Thoughts on A:AMFP

[Nospheratu]

So, i've aquired & played through AAMFP 2 days ago and after reading through a couple of threads i figured i'd share my 2 cents on the whole "immersion" thing you guys are discussing in this thread.

I'll (sadly) have to take the side of the ones who were more dissapointed than happy with the game. While the enviroment and the music & sounds were certainly gorgeous and well worth the investment, i found the overall expirience somewhat lacking for different reasons.

One of those was just this immersion factor; personally i find it rather interesting how most of you are arguing about weather having an inventory in a game breaks immersion or not - those who argue that it breaks immersion, please explain to me, how not being able to pick up an ordinary sack or broom from the floor does not break immersion? This was one of the things that bothered me the most - along with the hundreds of intricately locked cupboards and doors - as it constantly reminded me that i'm actually in a heavily scripted and predetermined enviroment, unlike in TDD where i could move most stuff around freely and locked doors & cupboard at least didn't have a visual que so that you could tell they're useless from a mile away.

Warning - some spoilers ahead!

The other thing was the too obvious puzzles; i was constantly thinking stuff like "how could someone build such a gigantic and intricate machine with dozens of built-in fail-safes and then fail to weld three very important pipes to the machine so they can't be removed by accident?" Not to mention the conveniantly placed canisters of compound X - over a huge turbine, right next to the only part where there wasn't any security fence present. What kind of engineer would come up with a primordial nuclear reactor and an emergency steam removal fail-safe device and then overlook such a trivial no-brainer? Sadly, stuff like this totally broke the immersion for me.

Last but not least, the very predictable plot "twists". Even before i installed the game - actually when i've read the plot description on the website - i was about 90% sure that a) the kids were already dead, b) their father aka the guy we're playing killed them and thus is a bad and despicable person, c) the machine would at some point actually kill people and d) the enemies would be some kind of mutant pigs. I'm sure most of the people who played through the original Amnesia thought the same thing about Oswald Mandus right of the bat; also most people who saw a couple of horror movies would figure out about the children being dead at the first "ethereal" call from them - right when you exit the very first room in the game. Most would have probably come to the same conclusion at the point when one of them dissappears in a small blood explosion - which is about 15 - 20 minutes before the developers tell us (surprise, surprise) what most of us suspected all along. The only thing i wasn't totally sure about was the reason behind killing them, but since there is a huge machine involved - and the machine in TDD was powered with the life-force (Vitae) of humans - it was only a minor jump to figure out why they were killed.

While it was a nice touch to "humanize" the pigmen, it didn't really hold much meaning for me since i knew from the first notes about "imbecils having their teeth removed and bones reset" that they were once human and thus their behaviour in the den didn't strike me as odd at all.

Well, enough ranting for now; hopefully this won't come over as too harsh for the players who genuinly enjoyed playing AMFP - i'm simply sharing my thouht and feelings about the game. I'll add some more thoughts in other threads when i have the time.