Survival horror games have become big business over the years. Whilst they may have originally been games that were talked about in hushed whispers so that parents didn't take the 'nasty zombie games' away from you, thanks to some big hits like Resident Evil and Silent Hill more and more publishers have wanted to get a piece of the survival horror pie.
Whilst not every survival horror game ends up being an amazing hit many still have something to them that makes them enjoyable; they become like a b-movie horror film where you know its not great, but you have a lot of fun with it anyway. But there are a few games that fail to even be that, and just end up being clunky, un-enjoyable messes. Games like 2012's Amy.
Amy puts players in control of Lana, a young woman who has to protect Amy, a little girl with strange powers. The game begins with the two of them travelling together on a train, which is soon caught in an explosion that causes it to crash. When the two of them recover they find themselves in a city overrun with an infection that turns people into zombies. Whilst Lana is susceptible to this infection, and can become a zombie, Amy's evolving powers enable her to cure Lana and restore her to health. But, because of this, the two of them are also being hunted by the shadowy Phoenix Foundation, who want to harness Amy's powers for themselves.
One of the biggest drawbacks to Amy is that essentially the entire game is one big escort quest. Now, I'm sure that there will be some who will turn around and tell me that there have been some good games that involve this mechanic, and are sometimes even built around it; but games like Ico and A Plague Tale: Innocence are few and far between. Most gamers will hear the phrase escort mission and will have flashbacks to the most boring and frustrating parts of some of their favourite games. And that's basically the entirety of Amy.
To begin with the game does present something of a fun challenge, trying to figure out the best way to balance keeping Amy safe from the things that only Lana can fight against, whilst also keeping Lana from turning into one of the infected herself. However, it soon becomes clear that it's almost impossible to find this balance between the two characters, as the game is just too poorly constructed to enable any real success, or enjoyment.
Unfortunately it's not just in the escort mechanic, the main part of the game, where Amy falls apart, as the basic controls are....clunky would be generous I guess. The game will tell you that you can do certain things, but whether these mechanics work will be anyone's guess. The game only allows you to dodge about ten percent of the time, meaning that you'll frequently find yourself getting hit by enemies, and even if you're standing right on top of items you want to pick up your character will stand there doing nothing as you tell them to grab it over and over again.
The division between the two characters and what each of them needs to do also feels very off in places, as you'll be sending the defenceless Amy into dangerous places because the game tells you Lana can't fit when the crawlspaces are more than large enough for her to get through. I know why they want players to have to do things from a storytelling point of view, but if the level design doesn't fit with this it just ends up feeling silly and broken in a lot of places. And when you add in how easy it is to end up being killed, and how sporadic the checkpoints are, you'll often find yourself playing through the same frustrating parts of the game again and again as you try desperately to have the game actually do what you're telling it to do. A lot of these issues ended up being corrected via a patch a few months later that would add more checkpoints, tweak the controls, and correct errors in the subtitles; though by then many people who bought the game upon release would have already been bored of it.
Graphically the game is also something of a letdown. I know that this is a smaller budget game, made by an independent studio, but often Amy looks like a game that should have been released on the generation of consoles that came before it. It's messy, dirty, and drab; and whilst you could hand wave that away as being part of the survival horror aesthetic, it often comes across as cheap-looking. When you consider some of the more visually interesting independent games coming out at the time it's a shame that the developers didn't take a more unique approach to the graphics, taking the chance to release a game that would look visually distinct even if it didn't play too well.
Upon it's release onto digital marketplaces Amy was met with unfavourable reviews from the vast majority of outlets. Whilst it was given some degree of leeway for being a download game there were still enough issues with the game that people felt unable to give it high scores. The shoddy controls, poor game design, and a story that failed to really do anything new or impress led it to becoming a critical failure, with one reviewer calling it 'one of the worst games ever made'.
As it stands, Amy is probably going to remain as one of those games that people will have largely forgotten, a game they picked up cheap to see what it was like and put down fairly soon into playing it because of how frustrating and dull it is. I myself gave up on Amy not long into playing it when it first came out a decade ago, and I can't ever really see myself ever going back to it.
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