Sort of a precursor to today's Itch.io horror microgames. Too slight to leave much impact despite being a cool idea that's theoretically well-suited to its short runtime, and includes one of the worst, most esoteric puzzles I've encountered in a while. The moral choices, supposed to be a test of character, are so obtuse it's hard to even parse them as choices on the first run let alone for them to feel meaningful.

On the other hand frantically opening a door and then locking it again while something closes in on you is the best part of these games and there's an extended, multi-room instance of that in here which is further heightened by the permadeath. Worth a spin if you have the collection.

The game that launched a dozen millionaire YouTuber careers, helped usher the golden/cursed age of the let's play and marked a watershed moment in horror game design. Yet when The Dark Descent was busy being extolled as the scariest game evar I was that faint, squeaky "nuh-uh!" at the back of the congregation.

Despite being an avid fan of both horror and adventure games and, as a result, being an early fan of Frictional Games via the Penumbra series, I'd always been lukewarm on Amnesia and somewhat baffled by its monumental mainstream success. Besides not being scary (as I'd claim back then) it was just annoying to play through, with its sanity bar, incessant distortion effects, constant voiceover monologues that make you walk through molasses while listening, endless flashes to bright white in a game expected to be played in the dark, oil that burns out in 30 seconds and a character deathly allergic to any room with lighting below 2,000 lumens. I felt the horror gameplay was not only overly basic but bogged down with all this useless annoyance, as if they saw Far Cry 2’s infamous perpetually jamming guns and thought that’s what our whole game should be.

Well 14 years later, removed from the hype and coming off a newfound (or perhaps rediscovered) respect for this team off the back of SOMA and The Bunker I can see I was for the most part missing the forest for the trees on this. Those white screen flashes and molasses-walk voiceovers can still buzz off and the scripted distortions do drag on a bit now and then but mostly I was just too familiar with Penumbra and had grown bored with Frictional's tricks at precisely the same moment the internet got obsessed with them. With Penumbra now fading from my old man memory I can see now there’s a lot of good here that I'd been taking for granted.

A sanity bar still irks me a bit in principle because it feels like the game trying to tell me my own reaction, but not being able to look directly at enemies and mechanically making the player actually afraid of the dark itself are both genius, and having to balance two competing stats in trying not to go crazy and trying not to die adds a perceived weight to one's moment-to-moment decision making throughout. The lantern oil is particularly stingy at first but if you're even a little conservative you'll soon have more oil than you'll need, so that it's not annoying, yet very rarely have enough at once to feel comfortable. Not to mention trying in vain to keep a dwindling flame alive in the depths of darkness is a powerful visual motif in line with the sanity theme and the writing's Lovecraftian ambitions.

An organically induced fear of the dark and the management of light were near-perfected in last year's brilliant and relentlessly oppressive Amnesia: The Bunker, but we have to walk before we can run and The Dark Descent lays a solid groundwork before they were brave enough to really get sadistic on a gamer. Perhaps more notably it's Amnesia's first sequel, A Machine For Pigs, that made me rethink the light management most, in that one you can use your light indefinitely with no consequence and ironically that abundance makes it feel like something is sorely missing. In that game you never feel like you're in real danger, where here (and even far moreso in The Bunker) it never feels like you're really safe. For immersive horror that's nothing short of a triumph.

Most of all though I realize now that I was wrong about one thing above all else, and now I'm no longer too cool to admit the truth: The Dark Descent is scary. Hugging a wall, moving slowly through the dark, thinking you're really going to make it, hearing that music cue, making a break for it and frantically trying to open a door, close it again and block it on the other side is still some of the most exhilarating moments any game can offer. Frictional's beautifully wonky physics engine ensures that opening drawers never gets old and that doors will always max out your heart rate during a chase. When you're a bit fatigued with no-combat 'pursuer' enemy designs it's good to return to the masters and be reminded why it got so popular in the first place.

Puzzles mostly strike a good balance in turning your brain on enough to get the dopamine flowing without being likely to get you stuck (though I did once resort to the patented adventure game tradition of just trying every item on every other item - a jar on a string, of course, why didn't I think of that? Also that pipe wall puzzle was fucking stupid), the writing is pretty good throughout - enough to make me actually eager to be picking up another note - and the villain has possibly the most epic voice evar.

There's an abundance of muddy dungeon maze environments but somehow there's still enough variance and novelty in the puzzles and monster encounters to keep this descent compelling even 14 years, many sequels and countless imitators later. My return to Castle Brennenburg was a fruitful one beyond my expectations. It turns out sometimes it's not everyone else who was wrong, sometimes it just takes another 500 games in the log to begin to understand the genius you'd previously dismissed.