Thank you copycats, you made me hate something good.

I hate Amnesia The Dark Decent. It’s not that it’s a bad game, it’s not that it’s a bad horror game (though I’d say Penumbra Overture worked better as a horror game). I hate it because of what it spawned, all the Amnesia clones.

I like Silent Hill games, Silent Hill 2 is number two on the list of best games ever made. Now images of a new Silent Hill game have been “leaked”, and it looks like a first person no defense horror game, like PT which was not a Silent Hill game but a fucking Amnesia clone! One Amnesia game is good, but a;; the clones are not, and making Silent Hill an Amnesia clone kills what made it good.

I am not saying Amnesia was bad. It worked, but not for the reasons the cloaners think. It was not the defenselessness or the first person view. The first person view is purely esthetic, it does not impact the horror much, if at all, a horror game is equally scary in the first person and the third person. The defenselessness actually hurts horror. It’s about the fight or flight response. Defenselessness works with the flight response, but if you respond with the fight response, or once your response switches to fight, and the game will not let you fight back, then it stops being scary, it become frustrating and angering.

I know people will say “If you can kill the monsters they are not scary anymore.” My response: You’ve been playing shit “horror” games. Just because you can fight back doesn’t mean a monster isn’t scary, it’s all about implementation. One of the things that makes Silent Hill work so well is how it’s combat worked. You could fight and kill every monster you encounter but it is not a good idea. You’ll run out of bullets and health items making the game much harder. If Amnesia made it possible to fight back, not able to kill the monster but temporarily slow it or stop it, but at a great risk, it would be have been better. Hiding would still be the better idea because hitting it with a peace of wood may stun it, but odds are it will kill you before you hit it. By allowing you to fight back but making it a bad idea it adds to the fear by letting you act on the fight response then having a cost to it . The next time you have the fight response you remember the cost and it then becomes the flight response. It also show’s you how weak you are compared to the monster (or force creating the monsters in Silent Hill’s case) adding to the fear.

Amnesia is a good game, a flawed game but a good game and it is a good horror game but I hate it now. Because of people taking the most obvious parts, the parts that are the flaws, and thinking those are what made it work (those are not what made it work) and copying them, to the point they’ve infected other survival horror franchises like Silent Hill, I hate it. At this point I wish it was never made.