AH!: Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Though Kotaku editor John Walker would “definitely” recommend 2010 survival horror Amnesia, he can’t forget how two scenes made him feel.

“The first is this scene early on where you walk down some bland corridor, and it ends in a collapse where the ceiling’s fallen in,” he DMed me. “So you just think, ‘Ah well, dead end,’ and turn around to go back.

But as you’re turning around, for a fraction of a second, some hideous visage appears in the corridor ahead of you. It’s gone before you can really register if you saw it or not, and it scared the shit out of me.” John’s messages confirm that you can tell a scary story over a platform as austere as Slack

Then, there’s the invisible monster that cements Amnesia as owning what John calls the “scariest bit of game, other than Thief 3, I’ve ever played.”

“You’re in this flooded hallway, and there are tables and chairs strewn across the floor, but you can hear these footsteps,” he said. “If you touch the water at all, they suddenly speed up and get louder, as something comes crashing toward you. But there’s nothing there!”

And then you see the splashes in the water where its feet must be! And you scramble, scramble, to get up on a table and out of the water. It’s one of those moments that makes me lean in until my face is touching the monitor in my efforts to more quickly move forward and climb up, my heart racing, sheer panic making my fingers struggle to operate the mouse and keyboard.”