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Its chapters shift between desert sandscapes, underground ruins, and, in one of the game’s rare nods to its period setting, a French colonial outpost. The setting of Rebirth feels awe-inspiring in a way that The Dark Descent’s setting didn’t allow - not just horrifying or hostile, but grand and strangely beautiful. But it’s still an emphatically isolating experience. The game is less lonely and quiet than Frictional’s earlier work, which sent players into almost entirely abandoned worlds. Like The Dark Descent, Rebirth sends players to retrace a story that its protagonist has forgotten at least partly to save their own sanity. After surviving a desert plane crash, Tasi wakes among the wreckage with gaps in her memory, a mysterious amulet around her wrist, and a trail of notes that her husband Sahim has left to mark a path. But it’s set in 1937, several decades after the original, and it’s focused on a different protagonist: Anastasie “Tasi” Trianon, a French draftswoman joining an archaeological expedition to Algeria. It also has narrative links to the first game. It uses the same first-person design and gives players the deliberately awkward point-and-click interface that Frictional has used for over a decade. Rebirth is an oblique sequel to The Dark Descent. But Rebirth tweaks the original game’s design and themes in compelling ways.Īn endless cycle of dread, panic, and recovery For me, it was a nine-hour-long cycle of dread, panic, and recovery, a loop so well-honed that it’s all but explicitly referenced in the plot. Like The Dark Descent, it’s a game that torments players by delivering stretches of tense, dread-inducing exploration frantic chases and moments of revelation before they’re pushed back into the dark. But Rebirth, which will be released tomorrow, is the first new, full-length game in the series.Īmnesia: Rebirth has an immediately familiar cadence. First with a short 2011 add-on called Justine, and again by publishing Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, a separate game developed by The Chinese Room. Frictional has gone back to Amnesia a couple of times. Rebirth is a successor to Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a 2010 horror classic defined by its shameless jump scares grotesque monsters and chilling story about guilt, cruelty, and memory. But Amnesia: Rebirth, the latest game from Swedish studio Frictional, isn’t designed to be reassuring.
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When is a society - or a life - past saving? The reassuring answer is never.