![]() Much of my annoyance, however, came from historical assumptions about how this game is supposed to work. My mind started to drift towards a world after Rebirth was released, when someone inevitably releases a mod that gave players unlimited access to matches. I would fumble through desk drawers without igniting a match to help me see better, hoping the game's interface would switch to the icon that represents an item I could pick up. This meant I was less encouraged to poke around the world, because it meant burning a precious resource. You end up spending a lot of time in Rebirth bumbling forward, a dwindling match in hand, hoping to find something to light along the way. You do not get access to many matches early on, which means choosing to light one up is a huge gamble, because there's also no guarantee you'll find anything useful to light along the way. The faster you walk, the faster the matches go out. It takes some time before players get access to a lantern, which means for a while, your main source of light is using matches to ignite nearby candles, torches, whatever you can find. I'm an easy mark for these games, but truth be told, I found the opening hours frustrating and hard to settle into. (In a nod to how our discussions around mental illness have shifted in the last decade, Rebirth swaps losing "sanity" for being overwhelmed by "fear.") A main source of tension is a desire to explore butting into the extremely limited resources allotted to light the darkness, knowing that walking around in the pitch black will eventually result in losing a grip on reality. You read lots of notebooks that fill in parts of the story because there aren't really cutscenes or character interactions. There are cumbersome physics puzzles that grind the game to a halt. Rebirth tries to split the difference, while still feeling very much like an Amnesia game. ![]() In that mode, the monsters were there, but they could no longer kill you. It was worth it, of course, but there's a reason Frictional later patched in a story mode of sorts. It was the story, and its monster sequences became tiring endeavours of trial-and-error. ![]() Navigating the game's lumbering monstrosities was not, in fact, the best part of Soma. One of the reasons Soma remains underappreciated is because a lot of people struggled to get through it. While experiencing frequent blackouts and suspecting she is very much not alone in the desert, Tasi has another reason for survival: she's pregnant. Tasi awakes alone, and sets out to find out what happened to everyone, including her husband. The story here centers on Tasi Trianon, who is part of an expedition into the Algerian Desert that hits a nasty speed bump when their plane crashes in the middle of nowhere. Rebirth, though connected to the story of The Dark Descent, does not require you to have played it to hit the ground running. ![]() It is, and remains, an underappreciated masterpiece, featuring one of the medium's best and bleakest endings. Even developer Frictional Games seemed to realize how much Amnesia felt like lighting in a bottle, which is why the studio spent the next five years leaving behind its cthulhu-inspired world for an existential crisis set in the depths of the ocean, Soma. ![]()
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