The first Suitor spawns, jaunts, and despawns. Frictional seemed to learn from the much-criticized scripted elements of Amnesia, demonstrating a more thoughtful and deliberate progression of challenge in Justine. It’s important to note that this enemy didn’t just pop out of a closet somewhere to jaunt across my path only to disappear moments later, his jump-scare job well done.
Those seconds spent desperately cranking the door’s handle as the monstrous Suitor threatened to burst in behind me were some of the most agonizing I’ve ever experienced in a game. Trading effectively on the fear of permadeath, this choice takes place near the end of the game, and I imagine most players left the poor soul behind to save their own skin. The third is the much more interesting of the trio, asking you to crank shut a door while being pursued in order to keep the prisoner beyond from being slaughtered. Then again, that may be precisely the point. Saving the first two entails solving very basic puzzles that leave you to wonder why this freedom was given in the first place for what was meant to be a psychological test, it seems rather silly to make execution solely the sadist’s choice. Three other prisoners are locked away in the dungeon-like Cabinet of Perturbation, and the choice is yours as to whether they live or die. While such a mechanic would never fly in the 8-10 hour Amnesia, implementing it in the bite-sized Justine is a brilliant way to leverage the game’s brevity to crank up the stakes beyond the usual virtual character death.ĭeath isn’t just a personal concern, either. Fortunately, there are only one or two tricky bits, and the game can be dashed through in 20 minutes if you know what you’re doing, so the prospect of permanent death is never a frustrating one. Perish 20 feet from the final room and prepare to do it all up again.
#Amnesia justine manual
There are no manual saves, no autosaves, no quicksaves, and certainly no checkpoints. “Death is final - nothing will be saved.”
In fact, the most audacious moment of the game may be its first while Amnesia opens with an assurance that the game will handle saving for you and a comically rosy message that reads, “Welcome to Amnesia: The Dark Descent!” as if we’ve just arrived at some schoolboy summer camp, Justine has no time for such pleasantries: I’ll be over here, smashing cotton into my mouth and watching Sailor Moon. And there are certainly few things in gaming I wanted to do less than proceed through the pitch black tunnel leading to the Trancept Saw chamber as the sound of shredding flesh and incoherent sobbing pounded off the walls.
The tension is thick to be sure, and encountering the hostile Suitors will have your heart racing, but nothing ever approaches the crippling terror experienced in some of Amnesia’s better segments, like the downright paralyzing Prison that left me spending minutes at a time huddled behind a strangely-comforting cell door, wondering if now was a good time to quit. There are moments - the dusty hallway of mannequins chief among them - that will have you cracking open doors as slowly as humanly possible, making liberal use of the lean buttons to make sure you’re never caught off guard, as much as such a thing is possible. Great horror games, like Amnesia, make you dread every step. Good horror games, like Eternal Darkness, make you uncomfortable. While it isn’t quite as deathly terrifying as I expected, Justine wraps a tight and commendably subtle narrative around all the mechanical bits that made Amnesia special, while doing an impressive job mitigating its flaws through some clever design.
#Amnesia justine free
With the release of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs only a few weeks away, I decided to finally power through the free Justine expansion for the original Amnesia, against my better judgement.
0 kommentar(er)
