There are lots of different kinds of horror out there, but probably the two biggest have to be Survival Horror and Hide and Seek Horror. I’ve talked plenty about both, but just a quick summary, survival horror has more of a focus on managing resources as you fight the horrors chasing you while hide and seek horror is more about running and hiding without any way to fight back. Neither is better or worse and whether you like one more than another comes down entirely to preference really! But that’s not what we’re going to talk about today. Similar to how I did a couple weeks ago when talking about Resident Evil defining survival horror, I wanted to do the same with hide and seek horror! However, it can be a bit harder to figure out what exactly defined this particular horror genre but most tend to point to Amnesia: The Dark Descent!

Much like with Resident Evil and survival horror, Amnesia was far from the first game in this genre. Funny enough, it wasn’t even the first game in this genre by the game’s developer Frictional Games! A few years before they made Amnesia they made the Penumbra series that has quite a few similarities to Amnesia! But much like comparing Resident Evil to Alone in the Dark, Amnesia was the game to popularize this particular horror genre. And while it probably did less to define it, Amnesia certainly refined what made hide and seek horror stand out and still stands as one of the best in the genre to this day!

Amnesia was originally released just for the PC back in 2010 but thankfully is now available on modern consoles! Somewhat surprisingly, the game has yet to receive any kind of modern remake despite the current trends. But given how well the game still holds up, it’s more than playable nowadays. Like I’ve been saying Amnesia is a hide and seek horror game, so no fighting only running and hiding. While games like Clock Tower and Frictional Games’ own Penumbra predate it, Amnesia was absolutely the game to truly popularize the genre. However, it did so in a very different manner than Resident Evil did with survival horror. While Amnesia is also a game that defines its genre and still holds up, the reason it became a trend setting success doesn’t come just from that, it mainly comes from the internet!

Amnesia released during the boom of Lets Plays, which are basically videos of people playing games with commentary. A big trend in this sphere was playing horror games. People tend to love watching others get scared and have a fun reaction to whatever is going on after all! And Amnesia was perfect for that.

Now I’m not trying to say that Amnesia owes all its success to it being picked up and player online by tons of people wanting to make videos but it does explain why it blew up and was quickly put into the limelight! Thanks to this, for a long time any time someone would play a hide and seek horror game, people would often compare it to Amnesia. While this might not happen so much nowadays, partly due to the fact Amnesia as a series hasn’t been able to capture its own former glory, it’s still quite the feat and one that managed to not only put Amnesia on the map but hide and seek horror as well!

After its release, the genre saw a huge boom in popularity! And not just from gamers wanting more games like it, but from developers wanting to make more games like it as well! It also helps that Amnesia came out around a time when horror games were very much in decline. I’ve talked in the past about this, but the Xbox 360 and PS3 era was quite the dark times for horror games with new series popping up but dying just as fast and old series like Resident Evil and Silent Hill hitting their lowest of lows. While I’m not going to give Amnesia the credit of saving the horror genre for games, it did give developers a new outlet to explore for horror games!

But how about we actually take sometime to talk about the game itself now rather than its legacy! Amnesia is a first person horror game, you play as Daniel a man with amnesia that only knows his name, where he comes from, and that he must kill the baron of the castle he’s currently in, Alexander. After this brief but very cool introduction, you’re right into the game as you start stumbling around and quickly realizes something extremely wrong is going on with the castle. It doesn’t take long for the game to start explaining the controls and how things work. You’ll need to be collecting items and solving puzzles but in a more linear form than you would with a survival horror game. This is another big part of hide and seek horror! While not a staple like it is with survival horror, puzzle solving can be a very big part of the game. And I mean actual puzzle solving and not just collecting items or pulling switches while you are being chased around like so many other hide and seek horror games. Amnesia does also put a little of its own twist on things here as well as it introduces the game’s sanity system.

Daniel’s sanity is pretty fragile right now. Having been thrust into this crazy situation with basically no memory at all, it’s pretty understandable he, and the player, are going to start freaking out as scary things start happening. The game is quick to introduce this and the fact that crazy things can happen pretty randomly! From doors swinging open to candles suddenly going out, you need to be careful of your sanity dropping at just about any time! You need to be careful about your sanity too because as your sanity drops, the crazier things get, or at the very least seem to get. You might start hearing footsteps from people not around, shadows moving when they shouldn’t. This is scary enough on it’s own but the main problem is that it will be hard to figure out what is a real threat and what is being made up by your insane mind. Thankfully, there are ways to make sure your sanity won’t drop! The best way to recover sanity is through finishing puzzles or progressing on your journey to put a stop to all this. I’ve always thought this is a super clever way of connecting the player to Daniel. In any horror game, getting past a problem is going to be a huge relief, so it makes sense for Daniel to start feeling better whenever you do and this is something him and the player can both feel! However, as you probably guessed, there isn’t always a puzzle to solve, or at least not one you can solve in a timely manner just to recover some sanity! For the most part, you’ll be recovering sanity through light itself! Namely staying in light or well lit areas.

Daniel is equipped with a lantern and tinder boxes. While the lantern won’t help with recovering sanity, it’ll make sure you don’t lose any while traveling around dark areas! That is assuming you have enough oil to even light it. The tinder boxes on the other hand will allow you to light candles, torches, lamps, basically anything that can be lit around the environment! These lights can’t be snuffed out by random events or anything and will help Daniel recover a bit of sanity if he hangs out in them long enough. However, you can’t take them with you. No pulling a torch off of a wall or anything. And given you only have so many tinder boxes, you need to pick wisely where you want to use them. For instance, if you’re just passing through an area like a hallway, not much reason to hang around there. But in a room that has a puzzle you need to solve and one you’ll be coming back to, lighting up the area makes the most sense! In a way, this gives the game some survival horror elements as well. Having to manage the oil in your lantern and the number of tinder boxes you have does give a similar bit of tension. However, where the two genres really divide comes in the form of combat, or in Amnesia‘s case, the lack there of.

Hide and seek horror involves a lot of hiding as you would expect! There isn’t any real way to fight back against the horrors that are chasing you. Maybe you can ward them away a bit but they won’t be truly gone until maybe the end of the game. But fighting back with guns, swords, or even fists? Out of the question! In theory, this is much scarier than survival horror. I mean in those games you can kill most threats chasing you! But here all you can do is run and hide. Now whether or not this is truly more scary than survival horror is a talk for another time. For now let’s just say that both genres can be very scary and Amnesia does hide and seek horror very well! And it achieves this in some very fun ways that I honestly wish more of the games that were inspired by Amnesia would have copied.

One of the biggest things is how you go about hiding. Take a game like Outlast for instance. In that game when you want to hide you come up to a hide point. Which can be a lot of things, from lockers to under beds. Running up to one gives the player the “Hide” action basically, letting them hit a button and climb on in. Most of the time, if whatever is chasing them doesn’t see them get into wherever they are hiding, the player will be fine! The player then waits for the threat to leave, they climb out and go back to what they were doing. Amnesia works in a very similar way but with a big key difference. In Amnesia, there aren’t really any designated hiding spots.

Obviously there are beds and closets and all that but when you run up to one in Amnesia, you aren’t given a button prompt to get in. If you want to hide in a closet, you need to open it yourself, empty it out if anything is in there, and close it. Now that might sound like the same thing but with different steps, but it’s actually quite different. By giving the player this much control and not just having it be one button press, you are having the player feel that much more unsafe. By allowing there to be more chances to make an error, such as not holding the door closed enough or worrying about the hiding spot not being good enough in general, you are adding a whole new layer of fear and worry! Now hiding no longer just feels like a perfect safe haven, now you actually have some tension! This also means that the enemies need to be designed a little differently. Instead of checking to see if the player is in a designated hiding spot or not, they actually have to look for the player. And that brings us to the other great thing about Amnesia and how they do this. You can make your own hiding place!

Something I didn’t mention before is that you can pick up and move a lot of objects around in Amnesia! Things like barrels and boxes. You can pick up and throw them around if you want. While you still can’t use any as weapons, you can use them for plenty of other things. Like I was saying, Amnesia doesn’t have designated hiding spots, it all comes down to if the monster chasing you can see you or not. Meaning if you really wanted to be bold, you could hiding behind a makeshift wall or something! That alone opens up plenty of possibilities but my favorite of these is being able to make barricades. I’ll always remember the moment in my first play through when I needed to really think about the current puzzle I was solving, something made a little harder by the fact I knew there was a monster nearby roaming around looking for me. Knowing it would probably come check the room I was in, I decided to barricade the door. I originally did this as a joke, so I’m sure you can imagine my surprise when it actually worked! The monster did eventually come to the room I was in, but it wasn’t able to push through the door! Instead, it banged and wailed against it freaking me out for sure but also giving such an amazing feeling of satisfaction!

In other games like this, all I would have needed to do is hide in a locker whenever the monster came around, wait a little while and then come out. Sure there would be some tension in me waiting to see if it would check the locker but it’s not nearly as fun or scary when the tools are so simple. For Amnesia, not only did it feel amazing to figure all this out, but it also meant that nowhere was truly safe if the game was willing to give me this much freedom! While I’m not saying every hide and seek horror game needs to be just like this, I think this shows why Amnesia is still so legendary in this genre and why it defines it so well! I won’t lie, I’m not the biggest fan of hide and seek horror. I feel like so much of the tension and fear leaves the moment you realize how the mechanics work since most games in the genre have very simple mechanics. This is not the case when it comes to Amnesia thankfully and it’s why I feel that this game is still the gold standard for the genre.

There is also one more part of the hiding and seeking that I wanted to talk about before moving on though! And it’s how the game cleverly makes sure you don’t get to know what’s chasing you for the most part. Or rather you shouldn’t know!

Another thing that can somewhat ruin hide and seek horror is getting too familiar with that’s chasing you. There’s only so many times a scary face will remain scary after it pops up on your screen over and over. Amnesia has a neat work around for this and it ties into the sanity system! One of the thing that will really drain your sanity in Amnesia is getting a look at what is chasing you. The idea being seeing something so horrifying is going to drive Daniel nuts. This works out perfectly since not only does it give a reason for the player to try and not look at the monster, but it adds another layer of fear to being chased. It’s not just about getting caught anymore, now just looking towards the monster is a problem! This is also a good thing since, I won’t lie here, the main shambling monsters that chase you in Amnesia are honestly kind of goofy looking, so not looking at them and realizing that is for the best.

Going crazy by simply looking at what’s hunting you also ties into another big theme of the game which is that a lot of it deals with Eldritch horror! Sadly this is explored mostly in the story and less in the game play. Themes of existential horror are brought up plenty but don’t really affect game play much beyond the whole sanity stuff. That being said, I suppose we should talk a little about the story!

The story of Amnesia is absolutely presented as a mystery so I’ll keep this section brief. At the start of the game Daniel is hobbling through the halls of the big castle telling himself to try and remember a few things, the same things I mentioned earlier about who he is and that he needs to kill Alexander. He’s telling himself this since he knows he’s about to have amnesia and forget most other things. The interesting twist to all this is the fact that it’s quickly revealed that Daniel is the one that gave himself amnesia! Stating that he needs to forget in order to finally put an end to all this. Another thing you find out in a note to yourself from before you forgot, is that there is a ‘shadow’ chasing you. This is basically the game’s way of explaining how some of the more spooky random stuff happens and why the castle is basically mutating. Throughout the game you’ll be piecing together not only what exactly is going on, but also what your role in all of this was and how exactly you’re suppose to stop it.

I feel like the story of Amnesia is very rarely brought up when people sing its praises, much like the original Resident Evil funny enough, but I do still think it’s a really good story! Nothing crazy or anything, but the mystery it presents was compelling enough to get me excited whenever I found a note that would further explain things. That being said, I can’t deny that the game’s story isn’t what helped it define so much about the hide and seek horror genre so we won’t dwell on it too much!

While I don’t think Amnesia was nearly as impactful as Resident Evil was, it can’t be denied that it truly set off a spark in the horror game sphere. For a few years after its release, so many horror games tried to follow its lead! This truly was the era of hide and seek horror, helped greatly by the boom of the indie game scene as these kinds of horror games where no combat had to be involved were far easier to develop. This absolutely contributed to some burn out in future years but you could argue the same thing happened with Resident Evil and survival horror. Nowadays though, I feel like we’re finally getting a healthy amount of both kinds of horror and even getting some fun hybrids like with games like Alien Isolation! And thankfully, both Resident Evil and Amnesia can be picked up and played very easily as both are available on modern consoles and PC! So you don’t have much of an excuse for not giving at least one a try this spooky season.

But those are just my thoughts! What are some of yours? Have you ever played Amnesia? Thinking about giving it a go for Spooky Season? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

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