How Amnesia Brought Horror Out Of The Action Era | Den Of Geek

Grip says that the team was inspired by PC text horror games like Anchorhead when it came to designing each encounter to tell the player a story. That’s why you’re presented with a descriptive text box whenever you click on anything in the game. That element combined with Penumbra’s first-person perspective, which Grip says was inspired by Half-Life and the team’s desire to not render extra character models, separated it from Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and the genre’s other big names.

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For all of their revolutionary departures from what had come before, the first two Penumbra games were still burdened by a combat system that felt, to be generous, half-hearted. When work began on what would become 2010’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent and the third Penumbra title, Penumbra: Requiem, the team decided to implement storytelling in more aspects of game design in order to address another element of the genre they weren’t entirely satisfied with.

“Normally when people made horror games, even Silent Hill which was very horror focused, it was all based around a combat engine,” Grip says. “It was very clear in a game like Resident Evil. From an early stage, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if encounters were more scenario-based?’ What if they weren’t just ‘let’s just throw random monsters out there’ but if there was a certain story behind each encounter?”

In Amnesia, the basic story behind each encounter revolves around the word “escape.” Early into the development of Penumbra, the team scripted a basic scenario that revolved around the idea of having to find your way out of a bad situation using only your wit. Amnesia expands that concept by putting the player in scenarios where they are almost entirely helpless and must find a way to escape using a combination of physics-based environmental puzzles and their wits.

It was a far cry from the popular games of the era, which relied on nearly constant instances of brutal combat. As Grip notes that style of game design can sometimes betray what you’re trying to do with any horror story.

“If you have weapons in games like Dead Space, a lot of mental resources are devoted towards combat-related tasks,” Grip says. “‘How much ammunition do I have left?’ ‘Where should I aim?’ You’re thinking of things in a combat-related way. The game tells you with the combat system what the default way to progress is. If you don’t have weapons, the game doesn’t tell you how to deal with [these problems]. It’s much harder for the player to feel secure.”