If you want to get the pants scared off of you, play Amnesia. If you want that experience to haunt you long after the end credits roll: play Amnesia: Rebirth. Whereas previous games in the Amnesia-verse relied heavily upon jump scares, the team over at Frictional Games assures fans that Rebirth will be much darker and much more focused on getting under the player’s skin.
In a recent interview with the folks over at GameSpot, creative director Thomas Grip mentioned that the team was ready to go in a different direction than the games released in the past. “There are a bunch of things that we thought that people liked with [The Dark Descent] and then there’s a bunch of stuff that we felt we could do better and there’s a bunch of stuff that we learned from Soma and we also felt like we wanted to put all of that together,” he told the site after saying they didn’t feel like they wanted to be quite so jump scare heavy with the upcoming release.
He also opened up about how the previous game, The Dark Descent, was a major inspiration for the revitalized direction for Rebirth. Grip mentioned that they want to continue exploring the darker nature of “human evil” but didn’t want the true message to be drowned by jump scares and cheap thrills. Instead, the team wanted to explore a horror experience that “grows over time,” not unlike the experience felt in SOMA.
For those that played SOMA, Grip mentioned the similarities between the two visions of both that game and Rebirth, saying: “The strongest connection between Rebirth and SOMA is that we try to put players into a persona, into a situation, and we spend a lot of time just convincing them that [they] should take this situation that they’re in seriously,” he said. Grip also added that Rebirth will share many similarities with SOMA especially around the midpoint of the game.
With how viral SOMA and The Dark Descent were regarding their particular brand of horror experiences, it will be interesting to see where the studio takes Amnesia: Rebirth. Jump scares always get the better of me and sometimes, they can take away from the deeper story, so I’m personally very excited to see where this darker and more contextual narrative will lead.
We don’t have a release date yet for Amnesia: Rebirth but we do know that Frictional is looking to launch the latest horror adventure sometime later this year.
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What do you think about the latest teaser videos above and the new direction they want to take Rebirth? Sound off with your thoughts over on Twitter @PrimaGames!
