#Amnesia collection series

The Dark Descent continues in this mould and this was a brave and innovative decision to make at a time in which the word ‘horror’ in games was always prefaced with the word ‘survival’. The catch: you’ll have to find your way to him through the labyrinthine innards of the castle, avoiding the lingering miasma of dread that lurks just out of view.įrictional Games perfected its craft with the Penumbra series, the second episode of which – Black Plague – made the decision to be rid of combat. This fear is wrought not from coded jump-scares or pixel-rich ghouls, but from crumbling stone masonry, long hallways that stretch into the distance, and the steady, hungry howl of the wind.ĭaniel wakes up in the lavish Prussian Castle Brennenburg with no memory of how he got there he stumbles on a note written by his own hand, instructing him to kill the castle’s proprietor, Alexander. Suggestion is the most powerful tool at Frictional’s disposal, and the best trick that Amnesia pulls is making you afraid of what isn’t there. It doesn’t take very long at all, though, before you start to succumb. Within the first few minutes of The Dark Descent, you might need to employ some selective amnesia yourself to forget some of the clichés dropped on you: a mysterious and empty castle, an amnesiac protagonist uncovering his own past, creaking doors and flickering lamps. From Gone Home, which was prototyped in Frictional Games’ HPL engine and Dear Esther whose developers, The Chinese Room, created Amnesia’s sequel A Machine for Pigs, to the recent tide-shift of first-person combat-free horror – Amnesia has quietly haunted the landscape since its release in 2010. Now with Amnesia: The Collection, you have a chance to refresh your fears anew, or to sojourn to Castle Brennenburg for the very first time. Like the shadow licking at the heels of the game’s protagonist, its influence can be felt lurking behind numerous subsequent successes. This paper investigates the ways in which the rotoscope collage technique employed by Scher in the You Won’t Remember This trilogy not only endows the works with a special capacity to emphasise the universal nature of childhood amnesia but also, conversely, resembles the phenomenological experience of remembering itself.You can see the inky tendrils of Amnesia: The Dark Descent slithering their way into many other games. Scher’s three portraits invite spectators to reflect on the mnemonic imbalance that is specific to this particular temporal situation-where the parent is able to remember what the child will ultimately forget-in both a distilled and heightened way. The trilogy is centred on the mnemonic phenomenon that is referred to in developmental and cognitive psychology as childhood amnesia, which has presented problems for the philosophy of memory since John Locke first investigated the roles of memory and consciousness in the constitution of the identity of the self.

#Amnesia collection series

Scher’s animated trilogy, You Won’t Remember This (2007), You Won’t Remember This Either (2009), and You Might Remember This (2011), depicts a series of everyday moments in the early childhoods of his two sons Buster and Oscar. Scher uses his distinctive single-frame rotoscope and collage animation technique to investigate the selective nature of memory and to celebrate the moments that constitute everyday life. Throughout his career, New York-based experimental filmmaker and animator Jeff Scher has created animated works that are in dialogue with the diary film tradition in avant-garde cinema.