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00:00:01
S1 Ep5: Amnesia
75 Plays8 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they talk about a game they'd rather not forget!
Recommended
Transcript
Spoiler Alert & Podcast Title Humor
00:00:04
Speaker
Hey everybody, Dave here. Just wanna give a light spoiler warning. Gonna be talking about some things from the game. Gonna not try and give away the main plots or endings, but be advised, things make it spoiling.
00:00:30
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of whatever we call this. The podcast. The podcast, in quotes. Underscore the podcast. With alternating upper and lowercase characters. It's fucking capture. Some X's on the sides, some tildes.
00:00:55
Speaker
Oh, so it's an MSN name. It's basically what we've got, but... What are we talking about today, Dave? I... Fuck, I forget.
Introduction to 'Amnesia: The Dark Descent'
00:01:09
Speaker
Exactly. Amnesia, The Dark Descent. Oh. Yeah. Just another cheery podcast opening for another cheery game.
00:01:17
Speaker
So I played through amnesia earlier this week, actually. Wow. I know, yeah. I was eight years overdue. It was released by Frictional Games in 2010. But I think it was worth it. I think it was worth it in the end. It is a good game, Jake. Thanks for asking. Yeah. Thanks for showing up, guys. Good podcast. We'll see you in the next one. So you jumped on the train, obviously, much later than everybody else, and myself included.
00:01:47
Speaker
Because I got this, I think, close to when it came out, maybe 2011, early 2010. Well, let's talk some initial thoughts on the game. Yeah, what is the game? What is Amnesia? Oh, Amnesia is a horror survival game where you're essentially progressing through the storyline, solving some puzzles here and there, avoiding some enemies. But one of the big things about it is you don't have a way to defend yourself.
00:02:16
Speaker
You have a light source and that is it. You can toss boxes around that just don't do any damage. This is true. But essentially you want to progress through the game, try and keep your sanity meter okay. So if you try and go through the whole game without setting any lights, your character will go crazy and you will die, which isn't good.
00:02:39
Speaker
But you don't want to have the light on all the time either because you'll attract some people and some friends you don't want to make. Right. Just like real life. That sounds about right. The game starts off with your protagonist. You play as Daniel.
Plot Summary & Daniel's Quest
00:02:55
Speaker
And you seemingly have lost your memory, as might be implied by the title of the game. You kind of have a note, which
00:03:07
Speaker
I may or may not put right here. Did I do it? 19th of August, 1839. I wish I could ask how much you remember. I don't know if there'll be anything left after I consume this drink. Don't be afraid, Daniel. I can't tell you why, but know this. I choose to forget. Try to find comfort and strength in that fact. There is a purpose. You are my final effort to put things right.
00:03:37
Speaker
God willing, the name Alexander of Brennenberg still invokes bitter anger in you. If not, this will sound horrible. Go to the inner sanctum, find Alexander, and kill him. His body is old and weak, and yours, young and strong. He will be no match for you. One last thing. A shadow is following you. It's a living nightmare, breaking down reality.
00:04:07
Speaker
I have tried everything and there is no way to fight back. You need to escape it as long as you can. Redeem us both, Daniel. Descend into the darkness where Alexander waits and murder him. Your former self, Daniel. No, yes, that sounds good. Yeah, it sounds good, yeah. Quality stuff.
00:04:32
Speaker
So as the note says, Daniel's on his own dark quest to kill Alexander. For reasons unknown. Reasons unknown. Yeah, he even says, you know, it's going to sound bad, but you need to do this. You need to go down there. You need to murder him. And at this point in the game, I tried to leave the building.
00:04:54
Speaker
game does not let you do that. It gets overgrown with this kind of like fleshy covering that seems to follow you through the rest of it. Yeah, essentially there's some dark forces that play a little bit of supernatural voodoo.
00:05:10
Speaker
But you're being followed by a presence called the shadow, because you essentially were dicking around with some relics in the Middle East, touch something you shouldn't have. The orb. The orb. And now you have a demon presence following you. Yeah. But it manifests itself in different ways. One of which is, as Jake described, the fleshy goop, which kind of seems to appear along the structure you're in.
00:05:36
Speaker
Yeah, it kind of just materializes around you at some points in the game. Sometimes you leave an area and you'll come back and it'll be covered in the stuff. But yeah, it follows you through the game. It's connected to this shadow. It's kind of this corporeal manifestation of this otherworldly being that's following you through the mansion, right?
Atmospheric Horror & Sanity Mechanics
00:05:54
Speaker
i understand your sense the way you said it but mac and cheese is also perporeal technically if it doesn't follow you it's not ethereal mac and cheese it's yes it's true but yeah uh you really don't know a whole lot of what's going on in the game when it starts um kind of just going around being scared you start out and you're very disoriented at the very start of the game daniel is not uh he seems very out of sorts um
00:06:22
Speaker
And you're kind of just progressing down, trying to find a way forward, essentially, to work your way down, since you can't escape this mansion. And the story kind of pieces itself together through journal entries that Daniel has written before losing his memory. And as we'll get to, by choice. But yeah, the atmosphere of the actual mansion you're descending here is very dark.
00:06:50
Speaker
There's a couple points where they look light shining in from outside. Maybe there's like a hole in the ceiling or something and you've got some light coming through. But usually you have to use your resources, your tender boxes, to light torches and candles to provide some light so that you don't go crazy.
00:07:06
Speaker
The game's like pretty liberal with how many it gives you, but if you as a player are starting to get panicked and you like overcommit, then that's when you can start throwing out. If you're just like, all right, I have to light every torch because I'm actually terrified. Situation you could theoretically find yourself in. Were you scared going into it? Did you have any apprehension? Because obviously coming in this late you had heard or read about the game a decent amount. Right.
00:07:32
Speaker
So I own the game. I had played it about 30 minutes. I got to like the first, first time you run into an enemy and then I stopped. So, I mean, it was eight years ago. I don't know if I could say I was scared. You're definitely older than watching. Yeah.
00:07:48
Speaker
But I didn't get very far at all. As far as how I felt while playing the game, there was a couple times I was honestly like, oh, jeez, this is a little bit scary. I wasn't playing late at night with the lights off, like they recommend. I was playing with headset though, so a couple points. But I think once I kind of understood the way the game was going to play out mechanically, it was a little less scary for me. How about yourself when you were playing through Do You Remember Year?
00:08:17
Speaker
emotional state of being. Sadly, always. I can catalog my history itself by emotional states of being. But when I was playing, I wanted to play it for the sake of playing it because I had never done anything scary before. I am traditionally a huge puss. I don't go to watch horror movies. It's not my bag. It just makes me feel uncomfortable and apprehensive. So when I did play it, I had all my shit set up in my parents' basement.
00:08:47
Speaker
but the basement has lights, which we're on. And I have my dog next to me, just because the petting was very comforting. Like you said before, it's very atmospheric in how it's spoopy, some of the darker lighting, some of the ambient tracks, especially there's one that sounds like
00:09:10
Speaker
back of the ear, kind of like bone crunching. Yeah, just behind you. Yeah. You did a good job of that. The ambient sound really adds so much to the atmosphere, like most horror games I'd argue. It's like if you just cut out the sound, then it's a completely different experience you're not experiencing that much at all. Like you can hear monsters, other things like that kind of.
00:09:38
Speaker
around you and if there's actually monsters around that can be a huge indicator of you know where they're coming from and you can kind of like play around that a little bit I like that when you can use that that information to your advantage
00:09:53
Speaker
But yeah, just in general, if there's no other audio coming through and you're just slowly walking through this, listening to the sounds of creepy things in the dark, it's gonna be a little bit scary. And that's definitely the
Gameplay Mechanics & Stealth Strategies
00:10:06
Speaker
case. I mentioned the monster is like a little bit.
00:10:09
Speaker
the you mentioned that you said there was a mechanic where you can go crazy and one of the things that can cause that is you actually look at the monsters and it seems to be from pretty much any distance I think kind of just watching them in the dark so you know what they're planning there you know if they're gonna come at you and stuff that's a bad idea you actually can't let yourself do that because it's gonna go crazy so the game deprives you of that sense which I think enhances it a lot
00:10:38
Speaker
Yeah. Um, one of the big things throughout all time is people are afraid of what they don't know, which is why you have a lot of dumb assets who are racist and said, et cetera, not going to a political thing. I'm constantly afraid of everything. But when you're in the dark and you're in an unfamiliar area, you're a little more cautious, a little more apprehensive because you don't know what's there. Right.
00:11:02
Speaker
Especially if you've heard things about monsters in the game, you're like, well, I don't want to run into one. It's going to suck. Yeah. And they are creepy. They look like if you actually look at them, I mean, the model is eight years old now, so it doesn't like hold up crazy. Um, but they have this kind of a body horror type thing going on.
00:11:20
Speaker
um, like mishappled face, things like that, malformed essentially. And it's like you mentioned, you can't fight them. You have to run from them. But also if they ever, if they ever really see you, you're already at a pretty big disadvantage because most of them are as fast or a little bit faster than you. And, uh, it's really hard to run away because you have to break contact with something that's as fast as you and then hide and hope it doesn't find you. Yeah.
00:11:51
Speaker
that you can try and put some items in the web. I think it has the ability to break through pretty much anything. Yeah. You kind of just have to not be seen in the first case.
00:12:00
Speaker
And that's something I did encounter a little bit when I was going through, like I mentioned, one of the things that kept it from being too scary for me is kind of this meta game sense that if, so if there's an enemy nearby, the game would reliably give me some way to avoid that encounter or like not be seen. So like, say for instance, I'm in a closed off room, there's no exits, there's just the one exit, and then an enemy starts breaking down the door.
00:12:29
Speaker
I know that there's got to be somewhere in that room I can hide and that was reliably the case and I think one of the things that Not necessarily a ding against the game because it was it's great as I'm sure we'll get to But if you came at it thinking that it was a game and that you realized that the enemies were being spawned in at certain times there's certain like triggers in the level and things like that and
00:12:54
Speaker
and then they would actually despawn after not finding you and wandering off. That took away a lot of the tension, I think.
00:13:04
Speaker
Sadly, Jake had the experience of knowing about T-poses for characters, and he's like, it's not that bad. That's my natural resting state. This is a T-pose. Just arms out, good rest. But yeah, most of the time in the game, the goal is to avoid the enemies. I think there's one part in particular where an enemy's kind of just staying in one spot, and you have to distract it. You have to throw a rock or something to distract it.
00:13:30
Speaker
then you can go like behind it but usually avoidance is the key and The game the game kind of makes it a little bit hard on you because you're like, oh if you're in shadow You're gonna start to go insane if you have a light out the enemies can see you If you look at the enemies you start to go insane. You can see how there's this Yeah, it's not necessarily a balance, but They're kind of on conflict pushing you to go forward
00:13:59
Speaker
So you can regain sanity by progression or completing puzzles and things. And just being in well-lit areas at times. So maybe if you're in a room by yourself, you'll turn on your lantern and just look at it like it's you and me, Lampy, and then continue on. Yeah, Lampy gets you through it. Lampy understands. But yeah, those are most of the items. The other thing, there's some basic puzzle game combining mechanics. Sometimes you'll have to find an item, combine it with another item, use it on something in the world.
00:14:29
Speaker
Yeah, I found a little bit of that to be not intuitive. There were times for sure. Yeah, because you have to go in and select the item and do something, and then go back and select the item and do something else. Like, if you have a key to a door, it's not like, oh, you have the key. You've used it on the door. You have to go in, create the key, and be like, this, please? Yeah. If you misclick the wall, it's like the key does not belong here. Yeah. It's not as so bad as King's Christ. It's like rubbing the key against the wall. I don't get it. Show me your secrets.
00:14:59
Speaker
I combined the rat with the honey. You now have a honeyed rat. Imagine the rat just slowly moving across the floor like the fuck happened. Yeah, there's a couple points in game.
00:15:16
Speaker
I think there's probably one time I actually had to look up a, cause I didn't want to spend forever playing this game and I was playing it like 2.30 at night on a work day. And the, uh, I was, I was basically stuck and it was kind of like toward the end of the game, there's some kind of specific things you have to do to progress. And it's not really entirely obvious until you do it necessarily. And there's usually some intuition, which I think is a credit to the game that, um,
00:15:46
Speaker
When I saw what the answer actually was, I was like, oh, there was a hint for that. I could have figured that one out, but I didn't. So, so it's running from things simulator, hiding from things simulator, and yeah, using items on things simulator.
00:16:03
Speaker
and the trend of making everything a simulator for modern games. Yeah, we talked a little bit about the vision in the game as far as limiting your sensory inputs, basically, right? That really is probably the thing for me, that in the audio that makes it a horror game, you can't look, right? You're gonna lose. It's very disarming. Like, you start to lose your sanity.
00:16:27
Speaker
your vision starts to get a little bit blurry if you imagine like your character's drinking in GTA type of thing. Yeah. Which can get really annoying really quick. Yellow car!
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, it's true. At the high state of insanity, you can actually mouse over your insanity. It's like a kind of brain attached to a spinal column. It's not morbid though. Sounds morbid, it's not. You can mouse over another day and say, oh, your sanity is perfectly clear or crystal clear. You're shaking a bit, things like that. At the highest one, before you actually lose the game, it's just dot, dot, dot.
00:17:05
Speaker
And at that point, your vision is like crazy blurred. It's like there's a delay as you're like trying to turn your mouse and say, I want to look to the right. You have a bit of a lag. It's like impossible to see things unless you stop moving because there's this after image effect whenever you're moving.
00:17:27
Speaker
your vision and the game gets like way harder like that it's a it's kind of a situation where if you were not playing well at the game and you're struggling a bit you know like oh crap I looked at the monster too long or I spent too much time in the dark or I ran out of resources to create light
00:17:47
Speaker
You can find yourself in a situation where it's really hard to find out how you should proceed because your character is going insane and you no longer can see that well. But, you know, the game is really forgiving about actual failure.
00:18:02
Speaker
So if you ever do die or go crazy for some reason, it seems like it will put you ahead in some instances. It'll be like, oh, you died to that enemy. We're going to just remove them from the game on your respawn because you reload roughly at the area where whatever happened. But the enemy will be gone. There's one instance near the end of the game where I was supposed to sneak by an enemy or distracted or something.
00:18:28
Speaker
and it caught me and I was supposed to sneak down past it like down some stairs to another room and upon reload the game put me in the room to despawn the enemy and move me beyond whatever the obstacle is and I was like I could have got it all right all right like just have a little faith in me I could have got it maybe. Do you think that's the settings thing?
00:18:54
Speaker
I don't know, I mean, because the game doesn't have difficulty, right? Like you can't change from easy to normal or whatever. I didn't check if there was a setting for that. If it was, it'd be a little bit surprised.
00:19:05
Speaker
It's just kind of a checkbox where it's like... Auto-complete missions. Yeah. You just kind of just... You can't lose in every area, obviously, because you're not enemies in every area. But it would be funny if you could literally just idle and like your character would go crazy because like the lights are off. So the game moves you forward to the next area and then an enemy catches you as the game moves you forward to the next area. I'd love this to you, too, for AFK Run. Yeah, AFK Run.
00:19:32
Speaker
the any% completion for AFK and amnesia. But other than that, I mean, that was my main gripe for the game. You know, I'm not gonna judge it that much graphically. It's eight years
Graphics & Immersion
00:19:46
Speaker
old. It is really fucking dated, but it also doesn't need crazy graphics. Yeah.
00:19:51
Speaker
The only argument you can make for it is if they made a more updated one, it'd be a little more immersive as far as the environment and making things scarier. Yeah, they can make things even scarier. You know, making better lighting, et cetera, for sure. Could be like Outlast or something like that. Oh my god. I refuse to ever go near that game. We would never review it. I don't know if we review things, but we would never review it.
00:20:21
Speaker
I mean, before it's been like for late in games that we like or now kind of, I think we've started to judge some games. We finally found ones that weren't perfect. We kind of like, if the game is wearing a suit and it's like standing in like a ball or something like that, we take like a couple grains of salt and we like throw it at the game in the suit. And then we kind of walk up and we apologize downcast eyes and we like brush the salt off of the game.
00:20:50
Speaker
Continue filleting it. But yeah, that's just the way it rolls, really. We don't usually care to talk too much about games that we have absolutely no interest in.
00:21:02
Speaker
Yeah. I think part of what we're doing here is reminiscing about games that we've obviously so far enjoyed to some extent and recommending them to other people, I guess. Yeah. Or even since we tend to spoil absolutely everything involved in a game, maybe helping people experience games that they would never have played anyways. I feel like this is the shittiest medium for that.
00:21:29
Speaker
Hey, you should really listen to these guys to not talk about this one game. It's a good game to listen about. Versus watching a YouTube playthrough or watching over somebody's shoulder or playing it yourself. You don't think people watch the companion videos we release with these, with all of the gameplay that goes along with the audio, one for one? I mean, they definitely haven't found that link yet, so there's no way. There's no way. Oh, well. Oh, I will say another gripe I had with the game.
00:22:00
Speaker
But this seems to happen in a lot of games. We talked about how dark the game is and how you need light as a source to not go insane. Yeah. I've never been many times where I've hidden in actually one specific closet for I think the third or fourth level, but you go in and it's pitch black.
00:22:20
Speaker
And then the light kind of adjusts like there's a moon lighting effect where you can see the outlines of other items in the room. And there's kind of just like a soft glow to everything. You're like, Oh, this is mildly peaceful. Yeah. Your pupils dilate a bit. Yeah. I'm sure it's so the character can still view things to a degree as far as the graphics engineers, et cetera. But.
00:22:44
Speaker
I found that as like a kind of a mechanism to get out of the spoop mode. Yeah. Because you're like, I can't see anything. It's like, that's not true. You can actually see 17 boxes piling up. I'm like, okay. I understand the necessity for it. Like what if you ran out of light entirely, right? And you're just like, you're in a basement or something. There's a specific area where the shadows actually, I think the cellar, there's an unnatural darkness, like permeating the area and anything that you like barely helps.
00:23:13
Speaker
And if you couldn't light anything and you didn't have this kind of like dark vision, to a certain extent, the game would actually just be pretty much impossible. You are in a room.
00:23:26
Speaker
There is a door. I opened the door. You cannot open the door. The door is locked. It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a groom. But yeah, that's definitely the case. I mean, like, to a certain extent, when playing through, there's actually some parts where not using a light lets you see more because having a light near you ruins your darkvision.
00:23:51
Speaker
And so you can't see that far. But if you didn't have any light whatsoever, you have like this dark vision that basically will give you like a good idea of what's around you. That's kind of rare, but it is interesting.
00:24:05
Speaker
I kind of want to talk about the story more, but I don't want to give away a plot as you play through the game.
Themes of Memory & Redemption
00:24:11
Speaker
Right, so we should just spoil the end, but leave all the connecting pieces out. I mean, we can talk about some of the themes, maybe. Clearly, the name of the game, The Dark Descent, relates to the protagonist. And you guys have already heard your spoiler warning, so...
00:24:31
Speaker
you know what are you gonna do yeah fuck you i mean fuck you dave that's our only listener and then we're gonna watch our videos too the uh the dark descent is like uh it it's kind of it takes two forms right there's literally you're descending into this mansion eventually finding an elevator going further down in this castle like this dungeon ritual chambers and things like that torture areas spoilers
00:24:57
Speaker
The other part of the Dark Descent is the protagonist's mind prior to you becoming the protagonist, prior to you assuming the role of Daniel. Where Daniel had all of these encounters, like he went to Egypt, he discovered the orb, as you said, he brought it back. People near him began to die.
00:25:24
Speaker
And it's it's actually kind of interesting because the people that die near him like his his physician Geologists that he visits They tend to die kind of soon after he visited them But this whole time he's basically stayed at his apartment So the shadow that's following him killed the people that he talked to about the orb but
00:25:52
Speaker
probably had an opportunity to kill him and didn't. And it's kind of interesting because he was at his apartment for like a month, basically, before finally getting the invitation from Alexander to come out for protection, basically, right? But.
00:26:10
Speaker
You know, the fact that everyone's dying around him is an incentive to no longer remain in the area. And he does head out to join Alexander. After Daniel arrives, all of the events leading up to the start of the game, as you know it, transpired. I'm not gonna go in depth, because if you haven't played the game, you should, for sure.
00:26:34
Speaker
It's not a long playthrough. How fast did you do it? Probably four or five hours. Yeah maybe about that. Yeah actually didn't take me that long so probably. The game is a bit slower or the game takes longer to complete if you're being really really patient with it or are paranoid. Something I encountered was
00:26:57
Speaker
I would like stack boxes things like that so I could hide behind them later, and I never hid behind those boxes those Those just stayed there stacked neatly until I left the area and came back Usually the game gives you someplace to hide and there are puzzles there is a puzzle kind of for the end of the game that I I did have to look up like I mentioned and It was
00:27:24
Speaker
It was something where I had actually looked at the puzzle previously, but I didn't realize what I needed to do. And so I had to come back and actually complete it and felt really silly about it.
00:27:38
Speaker
But I think Amnesia is a solid game to get started on as far as horror
Tension without Combat & Enemy Types
00:27:45
Speaker
is concerned. There's a lot of games that are like, ah, we're kind of scary. Or shooters that try to be kind of scary. There's like Resident Evil, there's Dead Space. Fear.
00:27:58
Speaker
Fear, yeah. Fear is actually, that could be a good podcast actually. I really enjoyed fear. But it's an entirely different experience to play without a weapon. To play a game where you can't fight back and it forces you to play the game differently, obviously. So having played through amnesia, what do you think could have made the game better or what would a game mean to have in it to interest you kind of like amnesia did? Or eight years after, like what could you add to it?
00:28:28
Speaker
I would definitely make things a little more scary. Like you said, the models for the monsters are a little bit dated. Yeah. One of the things I found out after the, I played through the game, there's actually like three different types of monsters. Yeah. There's like, one's like a soldier, one's someone else, and I never would have known cause I wasn't looking at anything. Yeah. Um, so I would definitely update that a little bit, find something that's a little more
00:28:56
Speaker
niche and will prey on people's like personal fears like i'm not a big spiders guy myself yeah so anytime like one of the doom games had like oh there's space spiders i'm like still it's not enough for me like i'm running through hallways with my eyes closed right but finding things a little more specific as opposed to just ambient horror i would still keep the ambient horror because uh
00:29:20
Speaker
The mood and feeling is a big thing of it. You want your character to feel alone and defenseless by not giving them any weapons. But maybe having certain things with a little more interaction. Like I said, I really did enjoy the game. I like the story, the puzzles and other things. But anything you had an encounter come up,
00:29:45
Speaker
Yeah. It seemed like just book it and run. Yeah. And you'd, Oh, that was an arrow escape. But assuming you don't sit there and wait, you can outrun whatever you need to get to the next area. And that was, that was kind of the binary thing, right? It's either you need to hide. Here's obviously a place you can hide or you need to run, run through closed doors after you go. Yeah. I'm not sure if there's like a perfect way to make it.
00:30:14
Speaker
Less formulaic in that regard. Yeah, I mean maybe the enemy types right like maybe if some of the enemy types Forced you specifically like maybe hiding wasn't an option But you also couldn't run right like you had to kind of sneak away from it because it would like move to where you were or something like that something so you just couldn't sit in one spot and wait for it to go away and
00:30:36
Speaker
Because all the enemies basically functioned one of two ways. There's the shadow chasing you. You have to run from it. Nothing else you can do. You literally can't see it. I guess three ways. Water enemy, which I actually... First time encountering that. That's a fun time. That one was actually pretty scary for me.
00:30:57
Speaker
the the last one is the main enemies type that you're going to just experience throughout the game just don't let them see you and that's that's it i mean those were the key mechanics but perhaps they could have iterated on that a little bit more now what are your thoughts on something like last of us you have the clickers they can't see for shit right but if you make noise they obviously go after you so a lot of the
00:31:25
Speaker
those gameplay parts, you have to essentially get close to the enemy without, if you touch them, they're like, I'm pretty sure somebody's there, but you have to get very close to them and skirt by without making too much noise or touching them. Yeah. And I think, I mean, without going too far into that game, there's, there's definitely some merit to the way that they differentiated the enemy types. You're just like, you're up against the guy that can see you.
00:31:49
Speaker
don't turn your light on. Don't be in the light, or he can see you. You're up against those clickers, things that can hear you, then that affords you an entirely different way you can go about it, right? So they kind of cover each other's weaknesses, and you have to approach either of them in different ways. So if you're in an area with both of them, you have to be really attentive. You can't get them confused, run in.
00:32:13
Speaker
get wrecked or you could because you have a gun but You couldn't do that in amnesia. So I Think I think things like that could definitely kind of ramp it up to the next next level and to be fair I did not play the next game machine for pigs It could be that that solved absolutely everything. I just had no idea but for the duck for the dark descent at least it was I
00:32:39
Speaker
Something I think could be could be iterated on in the future something made a little bit better But we didn't want to go too far into spoilers for this one just in case you guys did come back and play it So we left plenty of the story there still recommend you go back and you play it. I Believe that does it for me. Do you have any other final thoughts for the dark descent? So I will say one of the strong suits of the game is the plot
Storytelling & Pacing
00:33:06
Speaker
I really like the plot and the character progression and how you see the story unfold. I also like anytime a game is more minimalistic where it can get away with it. So you start the game with very little information and you go in as protagonist, you're like, this is me, this is what I have to do. Touch a bunch of stuff actually. Which is similar to other games like
00:33:33
Speaker
Zelda, I'm a protagonist, this is what I have to do. But it's nice when you start off at that base, the player comes in with a lot of assumptions. So I could say like, hey Jake, my parents have a cottage. I don't need to fill in the rest of that sentence. You already have in your head the idea of a cottage. Right. And you will essentially fill in the gaps. Trail of Sweets.
00:34:00
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, the game's definitely, definitely good with that, with controlling the amount of information it gets you. Yeah. And I prefer when games do that, similar to, again, I'd never want to relate anything to Dark Souls that isn't Dark Souls. Right. So you're saying it's a soulsling. I do like the piecemeal information and letting the world building happen over time.
00:34:23
Speaker
I don't like when things are rushed. It's like, hey, I'm Timmy. I'm your best friend from 12 years. Let's go out to the field real quick. I hope nobody attacks the kingdom. Certain things are a little...
00:34:34
Speaker
Tried. You get a little dialogue pop up at the beginning of the game and it just has a little scroll behind it. Just read all of the plot and then you can play. This is Alexander. This is Daniel. They're at odds. It's kind of like an out of, almost like a Stan Lee parable, kind of like out of body third person type of setup where it's just like, for this game you will be playing as Daniel. Your main antagonist is Alexander. Your character has some reasons that he dislikes him.
00:35:04
Speaker
But we won't go into that right now. Thank you for playing and enjoy the game. My favorite class is the Spy. I appreciate these references. But the game just does a really good job of pacing. Now, part of that is how dated it is and the engine it's on. But early on in the game, a little tool tip comes up.
00:35:30
Speaker
And it just says, pressed shift to run. That's it. Yeah. Now you're already in a spoopy environment. So you're hearing like, I need to run shit. So you start to like run. And at this point in the game, you're not encountering any enemies or anything like that, but you just now have that extra thing in the back of your mind. Right. It's letting your own mind work against itself for paranoid sake. Right.
00:35:58
Speaker
They're like, run, that sounds terrifying. I'm never gonna do that. Exercise, not for me. Yeah, just spend the next, or the length of the game could vary, depending on how many hours you spend trying to escape through the front door instead of going deeper into the castle. They're like, all right, let's apply some of these boards. Where do I get the crowbar? Crap.
00:36:25
Speaker
But I believe that that would do it for this episode, unless you have anything else that you wish to add. Or subtract. Anything you want to take, no take-backs. Could you take back all of my audio, please? Thank you. That would make this a very awkward experience. Just another podcast. They never heard that, Dave. They don't know about that.
00:36:48
Speaker
Just another podcast with me talking to myself, but I would like to thank all of our listeners for sticking around with us and listening to our episodes. And hopefully if you haven't played Amnesia, you get the opportunity to. It is a quality spooky experience and will let you, it'll lead you to appreciate any time you are given a weapon in a game to solve your problem. Yeah, that's okay, Jake. Have a good one, everybody.