Amnesia: Rebirth

A somewhat disappointing horror game.

It looks amazing and sounds amazing, and even the voice acting is terrific. The set designs especially stand out as evocative and immersive, though they are repeated a bit too often and thus lose their impact. The game is quite long, but it may be because it is too stretched out.

The story is ... just OK. It does the job well in terms of keeping the game together, but it is too predictable. It was pretty clear to me where things were going somewhere in the first quarter of the game, and from then on the "surprise" twists fell flat. This feeling of "meh" continues all the way to the end of the game. It's exactly the ending you would expect.

The gameplay is not so amazing. Sometimes it's a walking simulator, sometimes there are simple puzzles, and sometimes there are extremely annoying hide-and-seek encounters with enemies. The latter being the usual Frictional Games mechanic, which could honestly use some freshening up. Here's a boring tip: just let the enemies catch you. The game will rewind, you'll try again, get caught again, and after a few attempts the enemy will just disappear and you continue playing in peace. It's an odd design choice: on the one hand it reduces frustration, but on the other hand it sterilizes the anxiety.

Does it stand up well as a horror game? Well, it is in the horror genre for sure, but it doesn't always know what kind of horror it wants to be. Psychological? Body horror? Lovecratfian otherworldliness? A zombie B-movie? When it does try to be serious horror it's far too heavyhanded in its approach. There are several predictable cut scenes that try way too hard and caused me to groan rather than shiver in fear. The game as a whole is very immersive, but at the end of the day it's just not very scary.

And, all things considered, it's just not very fun. It might be more enjoyable to watch someone else play it than playing it yourself.