Amnesia: The Dark Descent

I don't really get scared watching movies. For me watching a horror movie is just to see what they've done from a gore stand point. Jump scares and all that are to easy to see coming whenever I watch something so I usually don't bother. Now games on the other hand, they can scare the living crap out of me. From some NES games to Resident Evil and more recently Cryostasis when a game has good jump scares they floor me. I don't know if it's something about the interactivity of it that makes me scare so easy but it does happen and will probably always happen.

When I first heard about Amnesia I was interested in playing it. It was being called the, "Scariest game of all time" and it would make grown people break down and cry. I knew it would be something that would be hard for me to play as I scare so easy when it comes to games so it did take me awhile to actually get around to playing it.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent was released in late 2010. Brought to us by Frictional Games who had made the Penumbra series before this. It was first released as a digital download and later saw a retail release.

This takes place in 1839, you play as a man named Daniel. You awake in this castle unable to remember why he's in said castle and really not a whole lot about who he is. You set off to explore and you eventually find out that you're after something and that something is hunting you down, I'm keeping this vague as to not spoil any of the story.

Amnesia plays out in a first person perspective but it is not a FPS, in fact there isn't any combat in this game at all. You walk around solving puzzles and trying to reach your overall goal. It really made me think of it as a first person adventure game, as if something like Kings Quest or Phantasmagoria were in the first person. You find items and usually need to use them in some puzzle later on.

The controls for this are extremely tight. I absolutely love the feel the mouse has when you're looking around, it just feels so right. When some of the sanity stuff comes into play you get this neat sway effect that again just feels right with whats going on on the screen. If I could have anything to complain about the overall movement Daniel feels like he jumps way to high for the type of game it is.

Light plays a big role in your journey. Then you're in the darkness you start to lose sanity the lower your sanity goes the more crazy stuff you start to see. It reminds me of Eternal Darkness but I never saw it get super extreme like that game did, it never fakes a format of your hard drive and any of that breaking the fourth wall type of stuff. To fight back the insanity you need to be in the light and this can be handled a few ways. Sometimes candles and lanterns and such are already lit when you find them. You can find tinderboxes to light additional candles and the like. You also come into possession of a lantern you can carry around with you. The catch there is you need oil to keep it going which you'll find in all sorts of nooks and hidey holes around the castle.

Darkness can be your friend at times, it helps you hide from the monsters. Since you have zero combat options whenever a monster comes along you need to duck behind something and hope to hell it doesn't see you. Even with that there is a catch, you can't look at the monster. If you look at it your sanity drops quickly and eventually the thing you're looking at will see you and well, kill you dead. You have to balance hiding and you sanity to make sure you stay hidden but don't got all bat shit crazy from the darkness.

Now I do want to say, Amnesia is a good game. It has a great atmosphere and the story and setting are all really well done. But I do need to say this the game isn't that scary. It's creepy and there are some really messed up stuff going on in the world of Amnesia but I didn't really get scared much. It has one really good jump scare near the beginning of the game and after that, not so much. The tension can build up when you're being chased which I will say is thrilling but not really scary.

One of the things that doesn't really make this game scary to me is the lack on monsters. You really only encounter two types of monsters through out and for about ninety percent of the game it's only one type you see. For me horror is about the unknown and after you're seen the first monster there isn't really anything left unknown. They all look the same when you hear that sound that tells you a monster is coming you know what to expect and it just takes away from the horror. Now don't get me wrong the two monsters you see most in this are really cool looking (But still very similar looking) I would of loved to see some other messed up things, a little more variety would of been great.

The other thing I really didn't care for were some of the puzzles. Some of them were not easy to figure out, I'm not one to shrug off a challenge, while some of the puzzles required a little thinking to figure out some were not intuitive to figure out at all. The solution would be so abstract it took away from the overall experience. I had to look up the solution to one puzzle and the still didn't get it after I knew the solution I just sat there and wondered how anyone would figure it out on their own.

In closing I want to say it again. Amnesia is a really good game and yeah you should probably play it but don't believe all the hype, it's not that scary. Everything about the game comes together to make a great experience but it's just not an overall scary one. After playing this I really want to check out the Penumbra games as I've never played them but I am expecting more of the same in the "horror" department but I do think they'll be fun to play.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent 7 out of 10 (It's not scary)

Doom 3

I remember back in 2004 when Doom 3 was released. I got the call from the Gamespot or it may of still been a EB Games back then but I still remember when they called me to come pick it up. It was around 6 pm and it was raining like crazy outside one of the worst storms of the summer. I decided to brave the elements and drive out to grab my copy. The usually 20 minute drive took me almost two hours with the rush hour traffic and the inclement weather pouring it's rage down on us. I finally made it home and tore in to the package to get my game installed on my PC. Well all wasn't as happy as I wanted it to be as it didn't really run that great on the PC I had at the time. Having to dial back the settings to play I made it a little bit past the first boss before I decided to wait for a better PC to play the game in all of it's glory. Well a newer PC eventually came along but I was in the middle of me first discovering MMO's so a lot of game had to take a back seat and Doom 3 was one of those.

Fast forward to last week and I decided it was time to finally play Doom 3 and finish it. I was really interested in play the Hexen: Edge of Chaos mod for it but I figured I should beat the base game before I go messing around with any various mods.

Doom 3 as I said was released in 2004 from ID software. It is at it's core a re-imagining of the first Doom game but with a more fleshed out story. You again take the role of the nameless space marine stationed on Mars proper this time, as the first Doom took place on the Moons of Mars. You've just been transferred to the already troubled base just before for lack of a better term, all hell breaks loose.

The main thing Doom 3 had going for it back when it was first released and I think still has now are some pretty nice looking graphics. In 2004 Doom 3 was groundbreaking in the way it looked. ID really outdid themselves and they had the absolute best looking game on the market. Nowadays many people give that honor to Crysis but to me Doom 3 still looks pretty good. With my current machine I was able to crank up all the graphics setting to the highest and play it at a high frame rate. There was some minor tweaking needed in a config file as Doom 3 doesn't play nice with Vista/7 with it's graphics settings but I was up and running in widescreen 1680x1050 with Ultra settings in no time.

Gameplay wise this is a very basic FPS game. As much as this is a remake of the first Doom it gameplay is pretty much the same. Roam through the Mars base and shoot anything that gets in your way. While Doom 1 and 2 were very fast paced shooters Doom 3 takes a slower approach. The speed on this one is kind of like the modern survival horror FPS games we've seen recently. While I know some people didn't really care for the change in gameplay for the Doom series I quite enjoyed it. If you were in this situation you wouldn't go full speed into the unknown, you'd sneak around some and take your time to make sure you could survive.

All the weapons are here from the Doom games of old, Shotgun, Chaingun, the BFG and so on. We do see a few new weapons, the assault rifle (which I really liked) grenades and the Soul Cube. The Soul Cube is a pretty cool addition, it's powered by the number of kills you make. Every five kills you can throw the cube at an enemy and almost always get a one hit kill but you also get your life refilled. This is really important in the Nightmare mode as you are always loosing life and this can get you back to 100 percent in one kill. All the classic weapons have been changed a bit and they don't behave like their Doom 1/2 counterparts. The Plasma rifle fires slower and the Chaingun has a rev up time before the bullets start to fly. I enjoyed the changes to the weapons as I felt it made me have to use all of them and not just depend on one gun through the whole game. Some situations call for the Shotgun some need the Chaingun, it was fun to switch it up as I made my way through it all. I guess this should go here but something I really liked and I like it when any FPS has it is the weapon sway when you turn. When you turn the gun lags behind a bit to make the it seem that you are turning your head a second before your body. I just really like the effect of it and wanted to mention it.

Doom 3 unlike Doom 1 and 2 presents the story to you as you're playing the game. Where as Doom 1/2 had the screens of text at the level breaks Doom 3 has cutscenes, character interaction and PDA files to help the story along. The PDAs contain a mix of email, audio files and video files to fill you in a various happenings in the base. Emails are just like in real life you read them and move on. The video files must be watched in the PDA so you're stuck there watching them which can be kind of boring. The audio files are like the audio files found in Bioshock or Dead Space, they can be played as you continue exploring but there is an issue with that. If you're listening to one and you come to a point in the game where you're suppose to get a story based radio message or you find someone who wanted to talk to you the audio file keeps going and the two voices overlap. It is a major pain so I just found myself sitting in a room listening to the audio logs without making progress. The other thing with the audio logs are they sometimes contain lock combinations. You can find these lockers as you play and they hold ammo, medpacs and such. They need a code to get into and sometimes these codes are in the audio logs. If you forget the code you have to listen to the whole audio log again and they are always at the end of the log and you can't skip ahead. There should of been a part in the PDA to record these passwords so you can just look them up when needed.

While Doom 3 looks really good, as I said I think it holds up really well even today it is a dark game. You're given a flashlight and you'll use it a lot to navigate the possessed Mars base. The problem is the flashlight cannot be used with a gun so sometimes you need to make a choice, see or shoot stuff. Turning up the brightness doesn't help as some places in the game are pitch black no matter how bright you make the game. When I first played this I didn't like having to switch back and forth but this time I did really have a big issue with it. There were a couple times I wished a gun had a flashlight on it but now it's not a big deal to me. You can get mods that give your guns lights so if the idea of going back and forth bothers then you have a choice.

With the darkness come some scares and this game got me a few times. Mainly it's with monsters jumping out as you while your walking down a hall or things teleporting in from behind you. Movies and such don't really make me do the jump scare thing but games do and I jumped plenty playing this one. And not to spoil it but they use one jump scare a little later in the game that they never use again and it was just so well done I have to mention it. While not as scary as the Resident Evil 1 dog it was pretty good. If you're a fan of horror shooters you'll find some here.

I played multiplayer a little bit. As this is 6-7 year old game not many people are playing online but it's just basic deathmatch and team deathmatch. You spawn with a pistol and all the other guns are all around the map. Just like with classic Doom but this one was only four player when it first came out. People has increased that but again not many people playing to begin with and anyone that's still playing this is probably a god at it so the learning curve is going to be brutal.

So, Doom 3 a 6 year old game what can I say about it? Well, it's pretty good. I really enjoyed playing through it. I have to say I liked all the changes ID did with the formula. It took me about 16 hours to finish it and I think that was a pretty good length. At the end I wished there were a little more and I think games should always leave you wanting more so Doom 3 succeeded in that. You can get this for 20 bucks on Steam and you can probably get it in on sale or in a ID bundle if you wait for Steam to do one of it's crazy deal things. If you like horror shooters do yourself a favor and pick this up if you haven't played it before.

Doom 3 - 9 out of 10

Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason - The Ice Cold Review

Over the last couple days I decided to finally finish Cryostasis. Cryostasis is a horror FPS game that was released for the PC in May of last year. I picked it up during a Steam sale late last year after hearing a lot about it on other sites. Developed by Action Forms and published by 1C Company, this is one of the best horror games I have ever played.

Basically, Cryostasis is a first person shooter, you play as Alexander Nesterov a Russian meteorologist, who comes across the nuclear icebreaker North Wind while dog sledding in the north pole. After some events you end up aboard the ship and start to explore it. The crew is dead and in there place you find some crazy people who are out for blood.

The action in Cryostasis is a very slow paced game. You do not move extremely fast, even the sprint you can do isn't the fastest run I've ever seen. With the game taking place in the north pole your character is bundled in heavy winter gear which explains the slow pace.

The combat is interesting also. You get a combo of melee and firearms. The melee weapons work well enough but you eventually get your hands on a gun. The shooting feels really good but it like the moving is slow paced. Reloading in particular can be excruciatingly slow, but it ads to the tension when you have some monster running at you, it's so much fun. The game is set in 1981 but the guns all come from the WW2 era, like the Mosen and PPsh-1 but they're all fun to shoot. One thing to note is the game does a great job of making sure you have ammo. I never had an issue with running out of ammo. I remember having one time I was down to one clip for one rifle but I never had to go back to melee after finding my first gun. I like that balance. When a survival horror game or any FPS in general has a ton of ammo management it can take away from the experience but Cryostasis nails it perfectly.

Cryostasis has a very interesting visual style. Taking place in the cold, Cryostasis actually feels like a cold game. When the snow is blowing and the screen starts to ice up you feel like you're in the game. The way the ice clings to the walls and frosts up the weapons is amazing but all this comes at a price. Cryostasis is a real resource hog. To run it at max you'll need a pretty beefy machine, but it's really worth it. This was also the first game to use the Nvidia PhysX graphics features and it adds a lot of graphical effects to the game but also comes at a performance cost. The one thing that really stood out for me was when you're outside the boat, the blinding nature of the snow is unreal, clingy to life as you watch your health slowly run down.

Health in the game is handled in a different way. In this game heat equals health. As you explore the game you can find heat sources, be it a lamp or something on fire. You have to walk up to the heat and warm yourself to gain health. There are areas that are exposed to the extreme cold and you will slowly lose health until you get back to the "safety" of the inside.

Cryostasis is a scary game. I don't tend to really jump at horror movies but games are another story and this one is at the top of this heap. I had started playing this last year but after one part in particular I jumped so bad I had to quit. Like many horror games though once you learn it's tricks it's easy to see the scares coming but with Cryostasis even when the jumps gone it's still a creepy game. I'd have to put this one up there with the first Condemned as being the scariest game I've played.

But the scariest thing of all in this game are the bugs. I've heard that unpatched when you get to level 12 you can get stuck in a no clip mode and just fall out of the level. They did fix that and I never saw it in my play through, I did see other issues though. These were mainly in the form of crashes. I didn't have a single crash until the aforementioned level 12. It crashed once in level 12, then in level 13 the game would constantly crash. I kept playing, and in the levels 13, 14, and 15 I must of crashed about 30 times. It would happen maybe every 5 to 10 minutes give or take a few minutes. I did some research and didn't find the exact solution to my problem but some other tips helped me out. I verified my files on Steam and it found one that was broken, redownloaded it and all that stuff. I heard it was the patch that was redownloaded but I'm not certain on that. I also turned my Shader to 4.0 which is what the game calls DirectX 10. I took a frame rate hit, not much but it was noticeable. In the end it stopped the crashing and I was able to finish the game level 15 on, without a single crash. I have to take a point or so away due to the crashes being there to begin with but the game's story is so interesting I would of tried my best to finish it with the crashes going on.

In the end Cryostasis is a great game, I really enjoyed my time with it. The setting is unique and the story is extremely interesting. You can get this game on Steam for 12.99 at the time of this writing and I highly recommend it if you have the PC to run it.

Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason - 8 out of 10