Not Alone in the Dark…
Amnesia: Rebirth is the third game in the Amnesia series, a sequel to Frictional Games own, Dark Descent. While the game is largely a standalone experience, there are a few connections for fans to discover. Given that the horror landscape has changed and evolved so much over the years, with many often taking a page out of the original’s handbook, Rebirth simply doesn’t do enough to warrant the same level of impact, often feeling like just another entry in the series. Now, that isn’t exactly a bad thing, but the lack of innovation does make the game somewhat bland and forgettable. Now, that said, Rebirth is still enjoyable, largely in part to its captivating story and lead performance.
As I rolled credits around the 9-hour mark, much of that time reading the notes and documents you’ll find scattered about, I can say that the game can certainly outstay its welcome for a small portion of it, usually in some unnecessary backtracking, or sequences that just feel as if they go on just a bit too long. That and the slow animations of you’re character reorientating themselves after you’ve been defeated, and the defeat itself. That said, there is a solid few hours among all of this, where the game does a great job at pushing ahead its story, the struggle of a woman named Tasi Trianon, who is not only pregnant through much of the journey, but suffering from the titular amnesia, slowly rebuilding her memories as the game goes on.
You start your adventure into madness via a plane crash. Left alone and suffering from memory loss, Tasi ventures forward, attempting to find her beloved, Salim, as well as what has happened to her companions. As you explore dark caves or surviving the blistering heat of the desert, Tasi starts to put pieces together of recent events, such as her pregnancy, which is escalating at an unnatural rate. While much of the game takes place in these caves and locations surrounding the desert, you’ll be transported off to a mysterious plane of existence, twisted and warped, yet always remarkably stunning, echoed in its own deep forgotten past.
While you will start the game learning to hide from the drastic heat of the sun, much of Rebirth is about remaining in the light, hiding away from the darkness, lest you go mad. You’ll do this by using matches to light torches, candles, or lanterns, which you oddly cannot take with you, despite a few of them having handles. While you will have a single lantern you can take with you, refilling it will oil, there is a point in the game where it shatters before you, despite the odd placement of oil, later on, teasing you.
Matches are found quite often, usually giving you about 10 seconds before the flame goes out, allowing you to light up what you can around you, blowing out faster should you run. While the use of your matches is largely critical to your survival, there are countless dead ends, empty areas to explore that can eat away at your resources with little to no reward in sight. You’ll have to gauge if that torch or lantern is worth the use of your last match or venture ahead in the dark, hoping for salvation. This does bring up an aspect of the game that does make the experience suffer a bit; the lack of fear. Now, there are moments in the game where there is genuine horror, but moving around in the dark is not as terrifying as one would think when you can often just sprint around in the dark and find enough light to just keep on moving, as opposed to stumbling around in the dark, afraid. As you stay in the darkness, creepy black lines will consume the screen, alongside flashes of imagery that is designed to punctuate fear, but given the game doesn’t have an actual fail state, it’s hard for those fears to feel weighted or come with a consequence.
If you are attacked and cannot shake free of the enemies you encounter, you’ll simply pass out and wake up after the event. Now, this comes with both a positive and a negative as while it’s great that you don’t have to replay a whole section over because of how some enemies might have some area-wide line of sight, or taking a wrong turn during an intense chase sequence, the fact you cannot fail does lessen the impact of the terror you should feel. I’ll also point that you only have a few chances to fend off your attacker before you have this fairly long sequence of blacking out, wandering the halls in a series of quick flashes, to the animation of your character sitting up and getting to their feet. While this sequence is interesting enough a few times, it is far too lengthy in repetition.
Much of that failure comes in the place of some rather obscure direction and you’ll often become stuck as to what to do, or how certain mechanics work. The game does explain a few things at the start, but several mechanics and controls, later on, are simply not explained well enough. Now, this is obviously to the player’s preference in regards to how much hand-holding is present or wanted, but there is a huge difference between exploring and finding things out on your own, and giving little to no direction and having the player fend for themselves.
A short while into the game, you’ll be granted a compass that acts as an amulet for opening up rifts as you explore in the deep reaches of various caves or ruins. At first, it’s an interesting gimmick, before you realize it’s really just removing a wall texture that fades away as you move into the attached room. It’s not something as impressive as the original Prey, where it did a lot of interesting tricks to push you into a whole new environment. The amulet is used heavily once you discover it but is largely forgotten for a few hours before it becomes slightly more important.
As Tasi is pregnant, you’ll use that to calm her down, reducing her fear as you press the O button to rub her stomach, calming her down and the baby as well. You’ll see flashes of blue light on the screen when the baby kicks, letting you know that Tasi may need a moment or two to collect her thoughts and escape the horrors around her. I can’t honestly say I’ve played a game as a pregnant mother before, and the themes of motherhood are well represented here, as Tasi is also going through remembering the loss of her previous child as well, something that plays heavily into the narrative here and the situation around her.
While a great deal of the story is told through notes and documents you’ll find, or relics that offer up flashes of old memories, there is a lot of voice acting as well, with actor Alix Wilton Regan bringing a very believable performance here as Tasi Trianon. There are other voices, other characters that do just fine, but Regan is fantastic here, fighting for not just her survival, but her unborn child as well. She’ll hum songs to her, talk to her, and allow us to know what she’s going through, and a few moments of instructions, such as when to run, or when to hide.
From a visual standpoint, there is a fair amount here that impresses, even if it sometimes isn’t the most visually pleasing experience. Outdoor environments are lacking nearly everywhere, as the darker and more moody locations are where this game nails its atmosphere. Areas are just dark enough for you to want to use your oil or matches to see just a few feet in front of you, but light enough that once your eyes get used to the darkness, you can at least navigate around in the black, hoping for some form of light to present itself. Items that you can interact with sometimes have a flash to them, so finding torches or oil cans in the dark is still totally viable, but the items that are under pots or lids are where a little bit of light may prove fruitful in your exploration. Monster designs are subpar, but still effective in that they represent a very generic look that has worked for decades in horror.
The controls are where I found the most frustration with Amnesia: Rebirth as they don’t always translate to the controller as nicely as they could. You’ll often have to hold down the R2 button while using the right analog stick to move a wheel around or swinging open a door. You can pick up and rotate items, but this doesn’t really play into the gameplay as one might think. I kept turning bottles and vases over just in case a matchbook would fall out, but it never did. You can throw items by charging with L1, but there isn’t any sort of feedback in regards to the heft you’re giving that tossed item. I also found the R2 button to largely vary in its dependability, especially trying to light a lantern or torch as I’d waste several precious seconds attempting to light it, wasting the majority of my short-lived match. While I am not able to test the PC version to see if a mouse and keyboard fix many of these issues, I just don’t find the game as intuitive and precise enough on the controller as I would have liked.
Despite my nitpicking, I still found a lot to like here and found the story and some of its more intense moments to have the experience still largely stand out. There are still countless horror games that have been inspired by Dark Descent to offer up a bit more from their gameplay moments or their own unique way to innovate, but Rebirth is still solid enough in its older, mostly outdated ways, that it feels like a proper sequel in those respects. It doesn’t do anything particularly original, but sometimes that can make you lose parts of the series that people want, or even look forward to.
Developer - Frictional Games Publisher - Frictional Games Released - October 20th, 2020. Available On - PS4, Windows PC. Rated - (M) Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Strong Language. Platform Reviewed - PlayStation 4 Pro. Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.