His adventure reveals some ugly truths about his past life, but the true extent to which the corruption spreads revitalises the tired concept of the amnesiac protagonist. Your character, Daniel, has lost his memory and spends most of the game gradually piecing together his past, motivated by a single directive from his previous self: find and kill Alexander Brennenberg, the owner of the castle. It's every horror film's haunted house, in other words, and the premise itself is equally hackneyed. The wind whirls and howls through its dark and draughty corridors, the tapestries are thick with dust, and the doors creak like old bones when they're prised open. Yet for all of these revolutionary concepts, Amnesia's setting couldn't be more traditional by contrast: a decaying gothic castle situated in rural nineteenth-century Prussia. That's quite a damp problem you've got there. These and other concepts, evolved in earlier games, would be used to disrupt horror conventions in Amnesia. Again, the horror is not just about what's prowling up and down the next corridor, but what's going on inside your character's body and mind.
As Black Plague progresses, Clarence's personality develops, and his power over the player increases to the point where he can manipulate your perception of the environments. Clarence begins the game as a figment of the player's psyche, a voice in the player's head that drones, sneers and jokes in a thick New York accent. Yet Black Plague's greatest trick is a narrative one that manifests itself in the form of Clarence. Without that crutch you feel naked and vulnerable, no longer in control of the situation, and there are few feelings as frightening as the absence of control. Combat was removed entirely in Black Plague, Penumbra's brilliant second chapter, and it's difficult to emphasise how brave and ingenious a decision that was, given how reliant all first-person games and most horror games up to that point were on letting the player clutch a weapon to their virtual chest. The grains of Amnesia, then, are already visible - the tactile interaction, the emphasis on avoiding combat, and the desire to present the player with horror that is not just extrinsic, but intrinsic too. It's an absolutely agonising decision, and the game pulls no punches in showing you the consequences of your actions. At the end of the game though, the player is left with no choice but to incinerate Red in order to obtain a key to escape the complex. Vulnerable though you are, you're guided through the mining complex by the warm, friendly voice of Red, who communicates with you over loudspeaker from an unknown location. Overture features a combat system, but it's slow and clumsy while enemies are tough and dangerous. While this sort of interaction is, for the most part used to solve puzzles, its significance lies in the way it lends a strong connection with the world that surrounds you - a vital component of any horror game.
Doors and drawers are opened and closed by holding down the mouse button and dragging the mouse around, for example, rather than merely clicking on them. As you explore the mining complex just outside the facility itself, Frictional's pioneering physics-based interactions are introduced. In Penumbra, the player character Phillip explores an abandoned Arctic research station after receiving a letter from his allegedly deceased father. Unsettling though Amnesia's environments undoubtedly are, the true horror comes from within.
Instead, it represents the culmination of a series of ideas that evolved gradually throughout Fractional's earlier output, beginning with the studio's debut, Penumbra: Overture. The result dramatically altered the horror genre as a whole, but Amnesia didn't break this new ground entirely on its own. This is the notion that Amnesia challenged by shifting the focus away from fighting monsters, and towards the central character's own state of being instead. Even the most frightening games in existence, like Silent Hill and System Shock 2, couldn't let go of that notion of fighting back against some kind of external threat. Prior to Amnesia, horror games tended to be prefixed with the term "Survival", and the genre was exemplified by games like Resident Evil and Dead Space, where jump-scares and creepy environments coexisted alongside an emphasis on combat and the scavenging of supplies. Like Minecraft and Dark Souls, the ideas and systems explored in Frictional's masterclass in terror have crept out into other areas of the games industry, like a virus seeking out fresh hosts. There's a reasonable argument to be made that Amnesia: The Dark Descent is one of the most influential games of this decade.