Frictional Games’s Weaknesses and Fears for Rebirth
They’re responsible for some of the most influential horror games of all time with Amnesia and SOMA, but they’re not perfect.
My excitement for Amnesia: Rebirth has only waned as this article grew and the time to its release shrunk. It was intended as a retrospective on Frictional Games, particularly to highlight my favorite of their titles, Penumbra: Black Plague. Frictional Games’s creative director and co-founder, Thomas Grip, has done a couple interviews recently regarding the creative process behind Amnesia: The Dark Descent, SOMA, and the upcoming Amnesia: Rebirth. Two things repeatedly mentioned as focal points of Rebirth stick out to me - two things that this piece previously mentioned as the biggest sore spots for Frictional’s games. The Lovecraftian lore behind Amnesia as well as the widely disparaged sanity meter (and dealings with mental health) are making a return.
Admittedly, I’m the type to give older media a bit of a pass when it comes to issues of representation. But it’s always predicated on the notion that were the same people to release it today, knowing what they know now, those issues wouldn’t come up at all. It’s disappointing, then, to see Frictional happily embrace the problematic core of their previous titles. Why?
The main criticism of SOMA was the chase sequences meshing poorly with the narrative, feeling more like a tacked-on “haunted house” than a second half to the philosophical story. While that criticism is valid, the window into Frictional’s thought process hints at overcorrection to that critique. In receiving what SOMA did poorly, the focus shifts to what, in contrast, the other series did that was so well received.
“You must not allow yourself anger... Do not allow yourself to fear. You must try to keep calm, or it will get worse.” These are the words echoed to Rebirth’s protagonist, Tasi. According to Grip, she has an “affliction” meaning she cannot be in scary or stressful situations without serious consequences. Judging by the eyelash-like tentacles that sprout on the edges of the screen, she’s been infected by some eldritch terror that threatens her humanity - similar to the antagonists of Penumbra (the Tuurngait) and SOMA (the WAU). It gets in your brain and it makes you crazy; while human, you become increasingly odd and hostile towards your fellow man until engaging in a murderous rampage, and are then permanently transformed into a mindless grunt.
On a social level, representing mental health as a sliding scale from “mild anxiety” to “murderous psychopath” is, at best, harmful. I’m aware Lovecraftian horror - the genre brainchild of a violent racist and eugenicist who baked his biases into the core of his work - has a strong emphasis on madness, especially as a result of unfathomable extraterrestrial influence. The subject was handled better in Penumbra and SOMA, characterized more as increasing paranoia resulting from cabin fever in a dangerous environment than going postal all at once. It was more The Thing than it was Outlast. As mentioned earlier, it unfortunately seems that Frictional is overcorrecting to be more like Lovecraft, more like The Dark Descent - after all, it’s still their most successful game by a long shot.
On a mechanical level, I hate the sanity meter. Frictional makes first person games. I care if I’m scared. I don’t want to die, I want to see the end of the story. The protagonists of each title are more story vehicles than characters to look back on, or wonder what they’re thinking. The brief character beats or backstory you do get more often than not make them less relatable, not more. Philip (of Penumbra) was a fairly bland everyman, easy to project onto and understand his thought process. His only big moment comes at the end of Black Plague, after the player has lost control, and he proves himself just as idiotic and careless as the scientists who unleashed the Tuurngait on the world in the first place. While Daniel and Simon both begin similarly, their undesirable qualities only grow over their games’ runtime, with Daniel escaping the ire of fans by mostly keeping his mouth shut.
Grip has said there’s a real emphasis in Rebirth to make Tasi someone the player would actually want to keep out of harm’s way, but in the same breath mentions the vague consequences of the sanity mechanic. Such a strong link between “caring about Tasi as a person” and “caring about a terrible in-game mechanic” has me a little worried. Frictional has a solid track record making their few female characters interesting, though, so there’s reason to be confident in this aspect of Rebirth.
There have been very, very few success stories in gaming to rival that of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It’s a hell of a game to follow up, so I understand the natural inclination to return to form. That being said, I’ve been a fan of Frictional Games for a long time. I’ve played every one of their titles multiple times, and as many have realized, they’re much more similar than they are different. In a lot of ways, they feel like iterations on the same game, but somehow, with the same mistakes every time. I was beyond excited when SOMA launched and there was no sanity meter, no Indigenous graverobbing in the backstory. Lovecraft’s influence was still there, but lessened, and the “alien being that makes you CrAzY” nonsense was a footnote. I was confident in Frictional’s evolution. Now, I’m not so sure.
Horror’s a tricky genre. There’s no real way to know a project will work until it’s finished. I know I’ll get all the thrilling scares I can handle, I know it’ll play well on stream, I know I’ll think about it when I walk down a dark hallway. The real question is: will Frictional improve on their formula, or are they stuck in the past?