Amnesia: Rebirth review: A treasure in the rare cosmic horror genre

Conclusion

In this section, I have to talk in pretty broad terms in this section as to not provide any spoilers for Amnesia: The Dark Descent or Amnesia: Rebirth.

Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs was the second game in the Amnesia series and had no outright connection to the previous title, making it feel like the series would serve as an anthology of stories rather than a traditional series that ties together one cohesive story. This was great and drew interesting parallels to the Lovecraftian stories that the games were heavily inspired by. Even if some of the games here or there had some small, inconsequential nods to the former stories or objects there in, that also would serve to further the obvious Lovecraftian inspirations (Many of Lovecraft’s stories, like “At the Mountains of Madness” or “Necrinomicon”, existed in a shared universe but had little to no effect on each other).

Sure, A Machine for Pigs was heavily inspired mostly by non-Lovecraftian classic horror and literature, but it still belonged in the genre of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, even if it was a little more grounded.

However, Amnesia: Rebirth breaks that trend, and by the end of the game, is revisiting and building on ideas, concepts, and even the story of the initial Amnesia title. By the end of the experience, the story still does stand on its own to a certain but had me googling names and references that I did not understand. So much of the final act of the game draws on the player’s nostalgia or knowledge of the first game, that for a player who did not play the first game, it became more of an obligation than a desire to finish the game.

You know, a player like myself.

I have played Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs because I was going to do a now-scrapped “Way Too Late” review of it this month and also Jacob Geller told me to, but never played or watched anyone play Amnesia: The Dark Descent. This is despite the fact that I own it as part of the Playstation’s digital Amnesia Collection. I did not follow what felt like were massive reveals in the finale of this title and left the game feeling unsatisfied and underwhelmed, despite having enjoyed myself thoroughly throw the rest of the game up to that point.

This is also unfortunate because the gameplay in the finale is also some of the weakest and least scary moments in the entire experience.

A game this good otherwise should not leave such a negative taste in the player’s mouth due to a botched finale. It makes the player question whether the game is any good at all, and even an objective look at the game does not exist in a vacuum and is likely to reflect some of those negative feelings.

A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.