Amnesia: Rebirth

It's a rare occasion for me to play an Epic freebie but free is about the most I would pay for Amnesia: Rebirth. I knew beforehand I wouldn't like the game; I played it mostly because it was free and because I had then added it onto my backlog before The Bunker came out. It was only with the latter game's release I learned that the lead writer Mikael Hedberg had left Frictional Games after Soma. Rebirth's story was thus unlikely to be any good and the Amnesia series' gameplay is yet to impress me.

Forgettable horror walking simulator

In Rebirth you play as Anastasie Trianon who is a member of a mining venture in late 1930s' Africa. The group's plane crashes in Algeria where Tasi wakes up in the middle of a desert. Everyone else is gone and the plane wreckage appears to have been there quite a while too. It's obvious that Tasi has returned to the scene after the fact but because amnesia is what it is, she has no recollection what has been happening.

You set off into the desert to find where everyone is and what's going on. There are dark caves, an abandoned fortress, ruins, and -- I guess -- dimensional traveling. The last one reminded me of Lust for Darkness and Scorn a bit. You get matches and yet another shittiest oil lantern ever created as your light sources to ward against the insanity-inducing darkness -- the typical Amnesia stuff.

Monsters show up soon enough too and I have to give Frictional credit for managing to spook me a couple of times. Soon enough the tension was completely gone again, however. Your methods of dealing with monsters is hiding or running -- the usual Amnesia stuff. Getting caught repeatedly gets outright annoying because there is a lengthy cutscene in which Tasi gets away (to progress past the monster). I regretted not having set difficulty to Story mode in which there are no monsters.

Rebirth has different endings which are entirely determined by how you choose to play the last bit, I believe. I chose the one that required no effort; I was so tired of the game at that point. The story had never gotten interesting and I didn't care about the outcome.

Over the years I've seen quite a few comments about how Alien: Isolation is too long and how it supposedly makes you think it's about to end but then doesn't, more than once. I wonder how those people deal with Rebirth because it most certainly does that. Isolation's twists never got to my nerves but this one definitely did over the too-long 9 hours it took me to get through it.

Mikael Hedberg appears to have resurfaced as the director on the fresh Alone in the Dark by Pieces Interactive. I don't know if such a reimagining (of a non-scifi title) offers enough room for a compelling story but since Soma was so great, I take any hope I can get for the possibility to have another as great of an experience.