Amnesia: Rebirth

[Blue Jam]

Frictional Games, the developers of SOMA, are releasing a new one in the Amnesia series on the 20th of October:

https://youtu.be/jQC8wlGz-4g

PC and PS4 only for now. I might pick it up when I eventually get a PS5, might check out The Dark Descent and A Machine For Pigs first. Any fans here?

Also Frictional Games have been hiring and they tweeted a while back that they were working on two new survival horror games. I hope the second one has a bit more of a sci-fi setting like SOMA, I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for that one whatever it is.

[brat-sampson]

Loved SOMA, mostly for the plot and atmosphere rather than the encounters, which lost their sheen after the first couple, or after dying a couple of times. It honestly made me reconsider some deep aspects of consciousness/uploading ourselves etc, and in a very effective and disturbing way.

[Blue Jam]

SOMA is a wonderfully immersive and atmospheric game. I usually hate walking sims, but playing this in Wuss Mode was quite an experience- as you say, the stealth element wasn't great and it was more enjoyable to just follow the story.

Not so sure about Rebirth, having seen this:

It's got that wobbly floor thing that the last few Fallout and Wolfenstein games have, and while I don't get motion sickness from games it can be a bit annoying. It was enough to put me off Fallout 4 but that was probably because I really wasn't enjoying the gameplay.

Will wait for some more gameplay footage to appear.

[Mister Six]

Not played any of these games, though I did get Soma for free on GoG somehow. Might give that a whirl. Heard Machine for Pigs is a let-down as its practically all scripted, so not the tense "ooh, where the fuck is the monster" vibe of the original.

[Thursday]

Some would argue Machine for Pigs is better because it doesn't have these fairly average survival mechanics and instead is more just a scary narrative game. I do think it's got a more original vibe to the whole thing and it's a lot shorter which I think works in it's favour, so your mileage might vary.

The actual development was by the Dear Esther/ Everybody's gone to the Rapture devs, not Frictional.

[Blue Jam]

D'oh, bollocksed up the link earlier- wobbly floor gameplay here:

https://youtu.be/GqzH7k75t2M

[Mister Six]

Don't most games allow you to fiddle with stuff like field of view and head wobble these days?

[Blue Jam]

It's not the head wobble, the perspective just looks a bit wrong.

[Mister Six]

Do you mean the way it stretches a bit at the edges of the screen? If so, I think that's to do with the field of vision - there might be an option to tweak it.

[Blue Jam]

Ah right, cheers. I never need to adjust those settings tbh. You're right, this isn't the same as Wolfenstein where perspective seems a bit off when you're moving down corridors, or Fallout 4 where moving over large stretches of wasteland feels like walking on a bouncy castle. A Google search tells me a lot of people experienced motion sickness playing Fallout 4 in particular and changing the settings didn't sort it.

[Mister Six]

Interesting! I wonder what it was?

[Mister Six]

Did a bit of a search and it looks like most of the complaints about Fallout 4 were on the PS4, and because it has a narrow FOV that can't be manually adjusted (because wider FOV = more visible polygons = more processor drain).

[Thursday]

Yeah I did always find FOV slider discourse to be the domain of the worst sort of "Elite PC Gamer" wank. But the difference an FOV slider made when going from PS4 to PC is huge, probably even more so than the framerate.

[The Culture Bunker]

Did a bit of a search and it looks like most of the complaints about Fallout 4 were on the PS4, and because it has a narrow FOV that can't be manually adjusted (because wider FOV = more visible polygons = more processor drain).

My main complaint with Fallout 4 was that the story was absolute wank, with additional bugbear of pointless busy work having to save settlements from attack. I don't remember anything about it feeling like I was on a bouncy castle.

I played SOMA when it was on PS+ a while back. Enjoyed the story and the characters, but as a gaming experience it was non-existent.

[Blue Jam]

My main complaint with Fallout 4 was that the story was absolute wank, with additional bugbear of pointless busy work having to save settlements from attack. I don't remember anything about it feeling like I was on a bounce castle.

I played SOMA when it was on PS+ a while back. Enjoyed the story and the characters, but as a gaming experience it was non-existent.

On paper Fallout 4 seems like the kind of game I'd love but I just found it boring as fuck.

SOMA was the exact opposite of that experience.

[Mister Six]

My main complaint with Fallout 4 was that the story was absolute wank, with additional bugbear of pointless busy work having to save settlements from attack. I don't remember anything about it feeling like I was on a bouncy castle.

Yeah, it was shite. Would have loved to see Obsidian let at that engine, but oh well.

[brat-sampson]

My main complaint with Fallout 4 was that the story was absolute wank, with additional bugbear of pointless busy work having to save settlements from attack. I don't remember anything about it feeling like I was on a bouncy castle.

I played SOMA when it was on PS+ a while back. Enjoyed the story and the characters, but as a gaming experience it was non-existent.

I think I'd disagree just because I can't think of a better medium than 1st-person videogame to tell that story/experience those concepts. If you want to just talk about 'gameplay' in stricter things like 'were the puzzles good / was it fun to dodge the spooks' then, yeah, those elements were definitely a little flat, but for me the whole reason it was so affecting was because it was a gaming experience.

[The Culture Bunker]

I think I'd disagree just because I can't think of a better medium than 1st-person videogame to tell that story/experience those concepts. If you want to just talk about 'gameplay' in stricter things like 'were the puzzles good / was it fun to dodge the spooks' then, yeah, those elements were definitely a little flat, but for me the whole reason it was so affecting was because it was a gaming experience.

For me, I think it's that a lot of my favourite modern games are those that give (even if it's an illusion) a sense that I'm having some say on how the game progresses, so that the experience you or I have won't be exactly the same. In something like SOMA, I feel like my pushing buttons is a modern way of flicking to the next page - more a visual novel than a game.

[Thursday]

Also relevant to this thread

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Kingdom - New Lands are free this week on Epic, the former a horror walking simulator, the latter, a mobile game ported to PC which contains some management and planning to get the sheer luck to have done the right thing at the right time