Amnesia Gameplay: Very Interactive!

Of all the games mentioned in lectures, I would say hands down the most interesting (and probably the most haunting) was Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The game trailer shown in class clearly wasn’t enough to satisfy my curiousness, and so I delved a little further into watching some more gameplay, dabbled in a few blogs, and read a few reviews.

One aspect of the game I didn’t realise existed was the comprehensive structural coherence that existed between the controls of the game and the interaction between the virtual space it represents. Simply speaking, when you open and close doors in the game, this is done by an active button press and mouse movement in the direction desired to shunt the door backwards or forwards. This can be done at speed, or very discretely, as to avoid monster hunting mode.

I haven’t experienced or heard of such interactivity of games like this before and feel that this is the way forward in terms of games providing a physical affect within the environment they occupy. By making this difficulty of opening doors and interacting with other objects, I feel it adds to this panic created in the game by emulating what it would be like in reality if you were being chased by anything of this description - you would be pulling as hard and as frantically as you possibly could to get the door open, only to realise you had to push it...

The sanity bar (along with health of course) also is another feature that I hadn't come to terms with, where being exposed to the monsters or spending too much time in the dark will decrease it to the point of the main character passing out. This again reflects a large degree of realism which I find refreshing in an industry where incoherence is all too common, making the player question 'is that really possible?'

Are there any other examples of games with this interactive interface of using mouse/keyboard actions that tranfer into character movements? If so please link!