Rock, Paper, Shotgun

SvDvorak was first with the news that in the lead up to its release on the 8th, the Amnesia: The Dark Descent demo is out there. Don’t look at it directly! Stay in the shadows! Be careful not to go insane! You can get the game on PC, beardy-PC or haircut-PC from any of these places. You should definitely give this a shot. I’ve only played a couple of hours of Amnesia and it’s already the scariest game of 2010. And new demo, complete with developer voice-over, shows off exactly what the physics allows…
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Exciting news for people being scared out of their tiny fucking wits. Frictional – the maker of the Penumbra games – have just finished their new game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It’ll be available on September 8th, from most of the direct download places or their own site. In short, story and atmosphere heavy first person game where you’re pretty much defenceless. Have a nose at Walker’s impressions of early code here. John is currently playing it for your edification, and I believe Quinns is reviewing it for Eurogamer, so expect to have their opinions emerge between now and then. In the mean time, here’s a Going-Gold-gameplay-footage trailer…
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Amnesia, the new game from Frictional Games – they who brought us the Penumbra series – is due to be with us on the 8th September. I’ve had a play with the first third (of what must be a pretty big game), and have written up my thoughts for Eurogamer. It begins:

“I think a mark of quality in a game is whether you can return to a room you’ve previously been in, and know you were there earlier by the destruction you wrought. Amnesia, the new first-person adventure from Penumbra developers Frictional, does not paint rooms in the blood of your enemies, but rather in strewn desk drawers, boxes and broken glass.

And light.

Amnesia is looking to be an extremely dark game, but rather than offering you the opportunity to sneak silently in the welcoming shadows, here darkness is your enemy. It is the path to insanity.”

Read on.

Frictional Games’ new horror title, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, is probably going to give me nightmares. They seem to be celebrating this with a new trailer, which sets the release date for Sepetember 8th, and reminds us why we should be interested in the gloomy spookiness of their game design. Feel vaguely disconcerted, below. (Also, the main site reveals that they are definitely planning a demo, which sounds like a good idea to me.)
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Aw, man. This is a bit of shame. When we were doing our Unknown Pleasures Ultromegafeature in January we tried quite hard to get the Penumbra chaps Frictional Games to talk about what they were up to next. Alas, that slipped into February. Except now it gets worse, as they show footage of their game and the work-in-progress title is… Unknown. Man! That would have been too good. Anyway – first teaser footage beneath the cut.
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We’ve been stalking Frictional Games, the developers behind the indie horror series Penumbra, for a while now, trying to find out details about their new project. Along the way we asked them to look back at the process of developing Penumbra, what lessons were learned, which publishers were hated, and why horror is their passion. In a frank interview, two of Frictional’s four-man team, sound director Jens Nilsson and lead programmer Thomas Grip, talk us through the company’s past, all the while dropping a few hints about what’s next, before giving us the first solid details of their forthcoming, castle-based horror game.

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Frictional Games, they behind the Penumbra series, are beginning to tease their new game. As yet untitled, so far we know it’s a horror game, and using completely new tech.

That last detail is a big deal. Frictional first got noticed when a student project to create a graphics engine ended up being a damn site better than many professional engines out there. Superb lighting and excellent implementation of physics made for a super-fun time. However, just of late it’s beginning to look a bit dated. So far there’s no in-game evidence of what the new tech will be capable of, but there’s good reason to assume they’ll aim for something impressive. More details about the teaser website and game below.

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