Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the horror game where players explore a dark castle while trying to stay sane, celebrated its 10th anniversary yesterday. To celebrate this, developer Frictional Games has revealed some of the ideas that never made it into thefinal version of its classic game.
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Despite being in a dark, decrepit castle, the protagonist Daniel manages to find a friendly face in the form of 15th-century Greman occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and his student Johann Weyer. Frictional Games considered putting some other real-life figures known for their interest in alchemy, such as Nicolas Flamel, Geber (also known as Jabir ibn Hayyan,) the Count of St. Germain, and Jesus Christ, known for his alchemical party trick of turning water into wine. As for less friendly faces, many players may recognize the deformed face of The Grunt, whether they met it in the original PC version or on itsrecent port to the Switch, but Frictional originally wantedAmnesia: The Dark Descentto have grotesque plant-human hybrids.
A big feature ofAmnesia: The Dark Descentwas making players next to powerless when it came to defending themselves. Frictional was originally going to give players a flintlock pistol with limited ammo to give them some minor form of self-defense. Other rejected items included sanity-restoring potions and the ability to mix them, bags of gold coins, bombs for blowing up weak walls, and trampolines. There were also some cut environmental ideas, such as a grisly dissection lab and a greenhouse, which was likely thought up when the game was originally going to have plant monsters. Some of these ideas may come back, however, with theannouncement of a newAmnesiagame.
Amnesia: The Dark Descentis available for Nintendo Switch, PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. The sequel,Amnesia: Rebirth, will be available in Fall 2020 for PC and PlayStation 4.
