I'm Going To Stop Revising This Post So That I Can Post It (Sorry If It's Scatterbrained, I Welcome Criticism)

I should be working on a thing for a potential employer so that I can get a job, but I'm not. Instead, I feel like talking about thematic consistency and enemy types. I've been playing Red Faction: Armageddon and I love the weapons and destruction in it but damn, if it isn't a terrible game in just about every other way.

Let's list off some enemy type tropes you can encounter in a video game, shall we?

• Snipers! (enemies who avoid you and attack from a great distance)
• Juggernauts! (slow and hard to kill)
• Turrets! (immobile enemies with a lot of health)
• Chargers! (move quickly towards you, melee attack, don't turn fast)
• Swarmers! (low health, low damage, attack in large groups)
• Small fry! (easy to defeat, medium health/damage, attack in small groups or individually)
• Teleport spammers! (enemies who spam teleports)

That's a lot of cool ideas! So when you're making a game, you should try to use a lot of those to make sure you've got variety, right?

If that sounded good, you need to take a deep breath and think about why you're making decisions. Why should the players fight juggernauts instead of snipers? Why put in a horde of swarmers? And should your decisions be influenced purely by an abstract desire for variety?

In Portal, there's only one kind of enemy - turrets! There are other obstacles as well, but all obstacles are  chosen because they're needed for whatever the puzzle in question is. In other words, you never see a situation where, purely to increase difficulty without changing the approach required, four turrets are used instead of three. Rather, four turrets are used because it makes it impossible to approach from the rear, requiring a different strategy. 

This quality - that obstacles are chosen based on the puzzle the designer is constructing, rather than simply how much effort it should take - is, in my opinion, desirable. It translates to non-puzzle games quite well, also: 

• Choosing what obstacles a player faces must be guided by what experience the player is supposed to have. This choice should never be solely based on how long the player should spend or how difficult it should be.

Of course, the exception is when the experience you're trying to build purely flows from the difficulty the player is overcoming.

In Red Faction: Armageddon, the variety of opponents feels totally forced. Enemies come in a wide variety of species (I think?) and as far as I can tell, the only reason for this is that they needed more difficult enemies so that battles could be longer without being boring as hell - which brings to our attention the fact that the battles aren't very fun to begin with.

It's really bothersome because I honestly have no clue what these aliens are supposed to be. Are they a covenant of different Martian races? If so, why are they working together (especially when they seem to be non-sentient)? Are they mutated humans? If so, why do they come in so many forms? Why do living beings have laser cannons and plasma bombs? Ultimately, the answer to all of these questions is the same as the answer to the question of why they've got Snipers, Juggernauts, Turrets, Small fry, and the rest:

• Because the game would be boring otherwise.

When the variety of the enemies you fight is the only thing keeping your combat from being boring, you're doing things very wrong unless that's a pretty major part of your game. Ultimately, Red Faction: Armageddon fails because even the variety of enemies doesn't make for interesting combat. 

Variety should be a secondary concern. It should flow from the other decisions you make.

---

I've included my thoughts on enemy variety in some games:

• When Halo did this they owned it and justified it in the backstory. It felt a little forced - "oh, now I'm fighting elites!" - but it was justified by the fact that the Covenant was literally stratified and composed of differing races with differing abilities. Still, feels like forced variety.
• In Red Faction: Armageddon, every battle is just about the same - there are a bunch of small fry, some heavier enemies, a sniper or two, and sometimes a support tower that buffs everyone. Battles feel formulaic and nothing about them is ever driven by the surrounding events in the game. The only effect on my experience of having different kinds of enemies is that in each battle, I have to take out the small fry with my assault rifle, medium enemies with my magic powers, snipers with my beam rifle, and heavier enemies with my heavier weapon. There's never a reason for them to be there. Such forced variety!
• Mirror's Edge had different types of enemies, but they felt like people employed by the same few organizations - the jump from cops to SWAT officers felt like I was stepping up to a harder difficulty, but when the cops started carrying shotguns instead of pistols it was just different people in the same organization - and I tried to avoid them either way. The step from cops to SWAT officers also made sense in the context of the story, as the police force started realizing I was a threat and as politics happened.
• In Valkyrie Chronicles, variety in types of soldiers is a central mechanic and part of the game, so it's totally justified and doesn't feel jarring - and it doesn't feel jarring because this kind of variety is used well. There's no unilaterally harder enemy type to fight, with the possible exception of tanks. Varying difficulty is provided by changing the size of the forces involved, and by changing the conditions and terrain you're fighting in.
• In Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, it absolutely feels like there's a sliding scale of difficulty and enemies are being picked from it purely according to how hard it should be. Forced variety!
• In Portal, there's only one kind of enemy - turrets! There are other obstacles as well, but all obstacles are  chosen because they're needed for whatever the puzzle in question is. In other words, you never see a situation where, purely to increase difficulty without changing the approach required, four turrets are used instead of three. Rather, four turrets are used because it makes it impossible to approach from the rear, requiring a different strategy. No forced variety, not even in numbers!
• Fighting games take extensive care to balance the available characters, so that - if you're controlling for personal skill - you don't choose a character simply because they're better or worse. There is variety, but never the feeling that you're facing an opponent purely because they're harder than the last.

Magical Overdoses or: Why Skyrim Sucks

I was thinking yesterday about the problem of magic in games. My biggest problem with Skyrim is that the whole game just feels like I'm clicking on enemies until they die, with occasional choices affecting how fast they do so. The graphics are the only thing differentiating a lightning bolt from a gun.

That doesn't really work for me. I want to live in a magic world for a while! Dammit, that's what I paid for. Now, in the case of magic, it's a little bit of an inherently intractable problem - the feeling of magicalness is inherently a feeling of otherworldliness, so it gets destroyed when we're constantly exposed to something.

Which leads to the first strategy for defeating magical overdosing: Spread it out. From a gameplay experience point of view, this is what mana bars, recharge times, and limited charges on magic items do for us. You can even see this in non-magic games - raise your hand if you've ever saved your shots from the aerial bombardment weapon "just in case", only to never actually use them.

[at this point I raised my hand]

That's probably the most powerful counter to magical overdosing, because it cuts right to the core - if you limit the player's chances to use it, the player will perceive that rarity as differentiating it from their other problem-solving options. Of course, everything is relative - if magic is rare but so are bullets, then it won't feel any more special. In my recent experiences playing D&D I've been struck by how effective magic is hard for me to find - but effective combat strategies are just as hard for me to find. (keep your comments about my sub-optimal character design to yourself - I don't care.)

Of course, the other popular strategy is simply to make magic feel different in the game, by clever asset work - if magic is the only thing that makes flashy particle and light effects, then baller for you. Magic feels flashy! Once that gets assimilated into the player's system, though, flashy just seems like another option. Magical overdose again, game over.

The strategy that I haven't seen tried as much, which (I theorize) has much better resistance to magical overdosing, is to change up how the player produces their magical effects. Maybe they shoot by clicking the mouse button or pulling the trigger, but they cast magic by actually speaking words into the microphone - or entering mouse gestures, or tracing out patterns in the game floor. Maybe they have to actually stand up and strike a pose for the camera!

You have to use these techniques sparingly, because if the player constantly casts magic in these ways, then it just becomes a mouse gesture game, or a pattern-walking game, or a silly kinect game. In order to stand out, magic can never become the norm. You're constantly fighting a battle to avoid the player getting used to the magic.

[also, shut up, I haven't actually played Skyrim.]

Wait, I should be working...

Ay yo. I've been busy. Got a job and shiz. Anyway, I've been talking to a new friend here from work a lot about game design stuff, and there've been two interesting takeaways:

I really want to play a game using the Window system. There are a few specifics, but not many; the basic precepts are:

1. Everything about a character should be described with adjectives, rather than numbers.
2. It is the player's responsibility to play their role realistically.
3. A good story is the central goal.

These might seem like pretty obvious rules for a roleplaying or collaborative storytelling system, but having them central to everything, and designing the system from the ground up around them... It makes for a very different system. Making the player responsible for realism, rather than offloading that onto a complex rules system, gets a player much closer to the realism of their character. Making everything more analogue, in terms of not having hard-and-fast rules, means that you don't have to think about the rules - you just think about what's happening. I haven't played using this system, but I really want to.

A lot of games keep track of the level of sanity of a character. It's a fun thought, to be able to simulate going mad. In Window's suggested sanity rules, when your sanity stat drops below the lowest possible, your character is removed from your control and presumably needs to be hospitalized. I thought of a potentially more interesting system:

When a character fails particularly badly at being sane (their sanity stat drops to critical levels, or they roll a critical failure, or whatnot), they do not simply go comatose. Instead, the DM describes what their character sees - hallucinations, vivid or blurred, otherworldly or only slightly shifted from the real world. The player responds to these hallucinations, and needs to deal with them or take severe damages through some other avenue - but here's the kicker: the player's actions in the hallucination also translate to the real world, but not in a way the player knows. So the player might see a floating snake and fight with it, but at any given moment, striking the snake might translate to striking the ally standing next to them... And so on. The key is that the player can control their character in the in-game real world, but they do not know how. Furthermore, to prevent the player from quickly figuring out what to do, the DM can freely switch around what hallucinations represent what in-game real objects. Or play around even further with indirect correspondences! Maybe the heated battle in the real world is turned into a philosophical discussion, or the other way around. The DM would then roll attack and damage rolls, modified by the player's hallucinatory knowledge check. The possibilities are endless!

I think my favorite little bit about this system, though, is the experience as a group. The DM rolls some dice as you're walking down a corridor, and you are thrust into battle - everyone rolls initiative, as you have been ambushed by some eldritch horror. Then, everyone's heads filled with dread, the DM turns to Alex: "You find yourself again in a shifting room of greens and blues,  booming noises emanating from the walls. There is a snake to your left, and a glowing ogre to you right." The rest of the party readies to defend themselves from the frenzied attacks of their mad comrade.

If the DM keeps a consistent hallucination world, then you get two benefits - one, it would rapidly form into a recognizable meme in your group, for much hilarity. Two, it opens the possibility of the hallucination world being... not so unreal after all, when two people are sucked into it at the same time, only to discover that their interactions are perfectly consistent inside the bubble of insanity.

Dungeon Defenders and Orcs Must Die!

I probably should have done this ages ago, seeing as I played these games ages ago. But no matter! Orcs Must Die! 2 has just come out, so let's celebrate by talking about old irrelevant material. Whee! The main reason I want to talk about Orcs Must Die! and Dungeon Defenders together is because they both are part of a new breed of tower defense games, that pulls you out of your tower planting perch in the sky and throws you smack into the middle of the action (Sanctum is another similar game, I think, and I don't know what else there is). Now, the main point of this: I think Orcs Must Die! did this right, and Dungeon Defenders did it wrong. And now I'll explain why.

Now, don't misunderstand. I don't think that Dungeon Defenders is a bad game, and on top of that it's been quite a while since I've played it, so for all I know they've fixed all the problems I had. It's definitely a ton of fun. The aesthetics are ridiculously bright, colorful, and cheery. The characters are all very distinct (well, at least the original 4), and are reasonably balanced. The constant earning of new loot and unlocking of new abilities/towers is extremely addictive. And most of all, there's 4 player co-op. All of that is pretty great. But what's not so great is the general feel of the gameplay. Character movement is slow and floaty, and attacks feel worthless and bland. There's just a general lack of oomph. You get used to it, and it doesn't impede play, but your character will hack and slash through hordes of enemies and it will feel absolutely boring and insubstantial. The insubstantial feeling is only compounded by the hordes of enemies, as higher difficulties and more players will result in more enemies. Speaking of difficulty, the last I played the game the difficulty was extremely out of whack. With only two players, we were able to quite easily beat all of the early stages, but when our party got upped to three, we consistently got wiped out on probably the 3rd level.

Another much more significant problem is the aiming system. Your character is only capable of damaging the enemy that you're locked on to. And you have to be reasonably close to an enemy to lock onto it. And this is just all kinds of problematic. For one, what about the characters with ranged attacks? The huntress and ranger both use crossbows to fight, and their secondary 'attack' merely zooms in a scope for them. But unless the game thinks you're targeting something, you're only shooting blanks, so sniping is a no go. You'd think it wouldn't be a big deal for the more melee based characters, but it still is. Simply put, enemy hordes are big. And it's quite annoying when you charge in swinging, but only deal damage to a single enemy at a time. Thankfully, hordes also tend to be comprised of the weaker enemies, so after a few swings you'll just move on to the next enemy, and I think that hitting enemies you're not locked onto will knock them back slightly. And again, I want to restate that Dungeon Defenders is by no means a bad game. If you're looking for a game that you and a couple of friends can play together, definitely try it out.

But then, there's Orcs Must Die!. In my opinion, Orcs Must Die! absolutely nails the gameplay. It's hard to describe it, but movement and combat all simply feel good. It's all fast and fluid, which is good because combat will get extremely chaotic. In Dungeon Defenders, things were fairly slow paced. Although your movement was slow and floaty, enemies also moved at a crawl, so things only really got hectic when you had enemies breaching your defenses on multiple fronts. In Orcs Must Die! on the other hand, you move quickly but so do your enemies. Unlike Dungeon Defenders, which will have enemies coming from a half dozen paths, in Orcs Must Die! there are only a few options for the enemy approach. It's very easy to place traps in the way of the enemies (and each trap is amazingly fun), but each trap has a cooldown after activating, and there are always enough enemies that a trap taking out one is inactive long enough to let by ten. Things get crazy very fast as you try to hold back the flood of enemies long enough for your traps to reactivate, and it's fantastic. And now that they've added in two player co-op, you get to do it all with a friend. And now I don't have anything else to say about it. Whoosh I'm off.

"Saints Row felt like a book of punchlines slapping my face repeatedly. Yes, I see the comedic content. I just don't care."

Alright, so. I played Just Cause 2 GTA: Japan Saints Row: The Third the other day on my brother's computer, and I have to say: points for style, but your game is one of the shallowest interactive experiences I've had since Scribblenauts. The game started out strong, with an entertaining intro cutscene and mission. After that it just... got really boring. The whole game gave off a very strong vibe of trying for Refuge in Audacity, and it only half-worked. They got the audacity part right, but it gets old fast. After the intro mission, it just felt... Done. Finished. Like there's nothing else to do. It has the sandbox problem in abundance. Just Cause 2 did sandboxing right - in both games my character was absurdly overpowered, with ready supplies of weapons and vehicles to plow through whatever enemies I faced. The worst-case scenario: I might have to take cover once or twice.
But in Just Cause 2 I only had to wander around and find some interesting terrain and suddenly there was an enemy camp in sight, ripe for the picking. It was hard to escape things to do. In Saints Row, on the other hand, the landscape is uninspired, there's no challenge in grinding for cash (regular paychecks, woohoo!), and the few 'story' missions I played were long, boring, and unrewarding.

As for the "wackiness" of Saints Row, it just failed to deliver. Sure, it had silly things. I can fire mind-control octopi at whoever I want, and yes, you can run around hitting people with a dildo, and at one point I saw a van with a giant mascot head on the front with a flamethrower in its mouth. Saints Row felt like a book of punchlines slapping my face repeatedly. Yes, I see the comedic content. I just don't care.

And now, before the end of this short review, I want to mention the sexual content in Saints Row. The immaturity of putting people in bondage gear for no reason isn't what bothers me - what bothers me is that bondage gear is apparently hilarious. Apparently giant dildos are hilarious. It's cheap and offensive. I don't mind the bondage gear or the dildos - I just mind the fact that they apparently count as "humor". Saints Row takes immaturity as a form of humor way too far, to the point that it loses all its shock value and just becomes alternately boring and offensive.

That said, if you want to go around hitting people with a giant dildo, fine. Go do it. Saints Row is your game. Just don't be surprised when it doesn't have the universal entertainment value you might think.

Oh, and for the other side of the review: The driving controls are pretty tight, although the flying is slow and pretty meh. Character customization was surprisingly lacking given how much time I spent and how many options it gives you (I don't know why we need fifty different mascot heads to choose from). Graphics are good, technically speaking, although there's not much interesting to see - the city is boring and repetitive. The shooting was pretty good, although uninspired. The high points, gameplay-wise, were the driving (I'm a sucker for any game with a handbrake) and the fact that whenever you want you can do a randomly-chosen special melee attack which varies from pro wrestling suplexes to flying punches to, uh, the ol' punch-in-the-nuts. I liked that functionality.

Sequence, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, Splice, and Auditorium

It's been a while since any of us have written, oops. Summer is unexpectedly busy. However, to celebrate me getting a shiny new computer to play games on, and the Steam summer sale, I'm going to talk about three games today! As you may have guessed, these games are Sequence, Splice, and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet. Let's make this fast, I want to get back to playing asap.

Sequence I actually got quite a while ago, and I could have sworn I had already written something about it. But then I searched through our post archives and couldn't find anything, and was immensely disappointed in my past self. For some reason I still feel like I've written about this before though, so in case I missed it in my search forgive me if I'm rehashing old territory. Sequence has you playing as Ky, who wakes up in a strange tower filled with dangerous monsters. You are led through the tower by Naia, striving to make it to the top and escape. Along the way, you'll level up, learn new tricks, and all that typical RPG jazz. What spices things up though, is how the battles work. These are far from the standard turn based battles, and are instead rhythm based. Each battle has three screens, each of which has its own set of falling notes a la DDR and those similar games. One screen dictates enemy attacks, another is where you activate spells, and the third allows you to regenerate mana. Miss a note in the enemy attack screen and you'll take damage, or activate a spell and then miss a note on the spell screen and the spell is wasted (thankfully, no penalty for missing anything in the last screen).

Every battle becomes a frantic juggling act balancing defending yourself from enemy attacks, gathering the resources to counterattack, and finding the time to actually counterattack. You've activated a basic spell, but the enemy is making an attack at the same time! Do you sacrifice the mana to defend yourself (and spend some time on the mana screen later earning it back), or do you take the hit and focus on casting the spell? In addition, you only have a limited number of spells you can bring with you into battle. Do you want to bring only attack spells, and end the battle as soon as you can? Or do you just take the most basic ones, and bring mostly healing spells for when things get out of hand? Sequence is practically the only game I can think of that brings me to a state of 'flow' like how Shoofle's mentioned before. When it's going good, I am easily juggling the three screens of falling notes, easily blocking enemy attacks and countering with my own. But all it takes is a single fumble, and suddenly everything falls apart. And it's absolutely amazing. Even though the story and art didn't grab me (not to mention everything is just a static sprite anyway), gameplay is king. The battle system alone was more than enough to keep me playing this game for hours.

Next up, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet! This one's a strange one. I've gotten to a point where I'm entering some water, and was instantly reminded of Aquaria. And it's pretty easy to see why, too. Both are Metroidvania style games that forgo the usual platformer aspect of the game, with Aquaria taking place entirely underwater, and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet having the player be a free flying UFO. Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet (I'm just going to call it ITSP from now on) plays essentially like a dual stick shooter, though the player has to constantly juggle their abilities to select the best one (or the required one) for the situation. The game has a very unique aesthetic, but honestly that's all I really have to say in favor about the game. It follows the Metroidvania style of blocking off passages and forcing you one way until you have the prerequisite item that allows you to pass the other way, but I didn't find it as fun as I usually do other Metroidvania games. Fighting felt dull and boring. The upgrades didn't feel like they were granting me very much power, and the environments felt too constrained. While there were aspects of exploration involved, there are few of them and the rewards for venturing off the path are meager. The aesthetic is interesting, but not enough to hold the game up on its own, and pales in comparison to the absolutely gorgeous aesthetics of Aquaria. I don't know. I really wanted to like this game, and it sat near the top of my wishlist for a while, but honestly I'm disappointed.

This is Auditorium

Thankfully, I saved Splice and Auditorium for last. Splice and Auditorium are by Cipher Prime. I played Auditorium quite a while ago and absolutely loved it, and it looks like Cipher Prime has managed to duplicate the magic with Splice. But first, I want to talk a bit about Auditorium. Auditorium is a very simple puzzle game (originally a Flash game, now available on mobile devices and Steam), where you use manipulators to direct a flow through some containers. Early levels are extremely simple, but later levels add multiple colors and get deviously difficult. But the main reason I loved Auditorium is the music. The game is silent at the start of each level, but as you redirect the flow to pass through the containers, the music starts to build up, one part at a time. The music is slightly repetitive, but I think the tracks are absolutely beautiful. I highly recommend this one (and they're working on a sequel!)

This is Splice

Ok. Now for Splice. Splice is a cell based puzzle game of sorts. You start with a tree of cells, and have a limited number of splices to make in order to reach a target tree that has a certain configuration. The game itself is also extremely simple: activate a cell 'mutation' by clicking on the cell, splice by dragging cells around. But like Auditorium, this game also absolutely fantastic music. Actually, as we speak (er, as I write this), I'm searching for where I can download the entire damn thing, because I want it now. And actually, I don't have much else to say about Splice. I've never seen puzzle mechanics quite like Splice before, so the novelty is extremely appreciated. I haven't played enough of the game yet to say for sure, but the puzzle mechanics seem extremely solid, and the game feels like it's going to ramp up in difficulty fairly soon. I'm excited, so I'm going to end this post now so I can go play. Peace!

Amnesia: Because a dark scary castle is a great place to spend a Saturday

I'll admit it: I'm a scaredy-cat. I don't do horror movies or haunted houses (unless I'm working them). I jump at little sounds and still sometimes get spooked by things that go bump in the night. This is why I didn't actually play Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a first-person survival horror title from Frictional Games, for myself - I watched as a friend of mine, Alex, played. I should get credit however for not running away screaming (and helping with puzzles).

Amnesia starts you in an apparently empty castle. You can't remember anything, but you find a note addressed to you directing you to kill Alexander, who is in the Inner Sanctum. It's signed by you, so it's gotta be legit. Assuming that your previous self knew what was going on, you proceed gaily through the castle to find him. The rest of the story is disseminated through pages of your torn-up diary and, interestingly, the load screens. (There's a minimum time set to display the message, in case you're playing on a really fast computer.) They do a good job of keeping you in the dark, but informing you enough that you remain intrigued. And, yes, amnesia is a well-known crutch of writing, but they work with it quite well.

Because when I steal and rip apart a diary, I leave all the pages in a convenient order for him to follow.

Amnesia's got a couple of interesting mechanics going for it. The main one is a balance between light and dark: enemies can see you if you're standing in the light, but standing in the darkness for too long makes you lose your sanity. You also have no weapon, so your only options when you see an enemy are to run or crouch in the darkness, praying it won't find you. Oh, and don't look at the enemies too much - you'll lose sanity. You also lose sanity by experiencing "unsettling events." Lack of sanity makes it harder to control your character and your vision will shift and warp. Eventually you just crumple to the ground in what I assume is a blubbering mess. Solving puzzles and staring at light regains sanity.

Another interesting mechanic is that doors are opened and shut with click-and-drag with an option to slam them quickly with the right mouse button. While it took Alex some getting used to at first, he tells me it was eventually pretty intuitive. It allows the player to swing a door open for a peek into the next room (which we didn't use much), but more importantly, it impedes a player who is running away flailing. Running from an enemy is that much harder when you have to remember which way a door swings and spin around quickly to slam it shut.

I didn't expect the game to be as puzzle focused as it was. Overall, I expected more enemies, but it turned out to be a good balance given the no-weapons part, and contributed well to pacing. The castle was reasonably linear without feeling like it - because you're never given a map and have to rely on limited tinderboxes and lantern oil to find your way around, it feels bigger than it is. It's also nicely impossible to get too lost or wander forward without all the tools you need. A few times we had some difficulty tracking down the last cog or pipe because Alex had a tendency to pick up and throw them around, but overall the puzzles weren't too bad. The game will generally give you a hint if you try to use an item but need something else as well. Many puzzles were fairly trivial, though - the game is relying on the horror mechanic.

Next up on our scenic tour, the sewers...

I think the sounds are actually the scariest part of the game. I know many people *cough Jeremy cough* who couldn't make it five or ten minutes into the game, and it takes about ten to find the first enemy. (Though you do catch glimpses of things moving before then and frequently try to go the other way only to have the game force you to Even longer before you're in actual danger - the game uses the first encounter to teach you how to hide from them. The aesthetic is very well done overall, becoming scarier as you descend deeper into the castle and uncover the more gruesome parts of the tale.

The sanity mechanic worked reasonably well, though both sanity and health are described on your inventory screen with a series of descriptors rather than any numerical scale. While this was a reasonable choice for the game, it was a little frustrating for seasoned gamers who wanted to make sense of it. Sanity, for instance, ranges from "Crystal clear" to "..." with descriptors in between like "A slight headache." This system didn't seem to correspond with the aforementioned warping of the screen, though. I suppose it is somewhat appropriate that we spent the game not understanding the insanity scale.

As far as enemies go, while there were less encounters than I expected, the various encounters were well designed. There was never a time we felt that getting by was impossible, though many were close calls of slamming doors behind us and crouching in a corner as the creature pounded at the door. A few times we got by because an enemy simply didn't spawn, though we're unsure whether that was a glitch or the game pitying us. When something kills you, the screen will bring up a message, which is generally something like "You must carry on..." but ocasionally explains a new enemy trick for you (like the helpful "Run!"). While it was clear after dying once what needed to be done, it was a little odd to have to die to get it. I suppose an observant player could figure it out in most cases, and luckily death didn't set you back too far. The pacing was mostly good, with high points and lulls, even if it got a little predictable. We still got spooked though, to the game's credit.

You've - you've got something on your chin there, dude.

Overall, Amnesia does a lot of things about survival horror right. While it isn't a genre I play often, I do think it's perfectly suited to video games due to interactivity. Amnesia, possibly because it lacks the graphics budget of a AAA studio, goes back to survival horror's roots in early 3D gaming, which relied more on darkness and surprise than impressive and creepy enemy models because they simply couldn't be rendered. Amnesia's enemies look a little goofy when you stare at them for a while, but they'll still make you jump when you turn around to find one right behind you. I recommend it to anybody who's at all interested in the survival horror genre, even if you get scared. The triumvirate for beating Amnesia (only 2 required) is to play in daylight, with a friend, and/or without sound. Mix and match so that you can get through it, but I do recommend enjoying the sounds - they add a lot to the experience.