Amnesia: Rebirth Review – Desert Stranding

Strike a match and sneak through the darkness of Amnesia: Rebirth as you struggle to find safety in a desolate world filled with nightmares.

Amnesia: Rebirth
Developer: Frictional Games
Price: $30
Platforms: PC (reviewed), PS4
MonsterVine was provided with a PC code for review.

Ten years after the release of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Frictional Games returned to the Amnesia universe for a full in-house sequel with Amnesia: Rebirth. You play as Tasi, a woman who wakes up in the desert of Algeria with no memory of what happened except that a plane crash stranded her, her husband, and the team they were traveling with. As you travel in search of the others, it doesn’t take long for you to realize that things went terribly wrong.

It is a first-person horror game with an emphasis on light and darkness. If you stay in the dark too long, you will begin to suffer from hallucinations in the form of images that flash in the center of the screen. When the game launched, this occurred often enough to become annoying, but a post-release patch significantly reduced the frequency of the “fear flash.” You have no permanent light source, so you’ll need to make use of matches and oil for your lantern in order to see in the dark. These are a limited resource, and you can only carry a limited number with you at a time. The game strikes a good balance by making you constantly feel like you’re about to run out of matches and oil, yet providing more just when you need them the most.

Although your journey begins in the desert, other parts take you into an alien world. No matter where you are, however, the general gameplay mechanics remain the same. (Just don’t think too hard about why the other world has so many matches lying around.) In both, you’ll also find notes that flesh out the game’s backstory. Notes in the desert are related to Tasi’s expedition, while the records in the other world give glimpses of its unsettling past. Tasi’s memories also expand the story, whether they’re returning memories of events in the desert or flashbacks to her life with her husband and their daughter.

Before long, you learn Tasi has another reason to be concerned about her current situation: she’s pregnant. She frequently talks to her unborn child, and it’s even a game mechanic to focus on the child to calm Tasi’s fears. Although this somewhat reduces the sense of isolation, the intention is most likely to create a bond between the player and the unborn child. Personally, this didn’t work for me, although that might be because I spent too long feeling suspicious of a rapidly advancing pregnancy in a horror game. It’s clear Frictional Games is trying to tell a personal, character-driven story here, with a stronger focus on Tasi’s feelings and her family. If you’re more interested in the cosmic story aspect of things, though, don’t worry. There’s still plenty of that as the history of the other world is revealed, as well as some wonderful callbacks to Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

But there is one part of the story that is truly frustrating, and that is its progression. The story’s most common means of progression is for you to be moments away from achieving your goal, only to encounter a setback that blocks your progress and requires you to take a roundabout path back toward your goal, only to suffer another setback, etc. It makes Tasi feel like much more of a reactive protagonist than a proactive one, and the story suffers as a result. I spent several hours thinking the story’s pacing was being dragged out by these setbacks, until I finally realized that this journey is the story. Changing the circumstances around the plot beats would have made a world of difference.

As you travel through the various areas the game contrives to trap you in, you’ll occasionally encounter puzzles you need to solve… and you’ll often encounter monsters that stalk you through the darkness. Frictional Games made a curious choice not to include traditional game overs in Amnesia: Rebirth, to reduce the frustration of needing to try the same part of a game over and over again. Instead, a monster that catches you will drag you to another part of the area. Sometimes this hinders your progress, while other times it actually helps. This mitigates the fear to some degree, but fortunately the game is scary enough to keep you fleeing even without the fear of lost progress. While it lacks a persistent sense of dread and tension, Amnesia: Rebirth has some fantastically terrifying sections that stand out above and beyond everything else in the game.

I’ve tried to avoid making too many comparisons to Amnesia: The Dark Descent in this game. That’s mainly because I want to judge the game on its own merits rather than as a comparison to another, but also because it’s difficult to compare the two. They have many common gameplay elements, but Rebirth’s more personal story, stronger focus on narrative in general, and use of desert caves and high-tech alien landscapes give it an entirely different feel. Nevertheless, the horror that filled the first game still runs strong in Amnesia: Rebirth.

The Final Word
Amnesia: Rebirth stumbles a little with its narrative-based approach and certain gameplay choices, but every time I started to feel frustrated with its direction, it had a nightmarish encounter waiting to remind me that no one does heart-pounding terror quite like Frictional Games.

-MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good