Rock, Paper, Shotgun

By Nathan Grayson on July 13th, 2012 at 9:00 am.

It’s Halloween night, and you’re safe and sound in your own home. Even so, you feel a creeping sense of dread slowly start to take hold, but you can’t put your finger on what exactly is causing it. You glance over your shoulder. A werewolf. You glance over your other shoulder. A giant spider with masses of smaller spiders for eyes. You look in a mirror. Turns out, you’re dissolving into a writhing pile of centipedes. Then, the horror begins: “Sorry, guys,” you say. “Amnesia got delayed into 2013. We can’t play it tonight like we’d planned.” So your party’s really boring and anticlimactic – just like the end of this little story.

Creative director Dan Pinchbeck explained in an interview with GameZone:

“It’s just slid back to early 2013. The quality of the game is the absolute first, last, and always with this development, and we felt it could do with a few more months’ work to make sure that’s really going to happen.”

It’s a bit of a shame, sure, but – though I never really had any doubts – it’s good to hear that thechineseroom is so dedicated to getting this one right. It has the potential to really be quite the thing, too, given Pinchbeck’s penchant for stomach-churning slow-burn mysteries and Amnesia’s masterful brand of sweat-stained mania. I desperately want to see how exactly the two mix, but for now, my ultra-bright lightbulbs, flashlight, spotlight, and poster of a rainbow-surrounded sun with a smiley face on it will all go sadly unused. This bit, however, at least sounds promising:

“The central thing about Amnesia: The Dark Descent is that the player’s experience is at the core. It takes precedence of mechanics, over more formal gameplay features as such. So we’re preserving that emotional journey – that rollercoaster of fear, awe, desperation, loneliness, sadness, disgust, and terror. There are some changes of course, to keep things fresh, but it will very much feel like an Amnesia game. But what we’re hoping for is a very different experience at the same time.”

On the bright side, this year hasn’t exactly been lacking in excellent horror. Lone Survivor, Home, and Slender have picked up the slack rather well, and then there’s Among The Sleep, which promises to scare many more than two years off our lifespans… eventually. And hey, how about Resident Evil 6? Anyone? Hello?