Amnesia: Rebirth

"Like worms on a hook
That were plucked from the hearts
Of the bodies of gods
That were rotting to dust"

 

Otep - Apex Predator 

 

 

A game about a pregnant gal falling down about twenty flights of stairs.

Also: The Magician's Nephew's gone goth!

Anyway, worship the great mother.

It's not polite to stare.

A Machine for Pigs made a good enough impression to keep me playing through my Amnesia backlog (I'd forgotten all about them until now) with Rebirth. Published a decade after The Dark Descent, it seems from the start eager to show off its more polished game engine, all those larger, more complex, interactable environments and special effects. While its underlying stiff mid-2000s blockiness is more and more difficult to hide these days, they worked it into a generally... well, stiff and blocky, chthonic aesthetic well fitting the cold, off-putting sensation so intrinsic to their survival horror claim to fame. However, while much of that is indeed well-executed, it also contributes heavily to a pervasively damaging over-indulgence.

 

The more lush environments could not help but tempt me to treat this not as survival horror but an open-world RPG, trying to explore every nook and cranny of every zone. (Hey, I like sandbox games. You put me in a literal sandbox. I'm gonna do some sandboxin'! I'm not on trial here!) Indeed, the developers themselves seemed uncertain which way to lean from zone to zone, delighting in immersing you in a massive alternate-universe ruin -

Worship the great mother.

- while struggling to maintain some degree of chill on the back of your neck. Rebirth satisfies more as an improvement on Myst's otherworldly exploration, but this cannot help but clash with its desperation to maintain the series' core survival horror theme. So many scripted events pop up randomly that it becomes tedious struggling not to trigger the next cutscene and the next and the next before you've had a chance to explore. Branching paths just waste time if you cannot fully explore a branch, invisible walls block your path or doors unlock miraculously across the map as you advance unrelated plot points with little hint as to proper order of operations. Most often you're simply thrown into mazes of dead ends, some of which you're expected to navigate while being chased, guessing at identical left or right turns in the dark.

 

The darkness in particular, while it's a constant (and logical) part of the survival horror formula, is taken to infuriating extremes. The strict game mechanics side (using light to lower your fear) works well enough, making you manage two resource pools of matches and lamp oil, with plentiful enough drops for the diligent explorer. But when every single damn zone is darker than the sun don't shine, the simple act of moving around becomes a mind-numbing chore. Cranking the gamma just to see one step ahead is a "game" I'd hoped not to play after the first Diablo. After awhile the entire trial-and-error routine of stumbling around blind while monsters jump out of the walls to chase you stops being a meaningful challenge or high-stakes immersion and just gets aggravating. Especially so as Rebirth lacks a quicksave/quickload feature, substituting an auto-respawn... which plonks you randomly in your current level. As you may guess that's worse than nothing, only compounding the central frustration of blind stumbling. I preferred to keep saving to the main menu and reload manually rather than use it.

 

So when I no longer worried about spoilers and looked at player comments I was not surprised to find Rebirth a bit polarizing, with lots of 1-star and 5-star votes. Take the rage-reviews with a grain of salt though. The various mechanics are not bad so much as overused and over-emphasized. Stumbling through the darkness would be great if such zones had not been over-extended. The puzzles can be frustrating, but hints do drop if you just monkey around with your environment a bit. The chases have some variety thrown in like needing to circle, dive, clear a path or stall for a few seconds. And when you're not faceplanting into walls, the alternate universe makes an engrossing playground of its humanoid yet eerie environments.

The backstory dovetails decently with Dark Descent's hints. Though I can't help but roll my eyes at the basic "spaceships that run on feels" phlebotinum, detailing the notion with objects you can actually pick up and combine in-game helps. I also suspect many who bash Rebirth do so on unspoken visceral reactions to its protagonist's plight of pregnancy. For some its mere centrality, complete with "Call the Midwife" cutscenes will feel overbearing. Others may feel betrayed in the opposite direction, because much like Grieving Mother, Rebirth makes you play through the discrepant weight and beatitude heaped upon childbearing and motherhood (what wouldn't you do?) a horse so high that naught may reach. Naught?

"Why does she look so much like me?"

A thread of Venus figurines and other earth-mother worship runs through the entirety of the plot, subtly shifting from being strictly associated with safe locations in the first cave to... well, play and see. For much of the campaign, I grew increasingly annoyed thinking our heroine Tasi would, much like Lorelai, never question the help she receives or weigh the value of her own well-being against the damage she causes. But while the ending can go several ways, at least one option lets you acknowledge that there are limits to anyone's entitlement.

 

Still, take any gushing praise with a similar grain of salt as well. I have not worried much about spoiling the story because the aforementioned overindulgence takes its toll in that department as well. For one thing, when cutscenes interfere with the rules of the game, we can safely call them intrusive. Being crushed by rubble sounds like a game over, except once or twice it triggers a cutscene. Normally being caught by a creature is bad, but once or twice you have to be caught for a cutscene. And the sheer number of environments and twists and turns occasionally undermines the central light/fear mechanic. Incongruously Tasi experiences no trepidation in some pitch-black areas laden with macabre remnants... so long as the darkness and gore is on that post-cataclysmic alien world which she knows issued all the horrors invading Earth. And the plot stretching over so many oversized zones results in overwhelming foreshadowing and some plot holes, notably Tasi looking for Panacea when diminishing returns and "it takes an ocean" are in fact some of the very first texts you encounter in the ruined world, entire chapters earlier. And just maybe the basic pregnancy/motherhood melodrama could stand to be cranked down a notch.

 

There are some other smaller flaws as well.

Developed shortly before 2020, Rebirth is heavier on political correctness than it had to be. Expedition to Algiers including North-Africans? Well, yes, I should think so. Inter-cultural marriage? Sure, these things happen. The only straight white males appearing as antagonists, and even going so far as to pad one's backstory with justification for "I never liked him anyway" because he's a lecherous racist? While the black man's an unimpeachable saint who never complains even as you condemn him to a fate worse than death and still worries about your well-being? Wow. No. Reel it in there, snowflakes.

Then there are a couple of apparently dropped plot threads, like the laudanum.

Or the oddity of centering a game on a francophone heroine who never drops a line of actual French, even if you switch the text language, yielding a sometimes goofy klingon swearing effect when you just know she's supposed to say "merde"

All in all, I can't call this a masterpiece, and it's been far more frustrating than it had to be. But... if you step back from immediate rage-quits and eye-rolling, this is, interestingly (like Technobabylon) a rare example of a game that just tries too hard, as opposed to the cheap shovelware we're all accustomed to. The underlying mechanics, the plot, the atmosphere, puzzles, exploration, all the elements are solid and developed intelligently... but then just slightly over-developed.