![]() ![]() In the game's opening moments, the player learns three facts: the character's name is Daniel, he is from London, and his sole task is to kill his master. The Dark Descent is, quiet literally, the story of a man dealing with his own descent into darkness and madness as he fights with his own personal demons, as well as the monsters that manifest within the world around him. Instead of focusing on jump scares, the game was much more focused on unsettling the player, and more specifically, making them feel powerless and weak to the world around them. Because of this, it was a return to form for classic horror. This was mostly unheard of in the contemporary horror genre, with even survival horror classics like Silent Hill containing some form of combat, albeit bad and clunky. Most notably, the game lacked any form of combat. The Dark Descent was unlike most other horror games around its time, as it emphasized horror, puzzle-solving, and navigation above other forms of gameplay. But what exactly made the title so special? That is, until Frictional Games came out of nowhere on Septemwith Amnesia: The Dark Descent. ![]() It was at this point that it seemed that the classic "psychological horror" genre was all but gone, and replaced by action-horror. By the time that Resident Evil 5 released in 2009, the series seemed to have jumped entirely into the action-adventure genre, with only light sprinkles of survival-horror. Other horror staples like the Silent Hill series fell into this same trap with Silent Hill: Homecoming. While it certainly was a fantastic title, games that followed it emphasized action above horror. Resident Evil 4, which heavily relied on action-centered gameplay over horror, released on the GameCube (and later PlayStation 2) to massive success. But then in 2004, a game that would change the entire genre forever launched on the Nintendo GameCube. The 6th generation of consoles were particularly great homes to countless fantastic horror titles, where the genre seemed to really hit its stride with games like Fatal Frame, Siren, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and more. Horror's popularity rose throughout the 90s thanks to titles like 1996's Resident Evil and 1999's Silent Hill, and continued to grow through the early 2000s. First popularized in the early nineties with 1992's Alone in the Dark, survival horror and psychological horror has become a staple within the gaming world and has gotten only more and more popular over time. The horror genre has always been incredibly popular within the world of video games. ![]()
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