Both Amnesia and Outlast are similar in mechanics – you are weaponless and find yourself chased by terrifying enemies, your only defense speed or hiding. In story, they are amazingly different. They also share the trait that I have played neither of them, instead watching Let’s Plays, because these are not really “games” in the traditional sense of “a thing you play for enjoyment”. I’m not sure anyone has truly enjoyed these games. They are well-named: Outlast is about enduring the chases and jumps and gore, and Amnesia is about wanting desperately to not know what’s going on, what went on, and what your part in all this was.

Outlast had some interesting elements and a good helping of crazy people aren’t people. Amnesia was a masterpiece, and I’d strongly advise watching it. If you hate yourself, you could also try playing it.

This will be full of spoilers, so seriously, check out Amnesia.

Which is scarier, Amnesia the Dark descent or Outlast?? asks a forum thread, prompting various people to declare one utterly terrifying and one utterly lame.

I found this particularly striking:

“To me, it is Outlast. Amnesia uses “artificial” means to make the tension of most situations rise, especially with the nyctophobia. The main character has it, but I don’t… So, it kind of feels less immersive, since that if you don’t have nyctophobia, you can’t feel like him. ”

In Amnesia, as you stand in the dark the world swims and distorts, and the longer you remain the worse it gets. It is pants-shittingly immersive. I didn’t even know the official explanation was the character starts with nyctophobia until I read the wiki afterward, because the game completely gets across the fact that being darkness is terrifying by making being in darkness terrifying.

The distinction between the two seems to come down to the types of horror. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is about dread, wrongness and horrors committed. In the Let’s Play I saw, there was a particular point the player completely lost it, the torture chambers. There’s no enemies at all. By the end of it, the player is more terrorized by the text produced by touching the torture implements than he had been by any of the monsters and frantic to get out. The successor, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, is similarly horror as discovery – you don’t know what is going on, and everything you find out makes it worse.

Outlast, in contrast, is very much about jump scares. Much of Amnesia is cowering in fear that something might possibly have seen you, did it see you oh god what was that don’t look don’t look is it gone? Much of the horror lives in that space, the desire to not look and bury your head under the blanket instead. Even when being killed by the monsters, the people I saw playing this game tried to keep the camera turned away, keep from seeing it. It’s the feeling in a nightmare where the worst thing that can happen is the monster finding you because then, at last, you’ll have to see it. Outlast has far more aggressive enemies with cutscenes for closeup looks, lots of inevitable chases and all sorts of scripted events where something jumps you. It wants you to hide tactically, not cower. And while Outlast does not, generally, allow you to fight back, there are various scripted points where you can kill someone.

People on Amnesia’s side say this makes Outlast the non-scary game. You learn to recognize when something’s going to pop out, and if you’re even halfway experienced, you can predict what’s next. But unless you’re enough of a horror gamer to have strangled your startle response to death, jump scares are still scary, it’s just now there’s anticipation behind it as you force yourself forward anyway. Outlast is about being trapped somewhere horrible, knowing pretty much exactly how horrible it is from very early on, then having no choice but to continue. Amnesia is the horror of not knowing and increasingly not wanting to know, and Outlast the horror of knowing full well what’s coming but not having any other option.

As to which is better – well, I can’t even watch the videos without pausing for a breather, so in terms of terrifying me, they both win. I was, however, incredibly engaged by Amnesia’s story and desperate to see the end, to the point I would recommend watching it even if you don’t like horror games and even if, like me, you end up having to pause the videos all the time and do something else. In contrast, I’ve been working my way now and again through Outlast, ignoring it for months on end, because it really doesn’t have a story.

Well, that’s unfair. It actually is pretty immersive in its way. There is one thing Outlast does amazingly well, and that is to tie together player and avatar.

Outlast has you as a reporter going to investigate abuses at an asylum. You have a videocamera in your hand you can hold up, and that has a night vision option that allows you to see in the darkness at the cost of rapidly draining your batteries. You get in through a window to find the place a horrorshow, but make the mistake of trying to see more and get some idea what’s going on, get tossed into the lobby, and then have to figure out how to escape. The player interface is actually done really, really well – he gasps and pants in fear, you can see his hand against the wall when he leans to see what’s around the corner, watch him reload the batteries on the camera, and your vision changes depending on if you have the camera over your eye or not. You can also use the camera to zoom in and out.  A t a certain point, your camera even breaks, distorting your vision through it. And when you’re injured, your vision swims (and worse, in the dark, your hand is no longer holding the camera to your face, so you blunder helplessly a moment without the night vision). Injured enough, and you find yourself staggering and crawling.

The problem is there really isn’t much beyond your motivation of getting the fuck out. You collect reports that hint at what happened, but it’s not really confusing what happened – they did something to make people go double crazy, and some of them murdered a bunch of others and all the staff and that’s why there’s blood and entrails everywhere, and the longer you stay the more likely your entrails end up as decoration too. The details beyond that just aren’t relevant to the issue of escaping and calling the National Guard. Was it demons? Ghosts? Cthulhu? I don’t care, I’m sure we can find out after the National Guard removes the raving cannibals. You really don’t need to document anything further, just one wall repainted in viscera is already enough to get a place shut down.

There’s also an issue that is not only about immersion, but about the sort of stories we tell, the sort we should tell, and the sort of stories that perhaps we need to stop telling.

It starts with the fact that the place in Outlast is entirely too populated while the game has little interest in interaction. Outlast has dozens upon dozens of people left alive in it, all showing similar bizarre mutilations with no real-world connection, all designed to be hideous and gory in a way that don’t inspire sympathy so much as disgust. It ends up feeling more empty than the Amnesia, which is populated largely by ghostly screams and records of what happened to them. Having actual characters is definitely more startling in a moment to moment way, but it adds up to less. A few of the double crazy are murderous, but most of them are just there. It’s a moment when the videogame nature of this is all too clear – an actual person would be trying to interact with the nonviolent patients, especially when they’re in such horrible condition. There’s a point early on when one of the jump scares is a patient leaping at you from a wheelchair. You shove him off and he curls up in a terrified ball on the floor…aren’t you going to say sorry? He’s more afraid of you than you are of him! But no, and later when another one jumps you, you shove him over the edge and kill him. At one point there’s the jump scare of a arm reaching out from a mostly blocked doorway to try to grab you. AAH! But, it continues to reach out even though you’re much too far away, and examination of the person on the other side shows their mouth has been sewn up. They look now like they’re reaching out for help or at least some comfort, and they aren’t saying as much only because they can’t. Too many of the “enemies” of the game are like this. The game doesn’t seem interested at all in making you sympathize with the current patients, just fearing having the same happen to you, and that’s not much of a fear. It all seems to be playing on the old idea of crazy = dangerous/not real people to a really uncomfortable degree, especially when the final act is to murder a triple-crazy guy, on the basis a Nazi says you need to. (No, literally, a literal Nazi says you need to murder a crazy person to go on, because we all know Nazis would never kill a crazy person unless it was the only choice.) You even write in your diary that you figure it’s a mercy anyway given how horrible he looks…then start your three-step murder by turning off the painkiller causing him to start screaming in agony. That’s the final boss of the game.

(You also talk with disgust about how the complex is putting all this effort to keep one lunatic alive. Incidentally, this is after the god monster he’s controlling kills someone about to kill you and then leaves you be.)

Sure, there’s lip service to the fact that the reason all these horrors happened in Outlast is because it’s easy to get away with abusing crazy people, but it’s less that it’s precisely as wrong as abusing anyone else and more yeah, it sure is easier to get away with abusing crazy people so that’s the best place to do it.

It does pull together for the final few minutes, as your character literally crawls toward the exit not long after saying that even if people only find his corpse at least the camera will damn those who did it, only to be shot by the people planning to cover this up, but then it actually ends saying you’re the new host of the crazy nanobot demon and so presumably not dead anyway, and even if it didn’t chicken out at the last second, it means that you end the game as a person willing to murder innocents for survival while mouthing excuses about how it was okay to do it to them. In Amnesia, finding out you were that person is the horror.