And so, my journey through the more relevant entries in Frictional's catalogue is coming to an end—and what a journey it has been! I’ve braved the horrifying halls of Brennenburg Castle, pondered oblivion amidst the waves in SOMA, and snoozed through the soporific occurrences of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, all in preparation for my descent into the Bunker. But, before I could put it all behind me, Frictional were waiting at the end with a second entry into the series that put them on the map all those years ago: Amnesia: Rebirth.

Something was off, though. Would you believe me if I told you that this is the poorest user-reviewed game on Metacritic that the company has developed? Looking at Steam’s user reviews doesn’t produce a more hopeful result, and the consensus is rather murky even among my friends who have dared to review the game. The positive reviews can’t recommend it without a bit of apprehension. The negative ones do the opposite without hesitation.

So, what's the secret behind Rebirth’s divisive reception? Is it that much worse than what came before? I don't think so. Rather, Rebirth is quite late to the party, trying something new with a formula that was all out of tricks, at a time when everyone was waiting for an encore.


The original Amnesia was released in 2010 to strong reviews and an even stronger footprint in the industry. Horror games didn’t want to be Resident Evil and Silent Hill anymore as neither of those two were themselves at the time. Instead, games wanted to be The Dark Descent, and so many of them tried to. So, many. Oh my god, that’s a lot of horror games!

Rebirth still follows this design philosophy. That is, instead of carefully managing ammo while navigating labyrinthine environments, you manage your sanity and light, with a larger focus on story and puzzles along the way. From the very start, you can tell it’s a game made by Frictional. Just like in the last Amnesia, our adventure starts in Algeria, though a century later and without a getaway to Prussia any time soon. Even with the setting changing from cold medieval dungeons to deserts underneath the scorching African sun, Rebirth has that “WTF is that?” art direction that Frictional have established themselves as the kings of by this point, weaving together creative enemy design and breathtaking architecture that slowly takes over the more mundane locations you’ll find at adventure's start.

Landing herself into supernatural-force-infested waters is Tasi Trianon, an engineering technician whose expedition plane crashes over the Algerian desert. Time passes, Tasi wakes up, and things are stranger than they ought to be. She sets off to find the rest of her crew, and so begins a new kind of dark descent for the modern age.

But, before we continue, here’s a fun little challenge: outside of Outlast, how many games have followed the “Amnesia” formula and did so successfully—if success isn’t exclusively measured by how much money or YouTube Let’s Plays were made? How many of them are critical darlings today? I can’t think of any that fit the bill, and even Outlast II came across as woefully out of touch in 2017, right before Resident Evil 7 “revived” survival horror. It seems to me that the formula, outside very few examples that did its own thing with it, has no staying power. It’s like everyone misunderstood the assignment; if you’re stripping away all mechanical potential to disempower the player and not coming up with a different key design to elevate your game, what exactly are you doing?

And I know that’s hard; it’s why combat is the most common way of doing away with your obstacles in gaming. Building mechanical depth through it is a lot more straightforward than coming up with all these other systems that could potentially prove cumbersome. However, when a game does succeed, it’s frequently a high point in the medium. That is why, in the era of “psychological horror”, a game like Alien: Isolation can come across as “an underrated gem” in retrospect. It dared to give back the player a little bit of power while still not removing the more popular choice to run away.

I think Frictional realised this early. I think that’s why SOMA was so mechanically barren even when compared to The Dark Descent. Merely disempowering the player wasn’t enough on its own; besides, players already knew how to deal with it. They needed something new and found it in marrying environmental storytelling to the horror of the game’s setting, making its mechanics truly psychological, not creating fear from startling the player or having them perform an unwieldy task while tensions are high, but from the way the player thought about what was happening around them. Even the public wisened up to this, in a way—SOMA featuring player death and seaweed automatons chasing you around in primitive psychological horror fashion netted it its harshest criticism.

To that end, Rebirth doesn't try to merely take further the design that made SOMA stand out so much, nor be a pure return to The Dark Descent's more mechanically oriented frights. Instead, it's an attempt to create a mechanically solid survival horror experience, with tighter pacing and SOMA's philosophical edge.

For example, there’s no health to keep track of this time around—it’s all in the sanity—and while your lantern again has oil to burn off of and matches that serve to create a new light source, much like the original’s tinderboxes, it’s a lot more limited and pushed towards increased interactivity. Unlike tinderboxes, matches aren’t a prompt that shows up next to an unlit brazier, but a limited tool you have to manually carry and align with anything flammable before they rapidly burn out. As for what was to be SOMA's holdover, the team again went with a more mature story that seamlessly makes its points through game mechanics, yet an established series praised for its puzzle design proved to be a much less hospitable environment where leaning fully into this design philosophy was never going to fly.

Rebirth is so full of excellent puzzles that they not only get in the way of its storytelling, but the horror as well. They’re probably the best designed, most immersive puzzles Frictional has ever created, in every facet—visuals, mechanics, worldbuilding—and they effectively help this game stand out from what is the slothful mould of a psychological horror game of the 2010s, but it's almost as if they have no place here. Actually, a lot of the game's elements get in front of each other. An unbroken narrative such as SOMA can't work as well when it's split up by elaborate puzzles. Horror sections can't be as expansive and punishing as they were in The Dark Descent when they stand to break the immersion and pacing. Rebirth comes across as an immature experience, pieced together out of the studio's best ideas that suffocate everything else that's also included.

Contrary to its name, that’s what Rebirth is—the tolling bell at the end of an era. A title interested in exploring the uncharted aspects of its predecessors to their limits, more so than reliving the glory days. In its stride, it somewhat ignored the highlights of those titles, resulting in a less cohesive game, taken too far off course for all those who expected another bold new step in the same direction. In the end, it is a fitting bookend to the era and, after putting it off for so long, the reason Henri finally bought a gun.

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