- [ominous music] - A lot of horror games just throws the player into some sort of haunted house and tells them, "Oh, go and have scares," and I'm like, "Why should I care?" And answering that question, "Why should I care," is extremely important to have that sort of deeper experience, and sort of lasting impression. [dramatic music] [ghost roars] I am Thomas Grip, and I'm creative director at Frictional Games. Amnesia was released in September, 2010. The first reactions that we got from Amnesia was that it felt very fresh to have a protagonist that couldn't defend themselves. - [Speaker 1] What have I done? This is crazy. Don't forget, don't forget. I must stop him, focus. - At this point in time, most horror game relied on a combat system or something, at least like it. In Amnesia, The Dark Descent, you really didn't have anything apart from running away or hiding from monsters. And you couldn't even look at the monsters. Many other games at the time were really based around shoving monsters in your face. It was a very new experience for players to just like, listen for the monsters. [inaudible whispers] [ominous music] - [Thomas] Trying to use their imagination in order to figure out where a threat might or might not be, yeah. - [Thomas] Now they had to base their tactics a lot on their own fantasy. [dramatic sounds] When we first released Amnesia, we got some like really good reviews saying that we just one of the scariest games ever. But we never really thought ourselves as making a mark at that point. But we got pretty good feedback from our player base. - [Thomas] Several months after the release, people were still talking about the game. And not only were they still talking, they were talking more and more about the game. - [Thomas] And I remember going to Reddit and he was like two or three months after release and seeing the Amnesia being on the front page and then going back a week later and seeing another Amnesia related front page on Reddit. When we started to get a sense that while we're actually have created something significant, here was one, just the amount of meme material that came out of Amnesia. - [Thomas] Like a lot of people were scared in ways that they hadn't been before and they were trying to communicate that with humor in various ways. Another way that we saw it was the whole Lets Play Community, yeah. And there was something with Amnesia that's just made Lets players love broadcasting this game. - [Speaker 1] If the mouse would, come he sacrifice it. Oh, Oh, Oh [beep] No going back now. No, it's coming after me. [beep] This is the thing that chased us before. - In Amnesia, a lot of it is built around the player's imagination and Lets Players are really sort of performers. They're playing a role in the game and in Amnesia it really allowed them to play it for their personalities to come forward. - [Thomas] And Lets Player go into a game, trying to create something entertaining for their audience. When they come across a scary hallway in a horror game, they start looking around thinking, "Oh, what could happen next?" Talking out loud about what could scare them, and so on, There like working themselves into being frightened. [dramatic sounds] - So can't see where [beep]. - [Thomas] I think that it's taught, normal players to play the game in a certain manner. That also helps to boost the popularity of Amnesia. That's the time Amnesia was released. You have names like Markiplier, and Pewdiepie who are still one of the biggest YouTube personalities around. [mumbles] - [Speaker 4] Go away. - They started doing your videos at the same time as we released Amnesia. Let's players were a crucial ingredient in teaching the audience of just how you should approach to game. [scary dramatic sound] There are two main ways of doing horror games. - [Thomas] Try to Amnesia to a certain degree at least what you had was horror layering's. The core game play is really not about horror, so it's a shooter or it's an adventure game. And then you have like spooky music and jump scares and suddenly it's a horror experience. - [Thomas] So you just take some standard gameplay that you've seen in other games and you just wrap it in a horror. In Silent Hill 2, there is this moment where you go into a room, you see pyramid head, which is a very horrible, creepy character. and you didn't cut to a cut-scene, the protagonist walks into a closet, peeks out and then sees that pyramid head walks away. And then the player gets control, afterwards. I would have wanted to play this. Why is this a cut-scene? This is the best part. This is the horror experience. I want you player to be part of this. We did something similar in Amnesia, where you get into a room, suddenly you hear a monster breaking into the room from behind a corner. - [Thomas] And the only way to do at that moment is to hide in a closet. What happens here is that the players recreates this scene from Silent Hill. Going into a closet, using your own agency in order to go into the closet and peek out, nothing is scripted. And you know, they're doing these things. They're simulating a horror experience to playing through a horror disappearance. The other way of doing it, is horror simulators. Think that the best example is Clock Tower. - [Thomas] In clock tower, you really see how the developers are trying to replicate the horror movie experience. You can hide in closets. You can push aside the antagonist. You only need to had one antagonist. like Scissor Man coming at you. After we had released Amnesia, to my recollection at least, there weren't any immediate clones coming out. - [Thomas] We were actually fairly alone on the field. Slender is the one that came one and a half, two years after release of Amnesia. The ethics are not very good. And the gameplay not very good, but its as really good ambience just from having this very dark environment and good ambient track. - [Thomas] It's very similar to Amnesia. I'd say it's even more, it's all in your head. But I think we started seeing even more of these Let's Play games. [eerie music] It's fairly, easy to make this game. And that's why we made Amnesia as well. - [Thomas] The problem with us, for horror game makers is that in Amnesia we relied a ton on the player, not understanding the mechanics of what was happening. - [Thomas] We had a situation, muse scary music was playing. There were some footsteps sounds heard, the player would go, "Wow, what's is this, what is this?" They were not use to that, they were used to these sort of things coming we're into war actual danger. But then a ton of games starting doing the same thing. - [Thomas] I feel a bit bad about saying this. If this games horror inspires when Amnesia hardly work, what they were inspired by mostly was just these sort of moment to moment scares. - [Thomas] They were not so keen on building a sort of narrative explaining why the player was there. A lot of horror games that came after was, the player walking in was basically a carnival attraction, sort of haunted mansion attraction, where you go into room, a ghost pops out. You get a bit frightened by things but there's no really deeper, frightening about that. I think it's extremely important that in order for horror to be effective, you have to establish a relationship with the player. - [Thomas] You have to care about the character that they're playing as. When we started doing a game, we were really wanting to do a horror simulator. We wanted to make like the whole game play and seeing that the player was captured in all of that should combine into the horror experience. It shouldn't just be a shooting gallery, that's also frightening. It should be the whole point and focus should be on frightening the player. - [Thomas] You have to know why you are doing something. And you have to sort of agree to doing that. Say for example, that you're playing, what's supposed to be a horror game and you're a character is an army grunt who is "Yes sir, yes I'm gonna win here and do that." That's gonna be so different, playing that character from playing someone who feels like a normal person, who's over their head in dangerous and whatnot and can barely handle it. That's the sort of relationship you have to establish. Going into Rebirth, that's gonna be even more important. - [Speaker 5] Mother of good, what has happened here? - On top of that, you also need to make sure that you have, a storyline that a player can hook into. There needs to be a sort of narrative drive. They need to know why they're doing something. They need to share the goals for the character. - [Speaker 6] My most precious Jack Daniel. And it lies well beyond the refinery. In fact, it lies beneath the very stone of Brennan. - By sharing these things, the player gets more emotionally attached. And then when actually horrible things happen to that character to player's gonna care more. What I wanna do going forward in horror games is to try and emulate, not just the carnival attraction, but I want to emulate the movie like say "The Exorcism." [eerie music] The horror it's not just a jump scares, but it's whole narrative. It's on a much deeper level. That's sort of something that lasts after you've seen it that affects you more deeply. - As you hear have some sort of presence view on it. It's "Oh, there's a scary girl. And there's some scary sightings and so on." And if you just try and do a movie that has that, you get a bad horror movie because you're not understanding what makes the Exorcism special. The Exorcist is about a mother, that's about to lose her child. It's about a priest losing their faith. It's about people being confronted with worst of their nightmares. It's about losing control. It's also anchored slightly, you know, depending on your belief structure in some. In reality in all of that makes for a real destroying experience. [screams] [glass shutters] What really lasts are these themes, these overarching story bits. - [Thomas] And I've always felt that was extremely important for any sort of horror experience. Horror is very interesting because it's, allows us to talk about very difficult questions, in a sort of safe space. You go into it knowing it's gonna be frightening. So you're not put off by it's being disturbing. Horror movies for me are about tackling. the most horrible things that we can have in life and I think they should. And Amnesia, one of the things that we wanted to discuss there, big theme was good and evil. - [Speaker 7] What did I do to deserve this? I mean, it can't be. Do I deserve this? - In Amnesia you're playing as Daniel, who slowly uncovers that in his past he's been torturing people. Which is obviously a bad thing to do. But then there's questions arising, like he can't recall torching anyone, he doesn't like his old self being tortured Is he still evil? That was something we want to get across. But the more lasting impression from players was more to moment to moment scarce and that always annoyed me. - [Thomas] I honestly felt that was a big failure with the game, and that we didn't accomplish what we set out to do. - [Speaker 8] What the hell happened to you? Hello, can you hear me? - When making Soma wanted to fix that, we want it to make a game where people were not just affective and didn't just remember the moment to moment scarce, but were deeply affected by the narrative by the hire and structure. - Its a study I'm with my colleague reductionist. We hope to design a gentle way to work with brain reconstruction, to help people like you. - The focus of Soma was not so much on scares because we're beginning to see, you know, we had to do something different in order to stand out. - [Thomas] The idea was to focus more on the narrative that could scare the player STEM that as they experience the game through first person means being immersed in the world as they start reflecting on that, in a similar to how a player reflects on a sound effect of some footsteps being heard, but on a much more complicated and higher level with how your own place in the world, and Soma was a lot about consciousness. [groans] - [Speaker 9] Oh fuck. - There weren't a lot of games around that time that had that sort of narrative. - [Thomas] So in Soma the idea was to have questions like , Oh, should I really care for someone who's trapped in a robot body, are they really alive, and should I care about life? If I find myself being a robot, is there a soul? And these things are not easily discussable in time spans where normal gameplay mechanic happens. - [Thomas] A normal gameplay is like on seconds or possibly minutes. These things takes hours. It was a big risk for us, if players would care about these things and if they would help make the game enjoyable, then in the end, it turns out that you can actually make a game like this. The intent with Soma was not making what I call like a horror layer game. The idea was that the players should be thinking about these deeper subjects as to play. That was the core intent with the game and trying to pull that off. Everything else was secondary. - [Speaker 10] Didn't you run a diagnosis or something. [eerie music] What was that? - [Catherine] No, I just, - [Speaker 10] Why was it still talking? - [Catherine] It's the same, like before - [Speaker 10] Catherine, why was he still talking? - [Catherine] That's how it works, you know that. - [Speaker 10] What do you mean? - [Catherine] You know, it's not magic. You were copied. The sleeping Simon in the seat was copied and now you are here. Just like Simon live on in Toronto. - [Thomas] One of my favorite things in the game, you have to answer a questionary about what you think about different things that are connected to the game. And then at the end of the game, you have to answer the same questionary. And most people change their answers. The experience of having played a game, actually effects players deeply enough for them to change their answers, to fundamental questions about soul consciousness and so on. And now is deeply satisfying. Going on to Rebirth, we still trying to make another thing. It's not going to be as philosophical as we had with Soma, but it's still going to be a very strong one. And it's a good thing to sign wise, but it's possibly unhealthy to you, but I always tend to focus on the aspects I think failed. And what I think failed in Soma was that we couldn't really mesh the gameplay with the narrative. - [Thomas] This sort of go hand in hand, but in certain scenes and so on, especially when you're encountering enemies, but aren't as tight as they should have been. And the whole narrative experience is not as grounded and in place, I think we can make. And then trying to remedy that this a focus of a rebirth. [eerie music] - [Thomas] Technology is not so much making the shiny as game possible with the latest features. We're actually trying to make the biggest and sort of highest production value game that we can on being a small team. Our approach is not to squeeze everything out of these and having the best graphics, but thinking about how can we utilize this to have like graphics that look good, work well for the game, but then we actually do fairly fast. When you make, say a shoot, you are fairly confident at an early stage if it's gonna work or not. So if you have a cylinder running around and you shoot spheres that are like multicolored spheres, you can have pretty decent gameplay, doing having those extremely simple graphical representation Feel that everything's fitting and then you like add the Polish on top of that. Knowing that not much is going to change level wise, but for horror game, it's very different. If you have a cylinder running around, people are gonna go, "Why should I be scared of the cylinder?" You have to have environments that have sounds as lightning and so on. - [Thomas] You have to come to a certain graphical fidelity in order to understand if something is working or not. You can't like plan for everything and certain things just have to be tested if they work or not. - [Thomas] Then having a pipeline where we can easily swap rooms around, where we don't have to worry about rebuilding large databases, where we can easily literate things. We don't have to have servers crunching things for two days before we can try it with all the lighting on. In order to do a good horror game, I think you have to be able to do these things because otherwise a lot of is guesswork and it's gonna be very hard to get that feeling that you're after. So now we use technology that we didn't have before is like how cheap video and bandwidth are. When we play tested Amnesia, "The Dark Descent," we basically only had thrift than feedback. Now what we can do instead, or we could do before the whole Corona situation happened, we could get people, sit them down in our office record their face and record as they're playing. Interestingly, all of this technology is streamers it's made for you tubers, people playing Amnesia, way back. - [Thomas] We're using the exact same technology that they're using now in order to do play tests. We are recording them playing. So just seeing how to react in different situation, we have their reactions, so on top of this. So if they're say walking a corridor where we're gonna to be seeing in game, is just to play walking in the corridor, but when we can check their footage, you can see that they're gripping the controller tighter. They're really staring at the screen. - I think there's something walking around here. Oh, there he is. Oh [beep] he's right where I wanna be. - They're obviously frightened about what's gonna happen next. Something that would be extremely hard to know, just seeing the gameplay footage. So having their facial expressions, - Go Suzy go. - Juxtaposed with the game player footage is extremely valuable for evaluating what's happening with players. - Success. - Players, they articulate as they play might they talk loudly. And I think that doing this feels more comfortable because people are used to seeing people on YouTube doing, you have a culture where it's that people know how to talk openly about what you're currently experiencing. So that's really great for us as well because people enter rooms and without really losing themselves from the game, are able to articulate. - Who's there, oh he's right there. All right, well that's just~ freaking great. - [Thomas] So they're sort of having this sort of stream of consciousness, and it's almost like you have a tool where you can see through actually thinking from moment to moment. But I think that if you were to sit someone down or a bunch of people down 10, 15 years back, they wouldn't at all be talking as much. And I think that's really cool is cause that's part of it. It's technology, just being able to record all of this and the in order to make like a really effective horror game, that's goes beyond just jump scares. You need to have this whole package and you need to have the player engaged on more than one level. [eerie music] - [Thomas] A good example of this, is we're trying to set up the scene. That's inherently spooky to the players. You walk into a room, that's not filled with water. Suddenly it's filled water, amping up the fear and so on. So the game play here, which is "Keep out of the water," is basically the floor is lava. [water whooshing] When we started making the water lurker sequence, there was a design document. The design documents said, there were going to be tentacles that are coming up and chasing the player. I started to implement this and I was like, shit, "Cant do tentacles." Like we have no one to animate them or anything. Have to come up with something else that had water splashes. Those were already made for other reasons. So I was thinking, "Oh yeah, it could be an invisible monster." And again, a lot with the imagination, soul pieces connect to having this sort of horror experience. We wanted to have as much interest in gameplay at this as we possibly can. So now we have a monster into water, what else can you do? So the player walks to the end of the room, trying to get away, "Oh no, gate is closed." So you're constantly adding tension to this. And as you pull the lever, the door is only gonna be open for a short amount of time. - [Thomas] And in order for the player to go quickly to this door, you have to run a bit in the water. But then in the water you have this invisible monster chasing the players. Then the player has jumped into the water, which is the worst place possible and to spin this really slow wheel. And all of that combined with this invisible monster, which you're not sure what it is, which is really good for fear, has the player constantly confronting, the horrible aspects. Being in the Water and trying to move quickly, and all of that sort of combined, since you making one horror experience. The one sequence in Amnesia: Rebirth, we had as an inspiration, which is one of my favorites, gameplay and sequences, which is the Start of the First Downhill, where you walk in this alley way and then it gets dark, you hear sirens, it's just really, really good build up. And then you light the match. [door closes] We have now so you can light light sources that we had in exactly like we had in Dark Descent, which is basically you have a bunch of matches and then a tinder boxes in dark scent. No, it was matches. And you just click on the light and it gets lit, but that's not how it works in a horror story, right? So, if you think about how would a horror movie do it as well? The protagonist would first light the match, which serves as a light source. And when you've lit one match, it can light several light sources. So this allows us to, to have like a table full of candles, It gives that interesting sense of shaping the environment to your own benefit and not very simple way by yes, lightning. Then you can also use that as a light source, which is really intense in a way where you're like, you're in a very dark space, there's no other light and you know that just as the old dark descent and being in the dark is bad. Then the player is thinking what might be beyond there in the darkness because you sort of, when you light the match in a very dark place, you have this sort of wall of darkness surrounding you. - I wanna play, hide the clap. - And if you are stand still thinking about that lights sort of burns very slowly but the moment you start moving, it burns faster, So, you're stuck in this position. You wanna to stay longer in the light, right? But then you can't move. And then you have to think about what might be out there. And it's a catalyst for the player's fantasy to run wild. - [Thomas] And that's something that sort of worked very well. And that's one of the things that I think is a very good evolution of our previous systems. We wanna build on emotions and give more freedom to the player, to play around and to frightening themselves. And being able to light the match in the dark and then go around lighting places. See, it's is a very simplistic thing, but it adds a lot to the feeling. It also adds a bit of tactility to it, which is something that I think is a big part of amnesia in that you can have, you have to open doors in an analog fashion. You have to pull leavers, builds immersion for the players, connects them to the character. Amnesia: Rebirth is built with Soma's engine, which is honestly an old engine, but it shows an engine that all people working on the team knows and we can really crunch out these things to fast into a, a high quality level, being able to iterate and to be able to do a lot of things. And almost every place you're in, in Amnesia: Rebirth is a new environment. - [Thomas] Pre constantly changing it up for the player to not know what's going to happen next. You have to constantly think about narrative things that keeps the player going. - [Speaker 11] Do not allow yourself to anger. Do not allow yourself to fear. You must try to keep calm or it will get worse. You understand me? [eerie music] - If I say that you have a game where there's monsters that are gonna eat you, and if you get eaten, you have to start all over, okay. Shit, I care about not being eaten on a mechanical level. I don't want to do that. But if you have a game that says you are ill and you might get more ill, if you get into certain situations. - [Thomas] The only reason that you would care is that if you actually care about the character, you know you don't want them to be more [mumbles]. You need to have some sort of overarching narrative goals. That means that, Oh shit. In order to carry these things out, I need to get hold of my current illness. Otherwise I can see that further down the line, given a bunch` of narrative and store events, I need to stay healthy. Obviously this is like, shit, this is hard, right? So why not just throw the player into creepy things and make scary pop-ups, that's been done. Like that's just gonna be another horror game that's already been made. - [Thomas] We want to try and go where games have not gone before. Try and think about, okay. What would be an interesting journey for the player? What would be an interesting experience and trying to emulate that in a game and is similarly to Soma where we said, yeah, we're gonna explore consciousness in a game. If we manage that's gonna be, what says if the games of success or not. And in rebirth, we're gonna have, for instance and illness and we gonna have other things connected to this illness that are not obviously gameplay related. If I'm playing in, whatever action game and so on, I'm playing it because it's damn fun, just repeating this game play over and over. But in a war, it's like, shit, I am frightened night. Now it's not pleasant to being in this situation for a longer duration. So you're constantly have to think about ways for the player to, well, if you just push forward, it's still an exciting experience. - [Speaker 12] Find more light. Uh, I feel so much better in here. - Almost everything that you see in the game is possible to interact with. If you see a rock laying around while you can pick it up, you can throw it around. A lot of these interactions are totally from a game place perspective, useless, but from an immersion perspective, they're extremely important. If you go into an environment, the moment you can pick up something, lying on a table, be that a box to hammer or what-not and throw it at some... - [Thomas] That's gonna put you deeper into the game. And it's something that I think, I miss in a lot of fighter games, but I think is really helpful for horror games to get across. And another thing you might want to do is that, you know there is a creature and it reacts to sound. So you want to throw something, you throw something, you see a shadow running past and like, "Oh shit, I can go in that direction now." And all of these would be in another game. They would have to be each one of them, special mechanics. You have to like constantly show the player that there's special controls for analog control and the special controls for throwing objects. And there's a special control for drawing out secret books and what-not, but all of these become consistencies. It's the same physics system that are using all of these together and having all of that. As one of her technology is extremely important for us immersion wise and just the general storytelling that we're doing here. - [Speaker 12] Hello, are you there? - [Speaker 11] Just keep talking, doctor keep talking. Ill find a way. - Amnesia then Amnesia: Rebirth as well is the reaction to these games where narrative is a secondary thing in the game. And the focus is just on the jump scares. So pieces connect to having this sort of horror experience of having this high level narrative that spans across hours in order to really have an effect on players, that's more deeply connected now, with the moment to moment game places. Choices that you're making on a moment to moment basis, just walking around, thinking about the environment, thinking about sounds here. It's all of that connects to the big storyline. The themes that we're trying to get across in rebirth. Two reasons for going into a rebirth, one was that we wanted to be a Two Project Studio. So we felt we needed to do something where we had some foundational knowledge of how to do it. The idea was that there was a lot of unexplored things in Amnesia. So there was a vast low material that we could use in a new game. But then setting out on making this. It was obvious that a lot of the tricks that used to work wasn't gonna work at all. One thing that we could use to rate effect in Dark Descent was that when a player was killed or defeated by mass, we could just teleport them elsewhere and then respond or even a remove the monster. And the player was confused enough to just "Well, what was happening?" And they were still frightened by a monster, even though you could just run into every monster encountered, you would still be able to continue the game. Monster encounters is interesting, there is a fairly narrow range of the signs, that are gonna be scary to a player. - [Thomas] If you go too far and it has 10 arms and a butterfly wing, suddenly it gets funny. It doesn't get as scary, but if there's just something off about it, that's when you get the good frights. And it was easier before when we did Dark Descent, because there hadn't been that many games in the same genre trying to make the same sort of scares, but now there's a ton of different titles. So it's been a huge challenge to just come up with the sort of enemies that we feel is gonna work with the storyline, that's gonna work gameplay wise and it's also gonna look scary enough. [groans] The actual encounter, of a monster is not that important that you're being caught by the monster and it eats you. - [Thomas] There's a certain catharsis to that. Like I was scared, but now I don't have to be scared anymore because the most horrible thing that could happen, happened. That's time for a monster encounter is before you encountered a monster. And when the player thinks the monster is near the actual monster encounters, when the player can see the monster more clearly, can move around about it. You have to keep them shorter, you have to keep them varied, because otherwise the player is gonna note this, what sort of behaviors the monster have, And having just those few details and a large dose of uncertainty that is the absolute best way to shift to have a creepy monster. We're like taking that, all of those lessons. We're trying to make sure that every situation in rebirth rudders a monster is varied in some or some other sense. And there's constantly something new happening, that's gonna keep the player on their toes. The best thing then is for the player to have enough intense experiences to constantly fear another encounter. I think the most common error in horror games overall is seeing your monsters as gameplay devices. Just copy paste or munching encountered Realogy, they have to have the narrative connection. They have to have something unique about them. Then you constantly have to think about how you introduce and how you, for both the different moments. So, while we tried to do was to have this sort of narrative thing that we had in Soma, and to use that knowledge and combine that with more lower level horror. The horror that you get from sounds and just being afraid of the environment that you're in. The thing that we have now in Rebirth is M Tacit the protagonist has some sort of affliction, An illness. - [Thomas] That means that she can't be in a scary situation. So the more horrible situations that you find yourselves in the worse off she's gonna get. From going from something, with Amnesia, where we could play a sound effects and players would just react and imagine things. We had a knowledge from Soma, and we knew if we could combine this sort of lower level scare stuff with a sort of higher level, more deeper narrative, we could get something that would be really hard to fail. - [Christine] Chris Nate? - We are making a game that is interesting for less players to play, but that's just because we have this sort of the narrative and game play are very tightly connected. But obviously, we don't want players to watch Lets Play and then feel like, "Oh, I've had my fill." My hope is though, and this is where I'm really seeing the challenge for this game and for the future, you want to have something where the player watches the "Let's Play" and feel's, "Well, I wanna experience this." When you're watching a "Lets Play" of a Amnesia: Dark Descent, the major emotion that people have, it's not fear, it's laughter. - Screw you game. Seriously, God damn it. - They think it's funny, when the lets player is scared. But then they go ahead and try it out themselves. And you feel like, "Well, shit, he's really scared. That was funny to see. I wonder how scared I would be." And moving forward, I think that's the big takeaway actually, I have from "Lets Play" And I think that's something that if you go at it from the right direction is going to lead to very interesting experiences. Is where you have games where people can watch, a big button, like whole player through it and still come out of that and say, "Wow, I'm so excited to have a go at the game now, after seeing someone else play. - [Christine] Oh, Alex, oh Alex darling. Oh God, oh God no. - Amnesia: Rebirth is not Amnesia:Dark Descent, plus plus, or it's not just version two of Amnesia:The Dark Descent It's its own game. It has its own new theme. It has different things for the player to care about. All of these happen in a sort of amnesiac setting and with Amnesiac gameplay. But we're totally trying to achieve very different things. In Amnesia:Dark Descent, there is a lot of emphasis on the background story. In Amnesia: Rebirth, it's a lot of emphasis on what's happening now to the player. - [Thomas] This sort of presence narrative that's happening. What is the player going through at this very moment? How do I react to the things happening just now at the themes again are very different. We want players coming in, playing Amnesia: Rebirth and saying, "Wow, this was something I haven't seen before." Make it its own thing to be evaluated on its own terms. I think it's impossible to not be influenced by what other people have said about your games. If that's critics or what you've read on forums, Reddit, or getting posted on Twitter, what-not. You're going to be effected. And you're gonna take that into account as you make your game But I think it's Neil Gaiman has said it. If someone says there is something wrong, with what you've done, they're almost certainly, right. But when they say, what you should do, in order to make it better, They're almost certainly wrong. If someone says, "Amnesia would be better, if it had guns." [laughs] For instance, you don't wanna take that face value and... Okay, write down in my notebook, "We need to have guns in our game." Instead you wanna be thinking like, read between the lines. Why would they say something like this? From my end, the best ideas are being influenced by sort of sources that are as far away from what you're trying to do as possible. One of` the largest inspirations for the Darkest Descend, is a book about how the brain was the center of thought. And what was so interesting about that book was reading about all of these 18th, 17th century scientists making these weird experiments in small groups in castles, And so am I, it was sea life, the overall obviously philosophy and so on. But with justice and environment, and in Amnesia: Rebirth, there are something that I've been always very interested in are tales of extreme survival. The one book that was read as a whole team was a book called the "Skeletons on the you tubers." And the game doesn't really have a lot of those aspects to it. but what survives, is this sort of general gist of survival under extreme conditions. Other thing also, that's a part inspiration is this discovery show called [mumbles] "I Should Be Alive" To the game Amnesia: Rebirth, has a lot of that's sort of baked into the experience. The interesting bit about these survival tales, it's not just always the reactions take but it's this sort of mental processes, because I think that a lot of the people who don't survive, these things just give up for various reasons. It's really about life and what matters to you and what sort of moves you forward. That's something that we're trying to make in ourselves in Amnesia: Rebirth as well. - [Speaker 12] Where is everyone? - Holy mother of God! What happened here? - When we release a Amnesia: Rebirth on 20th of October this year, it's gonna be over 10 years since we released the original Amnesia:Dark Descent. I'm really looking forward to seeing the reactions on this new game and how people are gonna compare it to the old one, and so on. It's gonna be very, very exciting to finally release, a proper sequel.