Amnesia: The Dark Descent

This chapter analyzes Amnesia: The Dark Descent, “a game about immersion, discovery and living through a nightmare” ¹ by applying a methodology based on relevance theory (Tosca 2000). In Amnesia, the player controls Daniel, a character who has no memories and is given to understand that his amnesia is self-inflicted. In real time, he has to save himself from terrible dangers by exploring a castle linked to his own dark memories. The game has won multiple awards, even though it deviates from the genre’s usual components such as cut scenes, staged fights, and static puzzles, thus suggesting that gamers are ready for works where suspense, understood as a “cognitive state of uncertainty” (Carroll 1996: 71), is the driving force for action. The search for meaning—who Daniel is, why he inflicted amnesia upon himself, what happened in the castle, and how can we escape—is literally the goal of the game. Plot intrigue and basic questions about identity and morality blend into each other and are eventually solved at the same time. Immersion is not only audiovisual but also largely semantic, as the player has to ponder the meaning of clues, text fragments, and events (such as the resolution of dynamic puzzles and attacks of monsters) at every step.