Without making any judgment on Amnesia: The Dark Descent as a game, suffice it to say that this is a tech-demo for Terror. If you've ever had a creeped-out feeling while walking down a dark alley or hallway, heard that stray sound in your backyard and hustled for the door, you have a sense of what your time in The Dark Descent will feel like. Your entire time... The audio engineering for this game is especially brilliant. It should really ship with a pair of headphones, considering how much better it plays this way, compared to using tinny speakers or those bundled with your Mac. Adding headphones brings all kinds of depth and range to the sound, pulling out barely perceptible breathing sounds that become rasping breath as your character falls apart. We also became aware of a clicking sound that we'd like to imagine are the character's teeth chattering, but we're not so sure about that...

Other sounds come to be associated with terrifying images. The first image you have of an enemy is off in the distance, really just a silhouette. The soundtrack for this is mostly your own audible terror, but the screen starts to warp and slide as you crouch in terror, in the darkness. Hiding in the dark has long been a favorite device for thieves and ninjas, but Amnesia: The Dark Descent adds a new wrinkle to what gamers know as the "cover" mechanic. Darkness is pervasive in the game, and will cause your character to slowly become more afraid and unstable. The appearance of enemies means you'll have to run or hide. Dousing a light and diving into shadow sounds great when you're Sam Fisher (Splinter Cell) but doesn't work well for your character in The Dark Descent. Staying in hiding is a necessary evil, but the long-term effects are that you'll lose your marbles. The execution of all this visually may depend somewhat on your Mac's ability to render high-quality graphics without slowing down, but we found the quality acceptable on our older (first-generation iMac G5) machine.

Looking back at the comment about tech-demos, we have to say that Amnesia: The Dark Descent doesn't come on strong with linear gameplay. It drops you into a somewhat familiar circumstance: The character awakens with no memory of where he is or who he is, and sets off to discover answers to these questions... The game's story is then teased out in tiny increments, through breadcrumbs and memories stirred by witnessing certain rooms or objects. The earliest narrative intrusion is a note you've apparently written for yourself, Memento style, bidding you to commit murder and warning of something chasing you through these dark rooms. We say intrusion because there's a dream-like quality to Amnesia: The Dark Descent that feels sullied by the narrative. Emergent gameplay this is not, but it does make for an interesting experience when you wander around discovering quirks in the game's interface and mechanics, managing your character's fear level, and following a path of... flower petals?

As the game progresses - without divulging any more of the backstory than we must - you'll begin to see more standard devices from what RPG-influenced games in the Survival Horror genre. Gathering items is important, at least to provide illumination in the form of an oil lamp or scattered candles and torches. Other items are used to solve puzzles, some more elaborate than others, that keep you contained in a specific area. The Dark Descent never stoops to key cards and obvious devices; everything you'll do in a puzzle-solving mode here has been woven neatly into the surroundings, keeping players immersed in that feeling of being in this place, living this nightmare. As you put the canned story behind you, there are opportunities to play Custom Story Mode, using levels created by the player-community, or that you've hacked yourself with the game's editor. Developer Frictional Games cites H.P. Lovecraft as an influence, and we can say they've been almost too successful in adapting the emotional timbre of Lovecraft to the gaming world. Rereading Lovecraft now - after time with the likes of Straub, King, and Barker - feels like one long dream sequence, an exploration of what one might experience when going insane, combined with supernatural influences that spurred on most of the creative types trading in horrific images for the last century... All this is to say that Lovecraft can be difficult to explain to someone, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent is similarly hard to explain as a game about anything other than wandering around trying not to go mad.

The developers designed intelligently around this narrative vs. open-world business, at least when it came to hinting and guidance. There are several ways to track progress in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but the most obvious is a scribbling notebook that pops up in certain places. Yes, it sounds like this would be at odds with suspension of disbelief, but believe us when we say it is a subtle device. Checking this notebook in your inventory menu will pull up hints about what you'll need to do, or at least reminders of what happened recently that has changed your surroundings. Other entries come from writing you find while exploring, and "Mementos" that dictate higher-level goals for the specific areas you are exploring. All these are updated as you play, mostly in the background, but having them available is handy if you aren't the person that gets to luxuriate in 4-hour play sessions... Also generously provided are screen-tips and suggestions that pop up early in The Dark Descent, telling you how to use some of the game's most basic controls. These will reassert themselves later, as you encounter new obstacles or situations where you may not have used a specific action in some time. The times when you'll need to work with objects to resolve some puzzle are when you'll appreciate these tips or hints, as the game leads you nicely toward a solution. In some areas, we almost felt that the game held our hand a bit too much, but this falls away as you progress beyond the first large area. The ultimate caveat for Amnesia: The Dark Descent is that it makes no bones about being a game based on Survival, not combat. We've all seen the Underpowered Hero in games like Silent Hill, where the notion was that you had limited ability to fight and needed instead to focus on running. The Dark Descent applies that formula in a stricter fashion, preventing you from even thinking about combat or aggression when enemies appear. Flight-or-fight becomes flight-or-hide, as you crouch in cover like some type of defenseless prey animal. The analogy isn't bad, but we're pretty sure that fawns and baby rabbits don't go insane while hiding from predators... In the final evaluation, it would have been a smart move to offer an Easy setting that disabled insanity entirely, so more casual games would have an opportunity to experience Amnesia: The Dark Descent. One could make a compelling argument that the addition of this sanity-management stuff is really just gilding the lily, considering all the challenging physical obstacles and puzzles in the game.

Installing and configuring the game was a snap, although we would prefer a more intuitive set-up for graphics and sound. The default setting left things a bit grainy, but dialing up the visual quality also had a negative impact on performance. Finding a middle-ground wasn't hard to do, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent allows you to pop into the Options menu at any time to modify these settings. Mac owners with relatively modest systems, purchased in the last few years, won't have a hard time running the game, but if your machine is more than three years old, you'll need to take a good look at the tech specs. The controls left a lot to be desired, in terms of their usefulness in the heat of battle (and by battle, we mean running away), because of some bad decisions with interface. Opening doors by actually pulling or pushing them sounds great in theory, but it doesn't work nearly as well in practice. The same holds true for rotating objects using the mouse in combination with button presses. At one point, we're told to move using WASD, while moving the mouse, and holding down a mouse-button or Meta-Key? Are they kidding with this stuff? Unfortunately not... The Meta-Key business is strictly a Mac thing, a problem that hasn't gone away even after the introduction of better mouse technology in recent years. We disliked the controls - configurable as they may be - every bit as much as we like most other aspects of Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

It's unfortunate that this part of the experience falls down, because it fans the flames of controversy about whether games like The Dark Descent belong on this platform at all. When Survival Horror is being done so well on consoles, folks will argue, why even bother bringing games like this to Mac or PC? A counter argument is that consoles tend to limit the extent to which players can do interesting stuff with editors and online communities of the kind attached to this game. In the end, difficult controls and variations in user-experience because of installed hardware tend to throw up obstacles for adherents of Mac gaming, at least in this realm. RTS and other click-based games are probably always going to prevail with the mouse-and-keyboard crowds, but Survival Horror keeps getting better and better on consoles. Even indie games like Limbo provide a simple sandbox for the kind of emotional response that Amnesia: The Dark Descent is trying to create. Frictional nailed it on so many counts, but fumbling with controls is never a good thing when one is striving for immersion. To draw an analogy that any traveler will understand: We enjoyed the trip to Hell, but the beds weren't very comfortable...