#72: Amnesia: Justine

Darkwatch

Frictional Games
Initial release: April 12, 2011 (worldwide)
Platform: PC

images c/o MobyGames

I've made no bones about the fact that I think Amnesia: the Dark Descent is a bad game. In the years since I originally wrote this review, I've only doubled, then tripled down on that position, especially since Amnesia: the Bunker was a totally different, much more entertaining experience. I don't know what possessed me to cover Amnesia's DLC by itself, but here we are: as if Amnesia: The Dark Descent wasn’t bad enough, a year after the game’s release, Frictional released a free DLC that, despite almost wholly reusing Dark Descent assets, is (mostly) unrelated to the main game... and adds almost nothing to it. Set several decades after the main game, Amnesia: Justine retains the basic amnesiac plot for a much shorter campaign that can be gotten through in maybe an hour.

You wake up being taunted via recording by the titular Justine, a French noblewoman who, it’s very soon apparent, is a raving psycho. It seems she’s locked you down in a cellar with three of her boyfriends, each one tortured and blinded into mad, naked creatures whose sole desire is to murder Justine. Your task: get through her stupid maze where she’s apparently “testing” you psychologically. How she’s gathering data without direct observation isn’t clear, but I guess it doesn’t matter. Along the way you’ll find prisoners and your actions determine whether they live or die. What you actually do, however, has no bearing on the ending, so they don’t matter either.

The main twist on the game is that there is no saving. You have to get through the whole thing in one go, and if you die, it’s back to the beginning. Given how short the game is, this was clearly a half-assed attempt at stretching the gameplay out. On the plus side, the three “suitors” are blind, so as long as you don’t make too much noise getting by them is easy. Other than that, the game is identical to the main game, right down to the reused textures. You have no lantern this time and there are only a few tinder boxes. What notes there are, are so few, so scattered, that they reveal only an incredibly trite microplotline that seems edgy for edgy’s sake. Seriously, this is the kind of side-plot arc that would occupy maybe two levels in another, better, longer game. At least it was free.

I think the thing that bothers me the most is how the ending literally does not change. Even after the big reveal (psst: you’re Justine, as if it wasn’t screamingly obvious,) whether or not you save the prisoners or leave them to rot has no bearing on the ending, as Justine is still snake-fuckingly crazy. More starry-eyed reviewers have expounded on how this DLC plumbs psychological depths like never before, but it’s all a bunch of horseshit. It's like with BioShock Infinite: Amnesia (DLC included) is a game that so thoroughly fails on all of its promises and yet is considered a success for doing so, and it's that very success that calls into question the value of games criticism as a respectable field.

-june❤