Amnesia: The Amateur Construction Hour

It turns out that Amnesia is one of very few games that my little netbook can run. Why or how this is, I don't know. I have not questioned it. I have not doubted it. I have simply enjoyed it, as a fading reminder of better days when I had a computer that tolerated if not outright encouraged my voracious gaming (and game-blogging) habits. The display is several inches smaller, the crowded keyboard has forced me into intimate acquaintance with some jerk known as Fn, and the whole rig labors along gamely but pitifully, like myself when faced with the challenge of a gentle slope. Still, it's something, and over the past week or so I've found myself revisiting Brennenburg Castle more often than I'm sure Daniel would like if he were a real person.

I haven't reached the end of the game or even gotten past the Back Hall yet, as I've spent most of my time finding something to do with every movable object I come across. Books, chairs, rolls of paper, the helmets on suits of armor--nothing has been spared.

I'm also running around with about forty-five tinderboxes, as I am Chuck Norris and/or Aaron Hotchner and/or a ninja and have no need for petty things like candles or torches. But that's beside the point.

Anyway.

Since a post dedicated to screenshots of every stupid thing I've done would be tedious to the point of unfunny, I'll just touch upon the largest: exploration of my inner architect.


It started in the Old Archives. There's a giant hole in the ceiling, you see, and I badly wanted to try and climb through it. There was no particular logic behind this goal--I just noticed it and decided that getting up there was more important than anything else in the world.


Unfortunately, Daniel cannot leap twenty feet in the air and Link is a right bastard who won't share his hookshot with other video game characters, so I had to get creative. I began stacking everything that could be stacked.


"Everything that could be stacked" was mostly crates and/or boxes with the odd trunk thrown in for good measure. I ran through the Old Archives picking them up and dragging them back to the ceiling-hole-room to be assimilated into my tower. At first all was well; I created a rickety but serviceable behemoth that allowed me to scrape the very bottom of the ceiling. From where I stood I could see up into the next floor but couldn't quite make it through. All I needed was one more box. I found it in a neglected, dusty corner and took it up with me for placement.

Along the way it brushed against something and the whole tower collapsed.

Undeterred, I rebuilt it all.

Then, after that one stupid box ruined all my hard work for the second time, I rebuilt it again.

And again.

And again.


My last attempt looked like this. It didn't work any better than the others and with all the different stacks it wandered out from beneath the hole anyway, as I am a terrible judge of distances. Ultimately, Daniel smashed his invisible head against the ceiling and then fell to the ground with a splatter of blood and a crack of bone as I hit a load-bearing crate with another crate and swept everything to the floor in a glorious explosion of wood and lag.

I gave up in disgust after that.

Fast forward to the wine cellar. I crept through the darkness, opening doors and poking my battered skull into equally dark rooms: collecting jars of chemicals, grabbing bottles of laudanum that demand a terrible, terrible price, extricating myself from cave-ins...


And then there is this room.


This harmless, wonderful room that contains about sixty percent of Brennenburg's barrel supply.

I was frazzled.

I was weary.

I was growing bored with my attempts to out-lurk the monsters.


It seemed only natural that I should take a break. I toiled for hours or at least fifteen minutes to create the ultimate hiding place, in the process both thwarting any monster who cared to pass by and annoying the person I'd Skyped my game with.


"This is ridiculous," he said. "It's stupid. Pick up the cuprite and leave!"

"Screw you," I said, hopping into my barrel fort.


I sealed myself in.

"I hope you're happy," he grumbled. "So, what, are you just going to stay in there for the rest of the game?"

"Maybe," I said. After all, it was safe and I had plenty of light--what more could I, and by extension Daniel, possibly need?


Oh, right, I'm supposed to kill a floating blue alien or something. (Concept art used because I am in no way far enough along to take a screenshot of said floating blue alien.)

At last I crawled out of my fort, but I did so grudgingly and with no small amount of trouble--I'd built it so well that even I, as its maker, had some difficulty taking it apart.

I moved on. Things happened and objects were rearranged and more suits of armor wound up headless and my audience screamed in horror when I entered the Refinery and baited the monster into chasing me around for no real reason. I was Chuck Norris and/or Aaron Hotchner and/or a ninja. I was invincible. I had no reason to hide--hiding was for Daniels, and I was Chuck Norris and/or Aaron Hotchner and/or a ninja, dammit. The monster obviously knew this, for although its growls and roars and slashing arms backed me into a corner it turned and beat a hasty retreat after I glared at it.


My glare looked just like this. I swear it did.


Okay, so it probably looked more like this recycled screenshot. Nevertheless, it was frightening enough to repel Mr. Face. His departure was in no way a coincidence or some glitch of the AI. Nope. My glare broke through the computer screen and rewrote Amnesia's code to inform the monster that it should be the one running from me.

Also, the Kaernk was so terrified of my wrath that it threw rotten body parts around to try and distract me long enough for it to escape.

True story.


Badass though I am, I am apparently slow on the uptake. Upon reaching this area I set my jar of explosives down, retreated, and watched it do nothing for the next five minutes or so. Where did I go wrong? I wondered. I mixed up a bunch of volatile chemicals and left them where I was supposed to! What did I miss? Was I supposed to find a big red button somewhere? How did I get through this part before?

"Maybe you're not supposed to look at it," my audience of one suggested. "They probably won't even show the explosion."

"But I want to see the explosion!" I said, and as five minutes became ten I crept back down and gave the jar a poke.


This was the only hint that I received for my trouble.

Perhaps I just hadn't gone far enough from the blast area? I wandered off down the hallway, expecting to hear the rumble of an invisible detonation at any second.


The detonation never came. Instead I wound up staring at a very old-looking bone next to a puddle of very fresh-looking blood, my back unsinged and my progress impeded because that damned jar of explosives was ignoring the fact that it had a job to do. At last my frustration boiled over.


I grabbed the bone and marched it downstairs. Then, with every shred of might granted to me by the throw button, I flung it at the jar.


It turns out that you can see the explosion. Um. Oops?


After the pile of boulders and myself were blown to smithereens--but not the bone; through some devilry it survived intact--and I'd finished scrubbing my own blood from my eyes, I peered down along the hallway that had just opened up. Oh, right. I was in Storage. That room was coming up.


I armed myself with a barrel and resumed wandering.


It was a faithful companion, as far as inanimate objects go. Nothing so good as the Luggage, of course, but it accompanied me through twists and turns and tinderbox-collecting, and not once did it waver as we drew closer to that room, the room where I, as a newbie Amnesia player, had experienced my first real monster encounter.

I'd made the mistake of researching the game a little before I played it, you see. I hadn't looked up any major spoilers, but I had read that the horror was largely psychological and that monsters were 1) few and far between, and 2) did not start to appear until late in the story. Having no idea of what "late in the story" or "few and far between" really meant, I grew confident. Footsteps on the floor above me? Alexander was trying to psych me out. Other unexplainable creaks and groans? Alexander was trying to psych me out. That tortured snarling and intermittent "BLEEEAUGH!" noise? Alexander was trying to psych me out. I stomped through one section after another, flinging doors open and collecting objects with gleeful abandon, until, my hands still greasy from whacking pig corpses around in the neighboring room, I turned the wrong knob.

I was traumatized. So was the person who'd been watching over my shoulder. That room holds a lot of bad memories for me.


It was all right, though, because I will reiterate that I am a badass who no longer cares about insignificant things like Mr. Face. Besides, I knew exactly how to deal with him now.


My barrel and I approached that room. I set it down in front of the door, taking pains not to disturb it.


My barrel was soon joined by all its relatives, including its extended family of trunks, crates, and boxes.


They even brought their friends, the rugs and burlap sacks and moldering loaves of bread. It was an inanimate object party! It wasn't my fault that they'd chosen to camp out in front of the entrance to that room.


Well, no, it was totally my fault and I totally did not feel sorry about it.

"What did you do?" my now-despairing audience wanted to know. "Isn't there something important in that room?"

"I don't know," I said, "and I don't really care." Then I went to go slap a few pig carcasses around.


Whee! (I also tried to get them hitting one another like an abacus, but they failed me.)

Once I grew bored with asserting my dominance over a few slabs of meat, I went back out into the main hall, and, secure in the knowledge that Mr. Face was confined to his room and wouldn't be out to pester me, strolled by his door. He banged on it as I passed, and I heard him grumble to himself and make a few of those "BLEEEAUGH!" sounds that have ruined many a gamer's life, but I ignored him. He seemed to give up quickly enough, anyway; after a few more bangs and grumbles he fell silent again, apparently resigned to fate.


It was a ruse. I was about to leave when the banging started up again. From the sound of it, he was now throwing himself against the door.

"Is he really going to try and break it down?" said I. "Heh. Stupid monster."

"You should be recording this," said my audience.

I listened to the banging for a while. The monster was definitely not going to stop. Clouds of dust and tiny wood-flecks rose up from the door and barricade, settled, and vanished into nonexistence.

"BLEEEAUGH!" said Mr. Face.

I decided that I should, in fact, be recording this spectacle. I did so, and then, because CamStudio decided that I didn't need any of the in-game sound, put it to some music.


And since then I've been working on this blog post and editing that stupid, stupid video, so I haven't progressed any further.

Hey, I've got a new roommate!

I found him on Craigslist.

Don't ever answer ads there. Just don't.

(In all seriousness, I have no idea how this really turned out. Photoediting on this netbook is a drag.)

I am an idiot: I play WolfQuest so you don't have to!

In the words of its creators, WolfQuest is "an immersive, 3D wildlife simulation game" that "challenges players to learn about wolf ecology by living the life of a wild wolf in Yellowstone National Park." It achieves its goal, I suppose, if the wolves of Yellowstone--all five of them, counting the player--live in a dull, featureless bowl that's surrounded by invisible walls and infested with plagues of dead elk.

This game was first released in 2007, and, despite numerous attempts to improve it by adding new features and extra content, it is still as bad as it was four years ago. The latest update adds weather, a rudimentary day/night cycle, and, at last, the long-anticipated ability for your wolf to sit down. How much effort does it take to animate a wolf plonking its butt on the ground? More than you'd think, apparently, seeing as how it was only patched in a few days ago. It doesn't matter how many sitting wolves and terrible lightning effects the developers have come up with, however. WolfQuest is a terrible, terrible game, and playing it is about as much fun as sitting on a bed of rusty nails and pulling your own teeth without Novocain.

But I get ahead of myself. Let's start at the beginning of my WolfQuest: Survival of the Pack Deluxe experience.

I made myself a wolf, a male named Killmurder (Kilmurdr, actually, due to the name length restrictions), and was immediately dumped into the middle of Yellowstone according to WolfQuest.


As you can see, it is a vibrant and meticulously landscaped place. A work of digital art, really!


Dead elk began to spawn almost immediately. Being a wolf in Yellowstone appears to be a pretty sweet deal. You never have to hunt; your prey just drops dead for you!


Wandering out of the starting desert/petrified forest area brought me to the forest-forest, which, again, is extraordinarily detailed and full of character. It absolutely does not feature hundreds of identical trees all lined up into neat little groups, with no undergrowth, roots, or even rocks to be found for variety. Nope. They certainly didn't skimp on the environments in this game!


Killmurder ran into a strange wolf, one that belongs to the park's Specimen pack. Since this is WolfQuest he had no packmates around to back him up and never will ("packs" in WolfQuest are a joke; pack wolves spawn one at a time and just stand there until you approach them), and since Killmurder is a gigantic canine douchebag, I naturally roughed him up until he fled. It's a shame that I didn't get screenshots of the combat--it was so dynamic and exciting!


Actually, it wasn't. It was more boring than the turn-based combat systems of oldschool JRPGs. I pressed a button, Specimen Male pressed a button, we snarled at one another with exactly the same animation and sound effects, and then he ran away.


After I sent Specimen Male packing (hurr), I decided to try out the new sleep functionality. Nap until dusk, Killmurder!


The wolves stretch every time they wake up. The animation is pretty neat and realistic, if slow, until you realize that you can't skip it. And did I mention that it's slow?


After Killmurder finally got his sorry hide up off the ground, I examined the dusk lighting. Meh. It's nothing dramatic.


But then something dramatic did happen! This Druid wolf ran up to confront me for being on his territory, and then moments later the entire pack appeared!


Oh, sorry, what did I say? I meant, "I wandered unmolested through this male's territory until I decided to hunt him down and pick a fight, and despite belonging to a pack he was completely alone and vulnerable."


VICTORY BUTT-PLONK.

But, seriously, I know these camera angles are awful. This is because the WolfQuest camera is awful and I have not yet figured out how to control it, or even if it can be controlled.


Killmurder took another nap so that I could see how nights look.


I love unexplainable ambient lighting, don't you?


As I roamed around staring at the hills and crappy forests, I got my first taste of the new weather system. The rain didn't stay for very long, but it did stick around to watch me scale a cliff that I should not have been able to scale.


Spiderwolf, Spiderwolf--does whatever a Spiderwolf does!

I wish I'd gotten more screenshots of what happened next, because it was one massive glitch. Killmurder made his way back to the desert and onto the territory of Yellowstone's third pack, the Slough. He happened upon the "pack," which, naturally, consisted of one member: a wolf named Slough Male. He approached with murder in his eyes or at least general douchebaggery, prepared to instruct the unfortunate Slough Male in the meaning of pain.


Now, when you get into a confrontation, the opposing wolf's name tends to remain above them. Slough Male's name vanished as soon as Killmurder interacted with him, and, not only that, Killmurder had a set of new options. What the?


The goal of WolfQuest's first "episode," Amethyst Mountain, is for your wolf to find a mate that it can pack up with. In a nutshell, you spend the entire mission running from one-wolf pack to one-wolf pack and getting into fights with them because this will somehow increase your chances of finding another lone wolf to start your own little family. When you do manage to find a lone wolf of the opposite sex, you must then befriend it. Then you're done. (Yep, that's all there is to Amethyst Mountain. It's such a short and irritating mission that it feels pointless, but that's a rant separate from what happened here.)

To befriend the opposite-sex lone wolf you must be rather friendlier towards it than you are towards the pack wolves, so the game gives you a set of kinder, gentler interactions to accomplish this goal. For some reason, even though Killmurder had bumped into Slough Male and not a packless female, he had those friendlier interactions. And, for some reason, Slough Male accepted them as if he was a packless female.


Okay then, thought I. "Let's play!" said Killmurder.

Slough Male stared at him uncomprehendingly, but he still had a little heart and was still saying hello. Now Killmurder's interactions had changed again, so I picked a new one.


"Let's hang out," tried Killmurder.

Slough Male stared at him uncomprehendingly, presumably so bugged out at this point that he had no idea what to do.


"You're okay," Killmurder tried again.

"Hello there!" replied Slough Male, complete with more hearts.

"Let's play!" Killmurder suggested a second time.

"Hello there!" repeated Slough Male, and Killmurder's available interactions changed again.


"I like you," opined Killmurder, whose taste obviously runs blond, and...wait, what the?!


"I like you," agreed Slough Male, who had, in the past two seconds, somehow become Dispersal Female.


They decided to start a pack, and once they did I was given the opportunity to name Slough Male/Dispersal Female.

I called her Hedwig.


Hedwig doesn't sleep.


It turns out that she doesn't really hunt, either, because I took her to get some food the next day...


And by the time that Killmurder caught up with their breakfast she had vanished off to who knows where and left him to bring down a grown elk all by his lonesome. The elk kicked him repeatedly in the face and nearly killed him, but...


Luckily, an already-dead elk had spawned nearby! He ate it to recover his strength.


Then he went back and finished the elk off even though there was no real need to do so.


Later on I did manage to rope Hedwig into chasing an elk and a grizzly bear halfway across the map. She's a very quick runner, but utterly useless since she'll catch up to the animal being pursued, overtake it, and then not do anything to attack. The AI in this game is so very intelligent.


Here we see two things: a tree set on fire by lightning, and what I cannot stand about WolfQuest's rain. A blue tint gets applied to the world, I guess to make it appear misty, but it...tears or something...and you end up with a patchwork of normal and blue landscape that just looks horrible.


So why are we bothering to chase this elk down when there is another dead elk just lying right there?


For that matter, why are we bothering to chase down anything at all ever? (The pink trails are all elk carcasses that appeared out of nowhere. Count em.)

Once I got tired of roaming the empty and uninspired Amethyst Mountain, it was time to move on and play the second half of the game.


Slough Creek's environment is, at least, somewhat more interesting.


Hedwig and I ran around and explored for a bit, and I took several screenshots but the game arbitrarily decided not to save any of the interesting ones. How lovely! This is the only one left that is remotely worth posting, because it kind of shows the fact that elk herds can and will cross rivers that are in their way. It's a nice little touch.


They're incredibly vulnerable while in the water, so, of course, it was time for one of them to die! Hedwig was actually helpful this time, chasing after our dinner and nipping at its butt while fat, slow Killmurder stood there and caught his breath.


In all likelihood there was a pre-killed elk fifty feet away, rendering Hedwig's valiant efforts completely unnecessary.


After eating, it was time to establish a territory. I took some entertaining screenshots of the whole process, including one densite's unfortunate bear problem, but they were among the pictures that got eaten. If you manage to have any fun at all in WolfQuest, the game will know and it will penalize you for it.

I did get a screenshot of this "stranger confrontation," though. In essence, a wolf from another pack spontaneously appears on your turf and you have to drive it off. Killmurder, naturally, was up to the challenge.


Fast-forward to springtime! Or summer! Or one of those!


Killmurder and Hedwig had four puppies, who, in keeping with their father's dreadfully stupid "death" theme, were named Murderkill, Redrum, You're Dead!, and Kills You.


A bear spawned on top of Redrum, so he didn't last long. The surviving pups got to see this: a tree catching on fire while the stupid rain effects blinded me.


I didn't miss Redrum terribly; the other three were pesty enough to make up for his absence.


At least they were easy to feed, with free food scattered all over the place.


When I say there were a lot of dead elk, I mean it. Remember, each pink cloud of smoke represents one body.

After I spent about thirty minutes peeing on land to claim it and feeding the pups to get their weight up, it was time to take them and move them to a new den. I didn't have much opportunity to screenshot the whole process, as there were too many things happening at once, so here's a textual blow-by-blow:

• Spend five minutes trying to move into a position that will allow you to pick up a pup, as the controls are incredibly stupid and don't want you to carry your own offspring around without fighting the spacebar first.
• Set pup down again to go chase off a golden eagle that has appeared.
• Spend an additional five minutes trying to catch another pup. Start off toward the new den, which is about sixty billion miles away.
• Turn around to see if the other two puppies are keeping up with you. (Hint: they aren't.) Where's Hedwig?
• Set down the pup you are carrying and run back to collect the others. Hedwig appears just as you reach them. Oh, hello, Hedwig. What are you holding?
• Hedwig is holding the pup that you just left right where you wanted it. She sets it down and then vanishes again. Fantastic.
• Grab a pup yet again. This time, don't run. Walk slowly so that the puppies can keep pace with you. Find out that they still can't. Mutter obscenities at them.
• Get to the edge of a river crossing. Puppies can't swim and won't try, so you'll have to carry them to the other side one by one. Bring one across and place it safely on dry ground.
• Stare at the message that has just appeared: Kills You is drowning! Get out of the water! Huh?
• Turn around and see that Hedwig had decided to help you ford the river, but has grown bored halfway through and dumped Kills You in the shallows where he is apparently still in over his head. Rush over to get him. Carry him out of the river and place him safely on dry ground.
• Watch in disbelief as Hedwig dumps another puppy in the river, this time right in the middle. Run over to save that one too. Prepare to murder the developers of this game as Hedwig then seizes Kills You and drops him back in the water.
• You can't rescue them both. Mutter more obscenities as another message appears: Your puppy, Kills You, has died.
• Continue on with your journey, stopping every so often to chase off that damn eagle. You are now hungry and the pups are hungry, but there is nothing to hunt and elk carcasses have mysteriously ceased to appear.
• Along the way, Murderkill dies of unknown causes. Either he has starved, or Hedwig has taken him back to the river. You suspect the latter.
• Since there is no longer any need to take things slowly and You're Dead! is about to starve, himself, you opt to sprint the rest of the way. Finally, you reach the new den with your one living pup in hand...err, mouth.
• Nothing happens. You poke around the area, searching for piles of rocks or odd-looking trees, but a whole lot of nothing continues to happen. Why is this game so glitchy? Regret playing it. Wish you could have the last hour of your life back, and mourn the time that you could have spent doing anything else.
• Notice that, instead of having one pup left, the game is now saying you've got two again. What? Dump You're Dead! where you stand and run back to look for your resurrected offspring. It could be anywhere, and in the meantime You're Dead! is still on the verge of starvation. That's just great.
• Find Murderkill kicking his heels in the grass some distance from your summer territory. Watch in amazement as Hedwig and You're Dead! appear out of nowhere, the mission completes itself where it shouldn't, and the game ends.
• Decide to write a blog post detailing the entire sordid experience, so that other unsuspecting people might be warned away from playing WolfQuest.

If you haven't played this game already, please don't. I would rather undergo a Blood Eagle administered by clumsy Vikings than ever touch WolfQuest again.

If you have played WolfQuest, you have my condolences. Might I offer some quality brain bleach to help get you through this painful and difficult time?