The New 'Amnesia' Was Too Scary for Some, and Too Pregnant for Others

Warning: There are minor spoilers for Amnesia: Rebirth in this story.

There are entire departments at game companies dedicated to analyzing player behavior, in the hopes of learning what they want and changing the game accordingly. Things operate quite differently at horror developer Frictional Games. Its creative process means few people outside the studio play the game until it's nearly finished, ensuring most of the feedback the developer processes about their latest game, such as last year's Amnesia: Rebirth, will not arrive until it's out in the wild. Then, for better or worse, they study how folks reacted to it.

"There is a lot of gut feeling that has to be involved in it," said Rebirth creative lead Fredrik Olsson in a recent interview, who admitted to reading too many Steam reviews of the studio's games, including and especially the negative ones. "We kind of had to just accept that fact, that we need to follow our guts. It's fun to do that, but also, of course, a bit scary."

The reaction to Rebirth, an unexpected sequel to 2010's genre-defining Amnesia: The Dark Descent, was, in the studio's own words, "a mixed bag." (I enjoyed Rebirth but found the solutions to merging story and scares without combat didn't entirely work.) A lot of people did like it, but some hardcore fans were irked it wasn't a direct sequel to The Dark Descent. A notable minority were annoyed with the main character, Tasi, being pregnant, meaning a central mechanic was pressing a button that allowed Tasi to console her unborn child. And then, there were the people who wanted to play the game but were too scared to do it.

The last group, at least, is easy enough to please. Frictional's sci-fi tale, SOMA, followed in Amnesia's footsteps and had players navigating dark spaces with creepy monsters, trying to make it to the nearest door that would leave those monsters behind. It was a lot of trial-and-error, and Frictional later added a Safe Mode that kept the monsters in the game, but made it so people could basically walk past them and focus on the game's stellar story.

Frictional specializes in scaring people. Horror, especially video game horror, is hostile and off-putting to the player. Unlike a movie, a horror game does not move forward without the player's participation, which is one of many reasons the genre has proved so incredibly popular on YouTube and Twitch, where viewers can experience a horror game passively.

With Rebirth, Safe Mode is now Adventure Mode, and it's a tad more ambitious. The lighting in the game has been turned up, transforming otherwise pitch black locations that relied on players carefully using a tiny supply of matches and lantern oil into a room that's just dark.

There are also a few new puzzles to make up for the lack of monster dodging.

One tweak Frictional made to its own formula in Rebirth was removing death as a penalty. Even in the original game, "dying" really just meant being placed back at the spot where you got attacked and moving forward again. Narratively, you were turning into a monster, but practically, it just plopped you back where you left off, often with the monster no longer present. The creatures are present in Adventure Mode, but like SOMA, will now ignore you. 

That said, the monsters are not completely passive. If you screw with them, they will bite.

"It's not so fun if you can go close to a monster for a long time," said Olsson. "We want to push you away from that. There are a few of those small things if players don't play according to the rules of the road, so to say."

When I interviewed Frictional co-founder Thomas Grip last year, he wasn't sure if Rebirth would get this. SOMA wasn't precedent, and Grip wondered if Rebirth's new design precluded something similar. But he said he would wait and see "how people are going to react," and apparently that reaction pushed Frictional to take a similar approach with Rebirth.

"I have a lot of friends who can't manage horror," said Olsson, "and I think now they can play the game definitely and appreciate all of the other aspects of it."

That update is available for the PC version of Rebirth, and is coming to the PlayStation 4 version “in the next few weeks.”

What the game does not have, however, is a way to turn off Tasi's pregnancy. (There is, naturally, a fan mod that will allow you to make her belly even bigger, however.) It's key to the whole narrative in Rebirth, her motivation to keep pressing forward, despite the horrors around her. The only path to civilization, the only way to save her baby, is to survive all this.

"[There is] a section of people who basically couldn't immerse themselves into playing a pregnant woman," said Olsson. "And that is a difficult thing because the game needs that, that you are at least open to that aspect."

This is not the horror equivalent of Baby Mario's constant yelping in Yoshi's Island. It's arguably the most interesting part of Rebirth, an attempt to fuse a character with gameplay, and it only takes a cursory glance at the game's Steam reviews to see the negativity:

Crucially, Frictional did not announce Tasi's pregnancy before the game was released. There was no splashy press release. It was part of the studio's dedication to trusting its gut and focusing on the player experience, because it wanted to create that relationship in the game.

It also wasn't present in the original design document for what would become Rebirth. The developer knew it wanted to sell a "survival-story in the desert" that connected to the alien world mentioned in The Dark Descent, but this very important character beat came later, during an internal workshop discussing how the game would handle the concept of failure.

"You can’t expect the player to be afraid of the 'YOU DIED!' screen more than a couple of times," said Olsson, "and we wanted failures to feel more narratively long-term, as if something bigger was at stake. That’s when someone suggested we’d let the player play as a pregnant woman and the idea immediately appealed to us. The concept of you not only having to worry about yourself but also about your unborn child felt really unique."

It's also not purely a story beat, either, which makes it even more unique than a main character who is pregnant, which itself is a unicorn in games. When Tasi is scared, if she's experienced something horrible or hiding from a monster, the player can press a button to wrap their hands around their belly, speak and soothe the child, and regain Tasi's calm. Rebirth is also a game where Tasi spends the majority of her time alone, and the child also acts as someone for Tasi to talk with. She spends a lot of the game talking with her child.

"I turned a lot to my experiences from the period when my partner was pregnant with my two sons," said Olsson, mentioning how they would walk around stroking their belly during the pregnancies. "I also performed a lot of 'show and tells' with her on the things we were doing."

Olsson noted one potential issue: the "majority" of Rebirth's development team was men.

"We had just a couple of women on the team and they were mostly participating in the later phases of the project," he said. "It was a bit scary to begin with of course. Setting out to make a game where pregnancy was such a big part and having very little 'hands-on' experience with the subject matter in the team."

A "couple" of women acted in an advisory role on the writing side, according to Olsson, and "a lot" of women acted as playtesters while the game was in development.

"The most memorable one was probably one tester who was actually pregnant (just a couple of weeks away from birth) when testing," said Olsson. "We were extremely careful with her and wanted her to know more about the game upfront so she could choose to opt out."

Importantly, the team disclosed to her that Tasi had, at one point, lost a previous child to illness.

Olsson said the pointed reaction from some players about Tasi and his pregnancy was unexpected, but players having strong opinions about it and other aspects of Rebirth was not. Making the game that organically came up through the team's design meetings and avoiding taking a straw poll amongst the most diehard Amnesia players was the point. 

"We always focus on experience," he said. "I think maybe it deters us a bit from the numbers and trying to be granular about things. And maybe if we start looking into those, we're afraid that we'll get too far down the numbers to not be able to fully focus on the player experiences. It's just the way we do it."

Follow Patrick on Twitter. His email is patrick.klepek@vice.com, and available privately on Signal (224-707-1561).