This was a return to form for Amnesia that I only got around to playing after The Bunker.
The game is quite visually distinct. You will be in a desert, caves, a fort, a cistern, an oasis, and the Dark World where Alexander of Brennenburg came from. Noticeably, all of these have very little reuse and I was looking forward to every new area. The HPL engine has some magic where even on my LCD screen they manage to put pure darkness on screen which no doubt would look even better if you have HDR or OLED. For the first time in Amnesia, there are also wide open vistas where I genuinely couldn't tell if something was in the skybox or the 3D area. Shockingly impressive visuals. In terms of audio, it's also a banger. The voice acting is very good. It has a quite cosmopolitan cast where everyone has a unique voice even when they're... not strictly human anymore. Tasi herself does a great job and reminds me of Daniel in many cases. A curious, well-meaning person who is in over their head. As you might already know, Tasi is unlike Daniel in a specific aspect in that she's pregnant. I think the pregnancy aspect in this game was underutilized instead of overdone, but that's for later.
Gameplay-wise it's sort of a premium plus version of the Dark Descent. You walk around a semi-open area, sometimes dodging monsters, picking up puzzle pieces and progressing forwards. You have no means of defending yourself, but also, in most cases you won't end up in a long chase either which is my biggest gripe with the Dark Descent. In that game when a monster was on your ass, your best bet was to put out your light and slam doors in their face hoping they forget to check every corner. Here, most encounter puzzles are faster, meaning you don't have to drop the puzzle, you can just take your chances and finish the puzzle and progress. As I said near the beginning, I played this after I had played the Bunker. Which means that, yeah, I do miss having a gun. And looking at how skinny some of these Ghouls were compared to the Bunker's Beast, I kinda think the Bunker's shotgun could solve a lot of problems real quick. Jokes aside, the less you scare yourself, the easier the encounters are, which is the Frictional house style as has been established since Penumbra.
Unlike the Dark Descent which had two meters to manage (health and sanity) or the Bunker which has one meter (health) and many items to manage, if you do end up scaring yourself, Rebirth only has one meter: Fear. I didn't quite like this. Laudanum has been reworked into reducing fear, which maybe is more medically accurate actually, but now during an encounter you can have passively increasing fear (by looking at scary things, duh) and whenever you get hit by a monster, that also increases fear. I was, uh, afraid of my fear peaking. Which might have been intended, but unlike the Dark Descent you have no idea when exactly you're really struggling. Also the bugs-crawling-in-your-ear-canal ASMR sound from the Dark Descent is the only Fear sound cue, so that was getting annoying near the end. Maybe it'd be better to have different sounds based on areas? Bugs for earthly areas, water rushing in the cistern and oasis, and the screams of the damned in the Dark World? Just thinking out loud. Now, when you get really scared, you have this QTE where you have to fight it off. If you fail, you die in terms of a game mechanic, but in-setting what happens is that Tasi is ghoulified for a minute or so and she rampages around then regains her senses. In the Dark Descent when your insanity peaked, you passed out. It was easier for monsters to find and kill you. It's only fair. But you had many chances to actually keep your sanity in check. Don't look at the monster. Don't stay in the darkness too long. Puff yourself up and go do the puzzle which basically tops up your sanity every time. Here, you cannot always keep your Fear in check because, at least as far as my rough "experiments" tell me, being in light doesn't reduce your Fear, only stops it from going higher.
There are two ways of reducing Fear. Progressing, as always, and talking to your belly. Well, the baby in your belly. You do this by holding down a button and caressing your belly, which in turn kicks your innards. Very Death Stranding. What was up with baby management games in 2019/2020, I don't know. The issue is, and again my rough "experimentation" shows me, you cannot reduce your fear by babying your baby during an encounter. It only seems to reduce Fear in large amounts when the baby kicks on its own, which only happens during safe moments and is marked by a baby blue flash on the bottom of your screen. You might already see the issue with this. It is a great way of characterizing Tasi and her baby, but mechanically it's detached from the horror adventure core. And to be honest, I don't even know how it could be fixed. If you made it so that baby management could zero out Fear even during an encounter, that risks people ultra-optimizing it and crashing the pacing. If you made it so that it's a resource, then you'd be re-creating the Dark Descent system with different words, and you'd also have to find a way to tell the player how much calming energy an unborn baby has, which... I have no idea how you'd do that. Unlike Death Stranding it's not a born baby, so you can't make it cry either. It's a tough situation. That being said, don't get me wrong, the gameplay is functional. Like I said at the beginning, it's a premium plus version of the Dark Descent.
The story and the writing itself are also quite good, and in many cases better then the Dark Descent. Unlike Pigs, it's a lot less self-aggrandizing and philosophical, but not as barebones as The Bunker though. You are Tasi Trianon, a French mining drafter in 1937 who travels to the Algerian desert with a crew of a dozen and a half people including her husband Salim. It's a horror game, so it all goes to ♥♥♥♥. The plane crashes in the desert, and Tasi wakes up alone with amnesia. And yes, she's also pregnant. You must brave the horrors and figure out what happened to everyone, while keeping your baby safe. A lot of the writing is based around the crew's tensions after the disaster, and how the friendlier crewmates interact with each other. There is a great amount of subtext in the game. It's 1937, if you know a little bit about history you can expect certain things from certain characters. It's not trying to be crude or offensive for the sake of it, and manages to get the issues of the time across while keeping the focus strictly on the otherworldly horror. Speaking of which, this is also the most in-depth Amnesia has gotten with the Dark World (or the Other World, or Zerzura, whatever). I had always wondered what it looked like and man... This is one of the best designs for a sci-fi horror world of all time. You start out exploring the outskirts of this strange, dying world, getting closer and closer to the heart of it. Its buildings are made up of huge monoliths and feel appropriately alien. The scale of the implied horror surpasses Pigs tenfold. And also appropriately, this game's endings are the darkest in any Amnesia game. I won't spoil them, but there really isn't a single, absolutely good ending. Sort of makes me wonder how Alexander would feel if he returned to this world, though Pigs implies that Daniel killed him without the help of Agrippa. That wasn't a spoiler, stop freaking out.
Set 98 years after the Dark Descent, 38 years after Pigs and 20 years after the Bunker, to-date, Rebirth is the latest game chronologically. As a result, since Ontos has been delayed to 2027 too, we won't be learning more about the Dark World for a while it seems. But in the meantime, this game is quite good. It's more like the Dark Descent rather than the Bunker or Alien: Isolation, but for a fun, moderately long first-person horror adventure from the people who invented that genre, it's a good return to form.
