Video Game Review | Amnesia: The Dark Descent, dev. Frictional Games

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is without a doubt the scariest game I have ever played.

This honour used to belong to the second Silent Hill, but Frictional Games' latest and greatest makes that touchstone of terror look like clowning around by comparison.

You are Daniel, and that's all you know at the start of this unforgettable six- to eight-hour experience.

When you awaken in the dark somewhere in the underbelly of Brennenburg Castle, for some reason, you have amnesia. What else to do but follow the strange trail of bleeding red petals that leads from your position into the indefinable distance?

This is easier said than done. Most of the castle's heavy oak doors are shut tight, meanwhile many of its corridors have collapsed, so for the moment there's only one way to go... but it's so incredibly dark that you can hardly see one foot to put in front of the other. Almost immediately, Daniel's fear begins to get the better of him, and we are with him every tentative step of the way: after all, almost anything could be biding its time in the next room, and lacking illumination, we wouldn't know till it was too late.

To make matters worse, it becomes clear that there is someone, or something, hot on our heels. A shadow of some sort. An embodiment of the darkness which seems to mean Daniel harm.

So we grab all the tinderboxes we see, light all the candles that there are, and every wall sconce we come upon. This does little to brighten the castle's horrid halls, but at least it calms Daniel down. Failing this, he simply faints away.

It is not far from The Dark Descent's starting point to Daniel's first destination, but the going is slow - progress through these oppressive spaces is excruciatingly incremental - so it takes some time to find the first piece of the puzzle: on a writing desk surrounded by glowing roses, a note addressed to you, and signed by the same. In it, you command yourself to forgo your fears, the better to descend to the Inner Sanctum in the castle's deepest reaches, where we are instructed to kill the Baron, Alexander.

Next to this letter, a lantern.

For the duration of The Dark Descent, oil for this delightful device and the aforementioned tinderboxes are our only defense against the darkness, and all that lives within it. We cannot fight back. We can only hide. Thus, it seems sensible to hoard such supplies — to push yourself through ill-lit areas without wasting the contents of your meager inventory. For a few hours, this attitude adds to the unbearable sense of tension that is The Dark Descent's most remarkable aspect, but by then I had such a surplus that I wondered where Daniel was stashing all my items. Heck, by the end of the game, I could have opened a small store!

Scarcity, then, is only an issue in The Dark Descent if you're too afraid to scrounge for supplies, or insist on lighting every candle you come across. Still, this speaks to the game's biggest issue: as it goes on - as one gets a sense of the story, and with it the various systems in play - we come, in kind, to know the unknown. It dawns on us that the monsters roam in preset patterns, and are easily avoided. That Daniel's sanity can be managed with a few simple tricks.

All that's left of The Dark Descent then is a physics-based adventure game, or perhaps a first-person puzzler.

Luckily, the puzzles are involving, and the solutions not so obscure that they beggar belief in the mode of most point and click candidates. To get to the Baron you often need some needful thing: an explosive mixture, for instance. To make it, you must explore a number of new areas to find its component parts, then combine these items using the proper apparatus. It's all very satisfying.

All the more so because the developers have little interest in holding our hands. Somewhat counter-intuitively, that's to the good, because the more we know, the less there is be fearful of; the firmer our footing, the less terrifying The Dark Descent. And terror is this game's stock in trade.

Ultimately, the first in the Amnesia series - soon to be succeeded by A Machine For Pigs, which Frictional Games are co-creating with thechineseroom, who updated Dear Esther earlier this year - The Dark Descent is undoubtedly at its most effective at the outset, which is sure to reduce even the hardiest stalwarts of horror to a bundle of bloody nerves. Even after this sustained state ebbs away it remains a game worth playing, but I have never known such fear as I experienced in the beginning.

Thank the dark ones for that!

The Monday Miscellany | The Tunnel, Books to Die For, Quantum Conundrum

There's been such a ghastly glut of found footage horror movies of late that it can come as no surprise when a high-quality contender slips through the cracks. That's exactly what The Tunnel is: a shockingly accomplished shoestring spookshow very much in the mode of Paranormal Activity. No prizes for guessing that it was met with an overwhelming meh upon its release, either.

That said, The Tunnel deserves better, particularly considering how little it cost to put together. It's an interesting story, actually. Back before Kickstarter kicked off, the mooted movie's producers went to the public for funding. Enzo Tedeschi and Julian Harvery aimed to sell individual frames of the final film for AUS$1 a pop, but for one reason or another - the aforementioned attitude surely had something to do with it - they only managed to raise a quarter of their budget.

They went ahead and made the thing anyway, for about £25k. Considering this, the result is simply stunning. That isn't to say The Tunnel is without its issues, foremost amongst them an over-reliance on interviews apparently conducted after the fact of the accident - interviews which spoil who survives from the first, in fact - but the performances are uniformly strong, the scares are certainly there, and in a found footage horror movie, these aspects are of paramount importance.

The plot, meanwhile, provides a plausible rationale for the form of the film: when a news and current affairs crew take to the flooded subway under Sydney to report on the homeless living therein, they find more than they had bargained for. They find... monsters! And of course they capture them on camera.

Imagine [rec] meets The Descent. Fancy seeing that? Then The Tunnel is for you.

Oh, and hey: you can download this film for free. Legally, even! 

***

Books to Die For is an odd beast of an anthology, but for what it is, which is almost impossible to quantify, it's brilliant — and beautiful to boot. Hodder & Stoughton's lovely hardcover, out on August 30th, contains a staggering array of essays in which "the world's leading mystery writers [...] come together to champion the greatest mystery novels ever written."

Co-edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke, Books to Die For is essentially an insider's guide to the genre, featuring a who's-who of its foremost proponents on their favourite mystery fiction, which ranges from ye olde right through to the postmodern, covering authors including Stephen King and Douglas Adams. Joe Lansdale recommends Raymond Chandler, Max Allan Collins goes to town Mickey Spillane, Kathy Reichs writes about Thomas Harris.

Meanwhile: Michael Connelly, Jeffrey Deaver, Charlaine Harris, Minette Walters, Karin Slaughter, Lee Child, Jo Nesbo, Dennis Lehane, Peter Robinson, Elmore Leonard, Eoin Colfer, Michael Koryta, Tana French. And know that this is just a fraction of the non-fiction on offer in this massively ambitious anthology. Books to Die For is in excess of 700 pages long, after all, of which the table of contents takes eight. It even comes complete with an index!

Admittedly, some of the contributors are more immediately engaging than others, but none of the essays in Books to Die For run long at all. This is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it means the dull ones are over in no time; a curse because you get the sense some writers are only just getting into their swing when the word count comes crashing down. I'd have given a lot for a little more leg room in that regard.

All told, though, if you're in the least interested in mystery fiction, Books to Die For really is a book to die for. Now then: can we have a speculative fiction edition next?

***

When I blogged about Portal co-creator Kim Swift's Quantum Conundrum a couple of days before its release on Steam, I wasn't exactly hot on it. I'm still not, but now that actually I've played the thing - from start to finish, because it's the summer, and what else am I going to do? Go outside? - I can speak to the actual experience rather than its lackluster launch trailer.

Then again, I wasn't far off the mark, worrying about Quantum Conundrum's tepid sense of humour. Six or so hours of paltry punchlines later, if I hear Q crack another crappy joke, I'm going to snap a Star Trek: The Next Generation DVD. Don't test me, I'll do it!

Luckily, the puzzles are markedly more engaging than nonsense narrative John de Lancie is saddled with, wherein his mad scientist talks your innocent nephew through a wacky mansion. In short: Professor Fitz Quadrangle is stuck in some strange dimension, full of belly button fluff and other such stuff. It's up to the player to help him escape by powering up generators in three discrete wings, each of which introduces a new dimension.

In the first, fluffy, you can use your magical glove to make the world light and white, thus enabling you to pick up heavy things - like safes - and deposit them on weighted platforms to progress. So far, so simple — and the heavy dimension fails to make things more interesting. But when you gain the power to slow time, and finally to reverse gravity, the puzzle-solving Quantum Conundrum hinges on does pick up.

The only thing hindering your progression through the game's forty-odd test chambers then is the platforming, which is so poorly implemented as to be practically perverse. Jumps are floaty, movement is imprecise, and guys: gravity's a bitch. This is a fundamental fuck-up when the majority of Quantum Conundrum's most promising moments rely on your ability to flit around rooms on top of fast-moving objects. As to that, at least the checkpoints aren't too terrible.

Don't get me wrong: solving the puzzles in Quantum Conundrum is actually a bunch of fun. The kicker is, implementing your answers is an absolute nightmare. Add to that an inane script, a slow start, an uninspired aesthetic, and some outright derivative design decisions... folks, I'm afraid the whole package feels second-rate. Give it a miss unless you're a fan of frustration.

Video Game Review | Thomas Was Alone, dev. Mike Bithell

In the beginning, Thomas Was Alone.

Thomas is a skinny red rectangle. Not much of a looker, no, but what of it? He's alive!

The simple visual representation of an AI in the right place at the right time - or so the story goes - Thomas becomes conscious of his own existence in the opening moments of creator Mike Bithell's blissful brainchild. Almost immediately, he decides to record his observations for posterity, and as he has them, thanks to Danny Wallace's mostly measured narration, we hear them.

For less long than I might have liked, Thomas has a jolly old time running and jumping and falling around the levels of some strange purgatory world — or rather what little of it he has access to. As his awareness grows in depth and complexity, however, so too does the abstract, graph-paper plane he inhabits. Soon, sadly, Thomas finds himself overmatched by the environment...

...so it's a stroke of luck when he bumps into Chris, a small orange square — even if he is a bit of a hater. Despite his dislike of Thomas, Chris helps his accidental companion navigate the next few levels, and of course the skinny red rectangle returns the favour, because he fancies himself a bit of a hero. They can either work together towards something more, they realise, or continue to exist where they are alone.

Through the next portal they go, then... where they meet another AI. Someone who is a little bit different from either of them again.

In the beginning, Thomas Was Alone, but by the end, my oh my had he made some friends!

For an indie game made almost entirely by one man, the aforementioned Mike Bithell, Thomas Was Alone is truly an incredible accomplishment. It's short at around two to four hours of gameplay, but so neat and sweet in that tiny amount of time that it leaves a hole in your heart when - all too soon - it's over.

Not unlike a game along the lines of Fez, but maybe more like Super Meat Boy without the madness - indeed the meatiness - Thomas Was Alone has you doing very some simple things in increasingly complicated situations. Each of the AIs Thomas meets over the course of his awakening has a unique ability, and a personality to boot: for instance Claire, a big blue blob, has self-image issues, but she can float in water, without which skill Thomas and Chris are plum unable to progress.

Later we're introduced to various other AIs. Many others, as a matter of fact, and given that the player controls them all - switching between them with the Q and E keys - for a moment it feels like Thomas Was Alone is going to descend into tedious micromanaging. But Bithell is on the ball: he never insists that we do any one thing for too long, introducing new characters and dispatching those that have served their purpose with a ruthlessness that belies the astonishingly heartfelt tale Thomas Was Alone tells. Nor are any of the mechanics repeated often enough that they wear out their welcome; a lesson the vast majority of games today would be well to learn.

Mike Bithell might be the primary mind behind the machine, but I should stress that Thomas Was Alone isn't a wholly solo specimen. The sound, say, is as good as the look, which is simply striking: all but unadorned, yet absolutely alive. Anyway, each of the game's ten worlds comes complete with an original ambient track by David Housden, whose atmospheric music complements the aesthetics of the entire smartly.

Credit too to Danny Wallace, whose performance - excepting a few awkward attempts at inflection that put me in mind of early audiobooks - gives credible personality to each and every one of the AIs.

But the writing, the coding, the art, the everything else... that's all down to Bithell, and Bossa Studios' erstwhile lead designer hits it out of the park. In fact he hits it up, and to the right!

That's a bit of an in-joke you're just going to have to play Thomas Was Alone to see the sense of. I wouldn't be surprised to see it come to the PS3 at some point in the future, but for the moment it's PC only. Ideal, then, that it runs like a dream — even on creaky machines like mine.

You can get a copy of Thomas Was Alone direct from the developer via this link, and I dearly recommend you do.

I Tube | My Quantum Conundrum

In late 2009, Portal co-creator Kim Swift did the unthinkable: she left Valve to "pursue opportunities elsewhere." Some time later, she resurfaced as the creative lead of a project called Quantum Conundrum: a first-person perspective, physics-based puzzle game with a silly story and a sense of humour.

Sound familiar?

But of course it does. Still and all, I adored Portal, and there've been a couple of indie games since that have honed close to its oddball formula and come up somewhat triumphant — not least QUBE, which I reviewed here. Given its particular heritage, however, I had very high hopes for Quantum Conundrum.

And then?

Then this trailer:

Call me a misery-guts, but I didn't even crack a grin. Your mileage may vary... though probably not a lot, if I'm honest.

Depending on the reviews I read, I may still play it for the puzzles, but if this trailer is as telling as I think it is, then Quantum Conundrum's sense of humour looks to be as tepid as tap water. Which is a real shame. Because the puzzles weren't what made Portal so awesome in its day, were they?

Quantum Conundrum will be coming to consoles sometime this summer, but if you're happy to play it on your personal computer, it's actually out tomorrow — ironically via Valve's ubiquitous digital distribution service, Steam.

If you'd asked me yesterday if I was planning to buy it on either platform, I would have told you my money was practically spent already. But not so much, now. Not so much...

Video Game Review | Q.U.B.E., dev. Toxic Games

When a first-person shooter comes out which superimposes neat new mechanics on the tried and true formula of the genre, nobody screams about how it's some Call of Duty knock-off. Or perhaps some do - idiots, to a one - but assuredly they shouldn't, because however much Infinity Ward's take has come to dominate the space, there were excellent first-person shooters before Call of Duty, and in time, there'll be FPS-based games which put Call of Duty to shame. Bioshock Infinite, for instance. Give it to me!

But there have been far fewer first-person puzzle games than shooters from said perspective. In fact - and please do correct me if I'm wrong here - the only one I can recall is Portal, so it's hardly surprising that every review I've read of Q.U.B.E. has made reference to Valve's masterpiece of spatial awareness. It's hardly surprising, particularly given that the pair share an identical clinical aesthetic, and take similar turns around the halfway mark... but that isn't to say it's fair. Indeed, I'd describe the tepid reception Q.U.B.E. has received as indecent.

Q.U.B.E.'s name is a reference to the gameplay principle it revolves around, which is to say the Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion. At the outset the player wakes in a simple white-tiled test chamber without a word of explanation as to how you got there, or when or why, or even where there is. The only thing you can do is move forward, into another room, where there's a ledge you can't quite reach, and a single coloured block set into the floor, blood-red against the pure, bright white. You click it... and it rises. You click it again and it lowers back into the floor. Understanding dawns when you surmount the platform and raise it up to gain access to the ledge you couldn't get to before.

In the next chamber there's a red block and a blue block. In the chamber after that there's a set of yellow blocks as well. You discern that each colour does a distinct thing, and the first few of Q.U.B.E.'s seven sectors are devoted to exploring the many and various ways you can interact with these coloured blocks, and they with one another.

Concepts fall into place quickly and moreover naturally in the first half of Toxic Games' debut. The Welsh startup studio may well have borrowed an idea here and adapted an art asset there, but they put all of Q.U.B.E.'s component parts together in an inspired order that is entirely their own. The thrill of discovering the riddle of each subsequent room is second to none. Well... it's second to one, but if there's a more soaring series to play second fiddle to than Portal, I don't know its name.

Sadly Q.U.B.E. seems to run out of ideas well before the game is over. There's been no narrative to speak of thus far, and certainly no character, but suddenly the luridly lit rooms are plunged into darkness, and then the walls begin to crumble around you; sparking wires hang loose, the mechanics of platforms are rudely exposed, and spherical security drones start factoring into puzzles that seem at best abstract. Q.U.B.E. becomes an uncomfortably familiar experience, and by the time it finds itself again, shortly before the credits roll, hours have passed, and the game has changed, for poorer rather than richer: the difficulty curve has risen sharply, only to drop arbitrarily away into jagged cracks and chasms of its own creation. In short, Q.U.B.E. has become something of a slog. 

But wait, there's more! I wouldn't usually comment on bugs in a video game review, no more than I would allude to typos or formatting problems in a review of a book, alas... there's no getting away from the fact that Q.U.B.E. is a bit broken. I lost count of the number of times I had to restart a room because I'd gotten stuck on some unexpected geometry, but these clipping issues were hardly an issue amongst all the blue screens I encountered -- and this on a computer that hasn't crashed since I fed it Windows 7.

Presumably there'll be patches - if there aren't already - to address these issues, and DLC tailored to expand upon the best moments of Toxic Games' flawed but nonetheless impressive debut. I'll look forward to both of those things, but with several reservations.

Ultimately, it's fine to find fault with Q.U.B.E. - after all it is far from a perfect game, nor by any means a stable one at the time of this writing - but to dismiss it because it bears a momentary aesthetic resemblance to Portal is wrong-headed. And despite all its issues, I'd still urge you to give Q.U.B.E. a go, the better to see what else it has to offer for yourself.