#51: Amnesia: Remember

Amnesia: Remember

Mikael Hedberg
Initial release:  May 17, 2011 (Worldwide)

illustrations from the book

One of the stranger facets of video game writing is how much time is spent putting the story in anything but a video game. Other mediums do this too, but it's particularly prevalent in video games, going all the way back to having almost the entire storyline be in the manual. I don't particularly know how I feel about this phenomenon; moreover, I don't particularly know how I feel about reviewing a short story collection for a game I don't even like. Nevertheless, Amnesia: Remember exists, and I'm gonna review it.

Included as a PDF with the 1.2 update for Amnesia: the Dark Descent, the collection, really a novella split across five moments in time ranging from the 1500s to just before the game, attempts to lay out some background for the game proper. Given some of the twists in the game, it’s probably best read after playing, but really, it's Amnesia, who cares? In any case, it sort of fills in a little bit about some of the characters that lurk in the game’s lore, never seen but having some important part to play.

The stories are told out of chronological order, each from a different perspective. There’s no single unifying element, but the stories all connect one way or another, for example a mysterious star-shaped stone in one story is revealed to have been taken from a crypt in another. In this sense there’s a sort of Lovecraftian bent in the use of deep historical background to wind a narrative leading up to the game's present. It’s appropriate, given how much Amnesia is basically a shameless ripoff of several of Howard Philip Lovecraft’s stories… though less racist I guess.

While free bonus content included with the game is always nice, it could have benefited from more judicious editing, as there are a number of grammatical and spelling errors. It’s not enough to really take away from the story, but some awkward turns of phrase don’t help — perhaps a translation issue?

I originally wrote this review in early 2019; editing this in late 2025 for JG64, I'm once again forced to ask what has been a common refrain with stuff like this: who is this for? Sometimes side material stands by itself — for example the Dead Space prequel comic — but not always. Amnesia: Remember has little in the way of literary merit; it does little to illuminate the game itself. It feels more like a writing exercise to expand on the game's lore in a way that they for whatever reason couldn't just put into the game proper. You can finish the whole thing in twenty, thirty minutes, but you could just as easily have gotten the same information off of a fan wiki. Perhaps I'm being uncharitable, but I tend to think a game's lore should be within the game itself.

-june❤