT WEEK: Mechanically speaking, Amnesia is a really solid game. But how does it hold up as a horror game? Do the sanity effects of Amnesia add anything to the overall experience, or are they just obnoxious? Why can't you just hit the monsters with a broom?
Tune in next week for another exiting installment of...
WWIDD!
* I had a question written here that I didn't address because it didn't fit with the article as a whole. But I still think it's important, especially with/in a counter to what I suggested. So. Yeah.
"At which point does the realism of the game actually take away from the experience?"
