Z Reviews: Double Feature Part 2: Amnesia: To Err · 2:47am Dec 20th, 2014
This time's review will be of Amnesia: To Err, authored by JLB, reviewed by me, TheifofZ. If you like this review, check my blog for other reviews, or follow this link to go to the post containing the mission statement and a list of all the stories I've reviewed so far.
As always, here's how I'll be doing this; First I'll cover the story idea, and writing style and quality of the story. Next, I'll look at the actual story itself, including character motivation, action (if the story has any), and the general plot. Finally, I'll throw down my egotistical and opinionated rating, declaring exactly how good, or bad, I thought this was. And yes, I will do my best to avoid spoilers for the plot IF POSSIBLE. If the spoiled events are integral to the story, I'll throw down spoiler warnings instead, and ask that you proceed with caution. Always remember, folks. This is all opinion. Disagree with me? Think I'm dead wrong, or spot on? Argue about it in the comments if you want. It's cool. Noone has a truly humble opinion, after all, but make sure you read the review first.
Caution: Spoilers: This review contains many, and massive, spoilers. If you haven't read this story yet, and actually intend to, then make your choice now. Either leave now and come back after reading, skip any section marked with either a Spoilers heading or the black spoiler bars, or read the entire review and spoil everything major about it. Remember, guys. I don't have a red memory wiping device, so no takebacks allowed. All choices are final. From here on out I'll assume any who continue have either read the story, have their blindfolds at hand, or are the kind of person who reads the end of the book first. If you are none of these... Make peace with your gods, and may you forgive yourself in the end. :End Caution
Oh, man... The blog title has waaay too many colons. So many...
With that out of the way... Here we go!
Amnesia: The Dark Descent was, in my not-so-humble opinion, a brilliant game that combined eerie isolation and helplessness with a creeping darkness and some cunning puzzles, (The second game was much, much weaker.) and the story Amnesia: To Err tries to emulate these sensations, usually successfully. The basic story is that a pony wakes up in a hospital with no memory of who he is or how he got there, and finds that he's all alone in a strange pseudo-world. Queue mind rending monsters, simple puzzles, and desperate flights through terrible darkness along with hints of things gone wrong. The writing style is... Okay, look. The writing is often times horribly mangled, difficult to understand, and more sensation than sense. But it's clearly intended to be that way, as the story delves further and further into sick and foul depths of insanity. Usually, the writing feels stiff and somewhat clunky, but moves along quickly, and the grammar is consistently well done. Now, writing insanity can mean that it seems excusable to abuse the basics of the English language, but having a clear concept can actually make insanity more gripping and compelling to read; as it was, I found that, several times, I just stopped reading at the end of a chapter, and had to pick it up again later.
The story follows the diseased (physically and mentally) Frame Fixer as he attempts to fix a twisted reality inhabited by six vaguely equine shaped holes in "reality" that are lovingly dubbed Errors that seem intent on destroying him and a large host of Victims, ponies twisted and tortured with horrible metal devices, and robbed of the ability to think or speak. As Fixer delves deeper into the "wrongness" of the world, first in desperate attempts to escape a fate of unknown horrors, and then later to try to solve everything, his mind begins to break and something else begins to surface. It's Rationale, Fixer's split personality; a darker, crueler version of Fixer. Though it's actually impossible to tell which is the original and which the split, as Fixer's psyche was already fractured before the start of the fic. Rationale spends what time he does have in control leaving ominous hints, and trying to solidify his control over Fixer. The story tends to blur together scenes and actions, making it confusing and occasionally frustrating to disentangle description and insanity from what is actually happening, though trying to maintain any sort of sane settings can be tossed completely out the window past chapter 6. As the story continues, actions become more and more important, which makes the awkward or impossible to describe settings a negative aspect of the story, as the author occasionally seems to struggle to describe what's happening simply due to problems with framing the motions. The final couple chapters are the worst offenders of this, as the reality the story takes place in is almost literally crumbling around Fixer.
The characters are actually handled brilliantly through all of this, as the story is more an exploration of Fixer's mind than of any reality, and what interaction occurs beyond panicked flight is darkly haunting, or ominous and yet heart wrenching. The less disturbing flashbacks also handle the Mane 6 really well, keeping them fairly true to the original characters.
Spoiler: My biggest beef ends up being the explanation for everything; that before the story had started Fixer had fallen under the sway of a reality altering, semi-sentient Orb which fused with his already shattered mind and, after compelling him to murder all six of the Elements of Harmony, rewrote reality according to his darker, omnicidal impulses. The Errors in reality are twisted fragments of the Mane 6 salvaged by Fixer's conscience which preserve the last feelings of each of the girls from before he killed them. It felt like a little bit of a cop out, though it's handled really well anyway.
Overall... I give this story 7 out of 10 moustaches, and 3.5 out of 5 scared Fluttershys.
Any opinions or major points you'd like to make go in the comments below. Advice, Major Corrections, story suggestions, and fan mail can be PM'd to me. ... if I ever get fans. HAH!
Final Note: Man, even if it wasn't perfect, the story did have an ominous and distressing feeling layered throughout. Personally, I'd have liked it more if less focus was put on Fixer's mind, and more focus were put on the incredibly creepy surroundings, the Victims, and the Errors. His pre-existing insanity made things feel awkwardly paced, and the split personality "reveal" wasn't even that surprising, really, and actually detracted from my horror, as it felt like a safe escape and an easy excuse for most of what went wrong.
I have to say, I'm glad to finally have received some sort of detailed feedback on this one. It's quite curious to see what it ends up looking like when you don't know the intention from start to finish... I'll comment where necessary.
That's one of the main things that, I suppose, are going to be the cornerstone of my response - it was a huge gamble and a big experiment. I'm glad to know that it worked in the end, as the story ends up, at least for you, going quite literally insane and making the reader feel the same way - that had been the intention of that very experiment all along. To me, the main thrill of Amnesia was the insanity, the confusion, the surreal side of it all, and I knew I had to replicate it. Since this is, after all, a story, I had to employ really fringe techniques in order to make the reader slowly go cuckooballs - videogames have it much easier than that.
That concept you mentioned was there the whole time - and the core of that concept was reader nausea. In a good way, ideally. Perhaps, the fact that you had to stop a few times was a measure of success. Unless you only continued because you had the review planned...
So, yes, just for the record, this was, indeed, the intent. I'm normally better with English than that.
This is, perhaps, my favorite part of the review. Don't get me wrong on this one. Because the thing is... People's perceptions, the differences in them, are what fuel my writing drive. Yours is probably the furthest from those I asked before. The perspective you've taken is quite different to what was on my mind as I wrote.
The point of the matter is, there is, in fact, little to no outright insanity, as in stuff-that-doesn't-actually-happen. It all actually happens. Even the most surreal scenes happened as written, with very few exceptions. The World Gone Wrong works off Fixer's mind. Yes, he is insane, but the creations of his mind are brought into reality nonetheless - there is nothing to discern. At least... that is what I assumed. Your own interpretation has more than a base to exist. And that alone, in a way, makes it all worth it. Just to explain my own vision of things.
I'll put this and the final thoughts both under this quote. Although you refer to the resolution as a cop-out, you'd probably be surprised to know that it's the opposite. This resolution, this final concept, was what started the story - everything else was made solely to lead into it. The existence of Rationale, the effects of the Orb, they were the catalyst for both the events of the story and for the creation of the story itself. That means that either it's one more perspective thing that is different between readers, as you found the journey more compelling than the destination... or that I've failed in building the ending up. That's something I haven't considered.
For the record, I should add a few things regarding the plot, the Orb in particular. What you may or may not have noticed is that there's a big undertone of humanity throughout the story. The Orb comes from Earth, and has what can roughly be described as human essence within. Frame Fixer - or, rather, Rationale, the dominant personality - is by far the closest to a human, and, as such, assumes the Orb. What follows then is a figurative battle of two extremes, Frame Fixer, who refuses the seeming inherent violence and embodies the supposed weakness of what he's actually supposed to be, and Rationale, who is, despite everything he says, imperfect in his replication of what ends up being human nature. The whole story can be interpreted as a thought on whether violence is inherent, and what extremes are the most acceptable when given power. To make it better, here's where I could use a double spoiler tag: Frame Fixer is in the wrong. The effective ponykindness within him is what ended up ruining near everything, and caused all the events to happen, and it was HIM that murdered the Six - he could have fought the Orb, but... he barely even tried. So, yes, even though Rationale is, structure-wise, the villain of the story, he isn't one... not exactly. But, again, this is my own interpretation, and I prefer to think that my stories are interpretative - your own is as valuable as mine.
To sum up what you should get about this story in short from the huge spoiler passage above, another thing that ultimately undermines the perception of the fic is that it's actually much less of a The Dark Descent fic than it is an A Machine For Pigs one. I've happened to enjoy the latter installment almost more than I did the original, and it was its narrative that I was inspired by, even though TDD did get sizeable pieces of its own into the story.
I'll have to mention again that I'm more than grateful for the review, and your opinion, especially on the story itself, is of as much value as mine in the end. And yeah, I don't think I'm going to purposedly make readers want to throw up for 11 chapters straight again.
2665365 I've said it before, I'll say it again; I -love- getting author responses. Healthy discussion is as much my goal as actually discussing what my personal opinion on the stories is.
I didn't stop reading due to fear, or horror; my own mind certainly is neither whole, nor wholesome, and much of my literature and game choices, have given me a very broad base of both expectation and experience; I mentioned in one of my previous reviews that I adore H.P. Lovecraft's stories, as well as the C'thulhu mythos. I haven't had to stop reading out of sheer horror since I was, what, 8? 9? and reading the first Animorphs book. (At the time, the mere concept of the Yeerks gave me the screaming meemies and the heebly jeeblies. Years later, and some things I've seen make "mind control alien leeches" seem positively human.)
More, I stopped out of a sense of confusion and possibly mild frustration as I tried to resolve the information that had been presented throughout the story. Certainly, the story wasn't bad enough that the only thing keeping me reading it was the promised review. I'm sure I'll find one of those eventually, but not yet. (Now that? That's a terrifying thought.)
Well, we aren't aware of that until muuuch later on in the story. Until then, it's more confusing than anything. Which is why it's still a valid point. Still, stories like this that are more mind than body, so to speak, are definitely more about the reader's interpretations than the authors, at the end.
I must admit to have never played all the way through MFP, (mooched off a friend for a short while. Shameless, I know.), but the fear of the "pigs" wasn't as crushing as the fear of the abominations in TDD; where in TDD, the monsters were these creepy corpse-things that you -never- clearly saw beyond a vague shape and lots of blood, the MFP monsters were just kind of... fat, ugly, mutilated pig-people; and an identified, known threat, even an overwhelming one, is a much less fear-inspiring threat than one which defies definition. I was honestly more threatened by the Errors in your story, simply because they defied logic and reality to the point where the only real definition that could be given was "Error" (and also, fairly obviously, some form of the Mane 6, but even that was so distorted as to be more disturbing than anything), far more than the Victims, which were as much pitied as feared.
2665405
Well, here's where you misunderstood me. I'm a bit messed in the head. That was what I wanted to replicate. The confusion, the creeping headache, the fever dream lack of reality, the general what-the-fuck-is-going-on. I wanted it to feel like Amnesia - the games were invasive, they made you (or, well, me) uncomfortable. It wasn't fear that I wanted to replicate, since I knew full well I couldn't - I'm not very good with fear, I'm mostly frightened by jumpscares and grotesque imagery, and neither of those are very well used on paper. So... in a way, I may have succeeded. Less so than I should have, though. This is probably one of the things I'd have put a lot more thought into if I ever rewrote it.
The intent was for it to be tolerable until the reader realizes that and goes aaaaaah and everything is forgiven. Yeah, those were my days of naivete, back when I was writing it. Not the best strategy, as I've found out with time. I put too much trust in the reader to put trust in myself - that can be an issue, especially if it takes many chapters of aforementioned confusion and delirium to get to the part that makes it work okay.
That is where our viewpoints take a fork - to me, the monsters barely mattered in either game (although I will one hundred percent admit that the Grunts and Brutes from TDD are the most fucked up enemies I've ever seen in a horror game to this day). My focus was on the story, the way all the different thoughts and environments made you feel, and the most important part about the monsters was their thematic relevance. That was where AMFP was one step above TDD - TDD just had REALLY GROSS MONSTERS that kinda sorta had to do with the plot, whereas AMFP had them used for a message, even if they were a lot less horrifying (and barely dealt damage).
As such, I took the AMFP approach in many things. Practically every scene plays into a concept, a theme, an underlying tone of each chapter and the story itself. The same goes for the enemies - and I'm glad to know that it worked for you. The problem with that was that so much thought was given to the philosophical and conceptual qualities of events and imagery that horror and action distinction had to take a step back, as I'm only human (I think).
Therefore, A:TE is, after all, much more of a story of feeling, thought, and concept than it is of the action that transpires. Because to me, that is what Amnesia had always been about. It's not commonly found in written fiction, and I tried what I could to replicate it. As such, I completely accept that people with different expectations may end up confused - frankly, I'm really glad you made it through it as a whole.
2665418 Ah, for me, the looming, lurking wrongness of the monsters in TDD definitely added a very real, very visceral edge to the uncertainty and fear that the entire atmosphere built up. Sure, they didn't have much to do with the story, but they were creepy and scary and you were never sure when you were going to turn around and OHFUCKWHATISTHATOHGODOHGODOHGOD for your life. In AMFP, certainly they were thematic, and built into the looming sense of the story, but they also were kind of clunky and shifted away from the lurking dread and into a known threat. Both games had very strong senses of how to manipulate tension, build it up, and turn it into fear, but the monsters that you do face in both games are just as important as the monsters that you can't face, if you understand me.
The monsters inside, the darkness of the heart and of the mind, those are both important aspects too, but to really turn it into a horror game, there do need to be threats, and they do need to be terrifying.
Is sort of my feeling on it. Still, you did a great job keeping the threats both thematic and story driven, while making them quite scary, too.
Ah, well, that you definitely managed to pull off.
But grotesque imagery is easy, even written down. Spend some time reading some of Lovecraft's works. "The Colour from Outer Space" or "The Rats in The Walls" both have some very unpleasant images towards the end, for example.
2665462
Well, I didn't word that too well. I know it is, I dabble in that frequently - the point of the matter is, I... well, I'm not the person to write horror, not really. You should write something you're well familiar with and that you know, and I just... I can't be freaked out by text if it's just describing really gross things. Once again, Lovecraft, I always valued the utter alien nature of those creatures more than their vivid descriptions, which, to be frank, bored me more than anything else. Perhaps, A:TE can be a study of the mind of my own, as I ended up writing Amnesia and horror itself the way I saw them. So while I said what I did, what I really meant was that it merely didn't seem effective, and if I write something that doesn't seem effective to me... I normally scrap it. As such, who knows - maybe the few versions that had much more scenery and monster description, the ones that I felt dragged on too much, would have been a lot scarier for some people.
I'm trying to make myself see the value in those descriptions and find a better balance of finding what's best left untold, but that's an ongoing project. Maybe I really should read a bit more Lovecraft.
That is doubtless - I myself spent a decent amount of time doing everything I could possibly do in order not to have to even look at those things. But in the end, my mind valued the story and thematics over the definite paranoia and fright of those encounters - and, to me, it's almost impossible to replicate that in a story. I've never felt paranoid over a character's life, not much - I had to forcefully make myself do that in order to enjoy a story a few times, and that's just not optimal.
There definitely are methods to make it easier - to make the protagonist more relatable, to put a more perceivable threat around them, to have more at stake. I defy all of these - Frame Fixer is quite obviously less than a good person, even after his loss of memory; for the most part, he is just trying to not die in a world that has ceased to make much sense - and even when he gains a goal, it's still fleeting; and, once again, the value of his efforts still seems insignificant in this world gone wrong. And I do that on purpose - this is the focus of the story. This different perspective, one where it's not an innocent being hounded by untold horrors, but something more complex. This was what AMFP ended up being to me, serving as inspiration for Frame Fixer (who is pretty much his own villain and can barely even be considered a hero - Daniel is, for instance, a saint if compared to him), and his journey through what is effectively his own evil. Instead of following a relatable character through a series of fucked up scenery to a likely fucked up conclusion, A:TE is designed to trick you into this idea, only to end up being an exploration of the deeds of the one who created this very scenery, as you steadily lose relation with him - and slowly begin to realize just how messed up the situation really was. Something of a traincrash scenario.
Once again, that was borrowed from the Amnesia games, and, to me, serves as more of a connection point than even the Orb itself. After all, in each installment, you go on to find out that you are a (for Daniel) or the (for Mandus, Justine, and now Frame Fixer) villain.
2665500 Have some hammy madness, btw.
So gloriously dark. I figured it was fitting.
2665690 Hm. Interestingly, it's more in touch with a few of my other fics. Actually, it's pretty inspirational, I'll store it somewhere, because I'm going to need some vocabulary similar to this.
And, although this seems to have gone on for long enough already, I did have a few questions myself. First off, I wanted to know how you found A:TE to review it in the first place - it's not exactly popular or posted in many places at all. Second, I'd have liked to know how exactly you liked the very ending, past the revelations, as it was one more thing I was a little unsure about. And third, I have some feedback as to the reviews themselves (the structure and all that), I wanted to know if you'd like to hear it too.