Amnesia: The Dark Descent is now haunted by Hard Mode
Ha ha nah no thank you
With the season of spooky celebrations kicking off, Amnesia: The Dark Descent has added a Hard Mode for people who wish to suffer terrible cruelty as they explore the horrible ghost house of meat monsters. The new mode, added to 2010's first-person spooker in a patch today, makes the meatmen more murderous and starves us of comforting light so we lose our mind (and then die as we lose our loose grip on reality). So a real good time. It's a stark contrast to the bonus mode developers Frictional Games added to their later Soma - an easy option for explorers and sightseers. This time, they want you dead.
Frictional explain the horrors of Hard Mode:
- Autosaves are disabled, and manual saving costs 4 tinderboxes
- Sanity dropping to zero results in death
- Less oil and tinderboxes throughout the levels
- Monsters are faster, spot the player more easily, deal more damage and stay around for longer
- There is no danger music when the monsters are near.
So there is less warning about things that'll harm you physically and they'll deal you more harm, and mentally you'll find less to provide comfort and die if your sanity runs out - and you'll have to use some of those comfort sources to save as a backup. Ha ha no thank you! I fired up Amnesia with this patch out of curiosity and soon stopped because ah you know what, I'm good, I'm fine, I'll be just peachy without this.
Amnesia spooks me enough already and it's the spooking that I really enjoy it in, not really the systemic challenge. I've not finished Amnesia because I got too spooked and look I have a lot of other games to play, okay, but I'd rather give up due to being overspooked than frustrated. But hey, Hard Mode is entirely optional.
Should you wish to test your mettle, Hard Mode is now live (on Steam and GOG, at least) and does have a new cheevo for completing it.
Frictional had said they'll add the mode on PC "after" its debut in the Amnesia Collection on Xbone today, but I suppose I hadn't expected we'd get it on the same day. That's nice. Well, nice that they're doing this horrible thing to us? Thanks?