It's hard to talk about certain specifics without spoilers, but suffice it to say, there are scenes you'll recoil at. Insects skitter across your vision, the input-lag between mouse-gesture and action goes to hell, the ground lurches sickeningly, and you'll hear things – whispers, cries and horrid noises, one of which can only be described as someone pulling crabs apart.Īgainst this background, you learn of the unspeakable experiments that happened here, and your involvement with them, as something hideous dogs your steps. As Daniel's sanity starts to stutter, imagination plays merry hell. Spend too long in the gloaming, and madness beckons.
There's not a weapon in sight: it's all about the puzzles, exploiting the neat physics engine, combining items to apply to the environment, and hiding when the nasties come. While these screenshots shout FPS, it shares more with point-and-click adventures than shooters. From the twisted brainpipes of Frictional games, the guys behind the Penumbra series, this is every part the worthy successor, with considerably higher production values, bags more atmosphere, and a deeper exploration of the parallel themes of horror and insanity. When it was all over, I nearly had a little cry.Īmnesia does Lovecraft in the purest sense: it understands that the imagined far outweighs the known in its psychological punch, and it gives you enough audio and visual cues to imagine a very carnival of horrors. I made errors in judgement, I missed jumps, I clenched. It was utterly, panicinducingly horrible. Every time I lost my footing on the narrow path of tottering crates and other detritus and landed in the drink, a flurry of intense sploshing rose sharply in volume as it made for my meat.
The only thing that gave it away was the languid ker-splosh of its footsteps as it ranged around after me.