Amnesia The Dark Descent Surviva Tips

1) Always close the door behind you. Barricade if you must.


2) Try and sneak around, hugging to.walls in dark corridors, hallways and cellars.


3) when dealing with water monsters but
boxes are available, esp two boxes at least, keep putting one box in front of the other, repeat, to make a floating platform, just don't throw boxes around, might go far away, too far sometimes.


4) Always be prepared to run away from monsters (esp in custom story's!) and hide in closets, behind crates/barrels and in an emergency in dark corners or dark rooms.


5) You can throw objects at enemy's and barricade doors. You can also shut doors behind you when a monster is in pursuit.


6) Pick up a box, use it to block a monster from seeing you, using the box to hide from seeing it's ugly head, the monster may not attack you!


7) In unfamiliar areas, always have a few tinderboxes and if possible 1/4 oil left in lantern (or 1 refill) to help explore dark areas, dark unfamiliar areas as well.


8) Custom story puzzles can be frustrating and may even have game breaking bugs. Most of these however have logical puzzles just like vanilla Amnesia. Look around everywhere, behind bookshelves, on bookshelves, on desks (under desk mats too) under any furniture, on crates, barrels, under them, etc esp in drawers, behind portraits and such (under movables beds too!) to find items such as keys and such.


Sometimes doors will open only when a bookshelf puzzle is solved or levers are pulled to reveal a door hidden behind one, etc.


9) Remember that all inventory items before picked up (keys, tinderbox's, oil, notes, other items) have a glow to them esp in dark areas!


10) When a monster surprises you remember to run opposite of it. In some cases you may have to run past it. -R.K.

Penumbra Black Plague Computer Room Puzzle Solution

Alone in the Dark Retrospective, the godfather of survival horror games

Alone in the Dark Retrospective

The Godfather of Survival-Horror

As the '80s gave way to a new decade, a young amateur game designer named Cristophe de Dinechin entered the Infogrames office in Villeurbanne, France with the hopes of landing an internship. To make his case, he had with him a small demo designed to show off a fast 3D engine. As the interview progressed, he realized that he had set his sights too low. He didn't land an internship, but instead secured the most generous development deal the company had ever given a freelancer. His assignment was to turn that demo into a game.

Alpha Waves, as the finished game was called, would turn a few heads. It is regarded by game historians as the first true 3D platform game, and while it didn't inspire waves of imitators, it caught the eye of one of Infogrames' programmers, Frédérick Raynal. He persuaded his superiors to let him take on the time-consuming task of porting the Atari ST version of Alpha Waves to MS-DOS PCs. After the experience, Raynal was convinced of the power of polygons, and he knew what his next move would be: a 3D game with animated human characters.


With that idea, the rest of the vision came together: a haunted house, walking dead, and a desperate plight to stay alive -- just like the zombie movies Frederick grew up watching. Infogrames brass wasn't convinced, so Raynal took the initiative and started working on a demo.

Carnby steps into the first Alone in the Dark

 He developed a character engine that set new precedent. It interpolated the movement of points on a 3D model to create characters that not only animated smoothly, but could bend and flex instead of being cobbled together from solid blocks. Raynal knew that the primitive 3D graphics of the day weren't enough to lend his haunted manor the needed atmosphere, so he created a system that used bitmapped backgrounds to illustrate his 3D space with dramatic (but static) camera angles. At first he thought digitized photos would be the way to go, but before long he settled on hand-drawn art by Yaél Barroz and Jean-Marc Torroella.

His bosses were duly impressed, and placed Raynal in charge of the project. He would direct, design, and program the game. To establish the eerie mood he wanted, Raynal turned to H. P. Lovecraft for inspiration, borrowing mythology and monsters from the Cthulu stories. It was a different sort of storytelling, perhaps ahead of its time. Rather than imitating other media and explicitly telling a story using movie-like devices such as dialog, cut-scenes, and narration, Alone in the Dark would allow players to discover the story as investigators, piecing it together from books, journals, and environmental clues.
The atmosphere was thick. In 1920, an old plantation house in Louisiana called Derceto becomes the site of the unexpected and inexplicable suicide of Jeremy Hartwood, a man who had become fixated on learning about the occult during his final years in the house. Players could choose to play as either Emily Hartwood, Jeremy's niece, or Edward Carnby, a private investigator called to investigate what really happened. Interestingly, since the story is discovered through investigation, the player choice doesn't really affect the actual story. The player's imagination is left to piece together the unholy events that have transpired, not unlike more recent games like Bioshock and Half-Life 2..."