4 years 1 month ago
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Today, Frictional Games announced their next horror project and it’s a return to the series that made them famous. Amnesia: Rebirth will be released on PC and PS4 later this year, 10 years after the release of Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
Amnesia: Rebirth follows a new character Tasi Trianon as they try to survive a deadly creature stalking her in the Algerian desert. This creature apparently feeds of Trianon’s terror, and players must be careful not to breathe lest they alert the hunter. You can watch the full announcement trailer below.
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The trailer is light on details but it’s immediately clear that Trianon finds herself in hostile territory. There are what appears to be caverns outfitted with traps, and you can briefly see the silhouette of a creature in a sandstorm.
"I personally always thought that Amnesia: The Dark Descent lacked a good narrative on a player journey level," Frictional Games co-founder Thomas Grip tells IGN. "Now with SOMA under our belt, and a ton of experience in just that, it felt like the right time to tackle it. To have this really scary game, with all what you expect from an Amnesia sequel, but to also add an emotional journey on top. Achieve this has been one of the core goals during development."
Rebirth will have strong ties to the original game, and even the setting of the Algerian desert was referenced in The Dark Descent. Grip says that Rebirth is the "most location diverse game" Frictional has done so far.
Emotion and sophisticated storytelling is the name of the game for Rebirth, but the team will still keep the scares. The difference is they won't just be a "cavalcade of cheap jumpscares." We asked if there will be a Safe mode like in Soma, but Grip says that they're still considering it and might even add a Hard mode on top of that, or something completely different.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent was released in 2010 where it became a viral hit online. The no-combat horror game was a popular mainstay for YouTubers and streamers to show how brave (or not) they could be while playing the game. Frictional would go on to publish a sequel called Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs developed by The Chinese Room.
Afterward, Frictional would develop their own follow-up in 2015 called Soma, which isn’t set in the Amnesia universe but features many of Frictional’s hallmarks such as having an unreliable protagonist and ambiguous memory.
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Prior to today’s announcement, Frictional began drip-feeding several mysterious videos hidden online that led up to today’s reveal. Some of the past videos included references to Algeria, and hinted at the desert location.
Amnesia: Rebirth will be released in autumn 2020 for PC and PlayStation 4. It is already available to wishlist on Steam. For more, check out IGN’s review of the first Amnesia here.
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Matt Kim is a reporter for IGN. You can reach him on Twitter.