Lethe

i haven't played the original amnesia game. i'm new to parser if and a little intimidated by it, and based on the reviews saying how unforgiving it is, i don't think i'm ready for it. so i can't really compare the two, but i can say what i thought of this game by itself, so here goes.

in lethe, you wake up in a hotel room in new york with no idea who you are, and almost immediately things start to get weird. first your clothes are missing, then there's this woman who shows up saying she's your fiance, and another woman who says she's your wife, and then you find out you're maybe a wanted criminal... it's quite a day, that's for sure. it only gets crazier from there, but i don't want to spoil anything.

the game's writing was generally very good. (though i didn't always love it's writing of female characters, but it is from the 80s so that's maybe to be expected.) there are some very vivid descriptions especially in the dream sequences. the plot is fast paced and full of surprises, really keeping the player guessing. i really wanted to know the backstory and how things were gonna turn out, so it's a shame I wasn't able to complete a playthrough without the game breaking. but ill go into that more later.

if you mess up in this game you usually die, or go to jail and then eventually die. in the original it seems like that's just the end of that and you just have to reload. but i really liked what this version did, which is have you get stuck in limbo (or the greek underworld equivalent i guess). charon, acting as some kind of afterlife bouncer, won't let you in because your names not on his guest list (as far as either of you knows, because you don't know what your name is) and so he just punts you back in time to try again. the game remembers whatever you learned from doing the thing that killed you (so your options are slightly different), and if you go to jail you even get important hints about your backstory and why you have amnesia, so the death stuff doesn't feel like an annoyance or a total waste of time.

unfortunately there were other aspects of the adaptation that didn't work so well. there are some long linear sequences, especially early on, where you're just clicking one link to advance over and over again (like the department store dream sequence, which otherwise was really creepy and cool), and sometimes you get two options of links to click but they're not really very different. the game does open up eventually, but the clicking through linear sections gets a little boring, especially if you have to restart multiple times due to bugs. the game also attempts to preserve an inventory and a money system, but as far as i can tell there's no way to see what you're carrying or how much money you have.

so anyway. the bugs. on my first playthrough, after one of the times i died and got kicked back in time, the game just kind of cut off mid paragraph, like it seemed like it should be possible to scroll down more but it wasn't. i tried loading my save but it didn't work. reloading the page didn't help. the only thing i could do was restart. this was very annoying, but i was invested in the game so i tried again. the second time, i had a no-brain moment and tried to leave the hotel before watching the news in the lobby, at which point the desk clerk made me open my safe deposit box. then i went and watched the tv and then... the clerk made me open my safe deposit box again? then the game dead-ended again and sure enough, i couldn't load my save. the other review on this page says this only happened to the reviewer when they were playing experimentally and most players would probably never run into the bug, but that was super not true for me. i guess you could say it was "experimental" of me to do stuff in the wrong order at the hotel but actually i'm just dumb 😭

anyway, in general the game seems to get weird if you do stuff in the wrong order, even though there's mostly not really any indication of the right order to do stuff in. i ran into bette before i made enough money to rent a computer, so it said I left the disk at her apartment, but then i still had it when i went back to the computer place. i'm glad i did because probably i couldn't have advanced in the game otherwise, but it was still weird.

basically i did really want to play this game but i don't think the game really wanted me to play it. ill probably try again eventually but for now i'm too frustrated. i hope the bugs get fixed.

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