Freebie Feelers...Amnesia: The Collection

Freebie Feelers is a series where we download the free monthly console-specific or newly released free-to-play games to test their worth.This series will contain some useful information as well as plenty of personal opinion. While these articles may not be reviews, we hope that you will be able to use them to help decide whether that free download is worth it.

What is it?
Amnesia: Collection is a first-person horror trilogy that brings together Frictional Games’ critically acclaimed series as a single package for the PS4. It’s free throughout all of October.

Although all three games share the Amnesia title, they are separate stories that exist in the same universe. Players take control of three different protagonists, dividing their time between puzzle solving and avoiding hellish creatures as they uncover the twisted narratives of each title.

Regularly played by streamers, The Dark Descent (the first game in the series) is one of the titles that popularised the “Let’s Play” style of video on YouTube and Twitch thanks to its ability to reduce grown men to terrified tears.

What did you think?
Although all three games fundamentally rely on the same basic mechanics of puzzle solving and hiding from ugly monstrosities that want to kill you, there is enough variety in their narratives and other gameplay systems to make each one feel unique.

The Dark Descent has an excellent “sanity” mechanic, which means that the longer you spend in the dark or looking directly at a monster, the more you lose your mind. The kicker is that the dark is a safe place to hide and you need to study monsters’ movement patterns to safely avoid them. This moment-to-moment balancing of keeping your sanity while staying hidden from enemies is a constant source of tension that never stops being stressful.

A Machine For Pigs is a much tighter, more linear experience, but its narrative explores some very weighty themes in suitably ambitious fashion. It’s more of an experiment in immersive storytelling than a horror game per se, but it’s certainly still incredibly unsettling.

Justine features some interesting choice-based gameplay that alters the story’s ending, but it also feels a bit like a mid-century version of Saw. It’s probably the weakest of the three games, but it’s still worth experiencing.

Is it worth downloading?
For horror fans, absolutely. The Amnesia series is lauded by critics and gamers alike for a reason: it’s brilliant. All three games are unnerving, demented, and terrifying in their own ways and anyone who enjoys a good scare will get plenty of them.