Amy review [Xbox 360/PS3]

Posted January 19, 2012 by Lewis Denby.

Review: AMY appeared to be an intriguing and ambitious survival horror game in the run-up to its release, which is why the final product is so bizarre. Read on to find out about one of gaming’s most astonishing failures…

The biggest tragedy about Amy isn’t that it’s one of the worst games I’ve played in years – although it certainly is – but that its ideas should have formed one of the more interesting and ambitious entries into the survival horror race. In practice, the game doesn’t even seem to try.

There are a lot of bad games. Games that on a technical level are worse than Amy, even. Shoddy first-person shooters full of invisible walls and painted-on doors, point-and-click adventures that tell tired stories in between obtuse puzzles, and racing games in which your car veers perilously around the track. You play them, you raise an eyebrow, you forget about them. No harm done.

And there’s solace to take from games that bring smart ideas to the table but fail to capitalise on them. Games like Pathologic or Boiling Point might be broken and unfocused, but you can still catch a glimpse of what they almost were. They’re games with their sights set higher than the developer’s capabilities: you get the impression that they tried their best, but couldn’t quite pull it off.

Amy is a bad game that manages to miss both these categories, systematically murdering every brilliant idea it has by stabbing it with a lazy one, then trying to bury the evidence under a pile of knives, blood and fingerprints. It’s a strong and inviting concept, an unlikely buddy-game, but it feels as though VectorCell got halfway through designing the thing before simply deciding, “fuck it.”

Train wreck

It begins half-way promisingly. Amy sits on a train, a troubled look in her juvenile eyes. With her is a young woman, Lana. The back-story crystalises slowly and with a decent sense of dramatic pacing. By the time the opening scene’s played out, you’ll have surmised that Lana has rescued Amy from an undisclosed research centre. Amy is mute and scared, but she seems to possess powers that others do not.

Things go downhill from there. An explosion and a train crash leave you separated from your young friend and, as Lana, it falls upon you to track her down. You do so by making long treks back and forth across a bland train station, occasionally stopping to scan an area or clobber to death a monster that’s appeared in front of you for some reason.

By the end of Chapter 1, you might think Amy a once-promising game whose designers were having an off year when they came to putting everything together. Chapter 1 is the best bit.

It’s difficult to know where to begin when assessing what goes wrong after this point. Perhaps with the fact that subsequent chapters stretch out to an hour or above, with only a couple of checkpoints in between, and no manual saving. Every time you die you’re forced to repeat frustratingly lengthy sections of dismal zombie-bashing and puzzle-solving – and, thanks to the instant-death traps the game enjoys springing upon you, this will happen frequently.

Combat is an irritatingly lurching affair in which you press one button to attack and another to jump backwards out of the way. But the clunky animations mean it’s difficult to time anything accurately, and the camera swings around each time you’re hit, leaving you vulnerable to follow-up blows.

Meanwhile, puzzles generally revolve around working out how to get from A to B without falling foul of a perilous trap in the middle, or how you can put Amy’s small size and mystical powers to use in an attempt to aid your progress. You’ll send the poor kid crawling through air ducts and other conveniently placed holes in the wall on many occasions throughout the game, even when those gaps are obviously big enough for Lana to slip through herself.

Infection control

The occasions on which the pair is forced to split up bring about one of the game’s few interesting systems, in which Lana gradually succumbs to a strange, mutating and unexplained infection all the while she’s not holding Amy’s hand. It seems this little girl has the ability to keep Lana alive by merely touching her, which leads to some sufficiently tense moments of battling with the awkward controls so you can get back to your young friend as quickly as possible.

Elsewhere, there are timed puzzles that result in a grizzly demise for the both of you, assuming you don’t figure out the developers’ exceptionally strange sense of logic in the four seconds you’re given to react. And each drearily predictable time you find yourself slashed to bits, you’ve to repeat it all again, knowing full well that you still don’t have a clue how you’re supposed to get past the next bit, and as such are doomed to failure again and again until you finally cave and consult a walkthrough.

So the levels are long, and their checkpoints are sparse. Not only that, if you decide to quit mid-chapter, the game ignores all your checkpoint-saved progress and dumps you back at the chapter start the next time you fire up your console. But that’s nothing compared to Amy’s utterly bizarre decision as to how to manage your inventory at the end of each segment.

For no discernible reason whatsoever, it wipes it. All your health syringes, all your weapons, everything – it all disappears. In the game’s fiction, just a few seconds may have passed since you were strolling around with a backpack full of stuff, but as soon as that between-level cutscene is over you’re left with nothing. It’s utterly surreal, and the game doesn’t even have the courtesy to explain itself.

Incredibly, it gets more baffling. Not only does the game wipe your inventory between levels, it also does so when you die. In a videogame, it’s usually fair to assume that dying means you were struggling with that part a little bit, and some games have even gone as far as making subsequent attempts easier, by adding hints or lowering the AI difficulty. Amy sticks two fingers up at such a very sensible idea, and instead decides that if you’re having a hard time with the game, you should be punished. So it gets rid of your healing items, it gets rid of your weapons, and forces you to spend whatever time could be used trying to progress by instead going round and meticulously collecting everything again, even if that means venturing into areas you know to be dangerous.

And the strangest thing is that the developers seem to be proud of this. They’ve spent a not inconsiderable amount of time boasting about how challenging Amy is, and how they wanted to create a game in which progress was difficult. What they clearly didn’t do was work out a way to make that difficulty fair, or even have it make sense. Why would you wipe my inventory? Until now, I thought that sort of nonsense was exclusive to game-destroying bugs.

Thoughtless

While I would never claim to speak for a developer’s design rationale, the result is that the game feels lazy. It conjures up imaginary conversations that could have taken place as the development schedule ticked away. “Hmm, that bit’s too easy, isn’t it? Oh well, we’ll take away all the health packs they’ve saved up.” “Yes, and this chapter’s a bit short, but that’s okay too, because we can just temporarily remove Lana’s ability to run.”

It’s as though every problem faced was met by a stubborn refusal to think about the issue, and was instead crudely masked by a hackneyed design shortcut that the writers didn’t even bother to explain within the game’s fiction.

There are so many questions. Why do I have to walk the long way around a large area, filled with traps and enemies, when the path leads to the bit just over that knee-high wall? How come Amy can sprint past motion detectors, but when Lana tries sneaking slowly by them she gets electrocuted? How come the game gives Amy the ability to mute the sound in an area, when nothing happens if you make a noise anyway? Why is that monster, which was ferociously chasing us just a second ago, now standing in the corner of the room, staring at the wall, frozen to the spot no matter what?

So many of Amy’s game mechanics are so poorly explained by the fiction that you’re left wondering what’s a bug and what’s an ill-advised but intentional design choice. There are so many of both, it’s often anybody’s guess.

Every now and then, you see a fragment of what was once a great idea. Amy’s face is particularly expressive, for example. It seems to have been locked into a permanent state of terror, but it’s convincing. You start to wonder what happened to the game that was supposed to be about managing the emotions of a child during a terrifying ordeal. The closest it ever gets is when Amy runs off in a panic, and you’re left screaming at your television, “Why can’t I just pick the bloody kid up and carry her?!”

All downhill

The sense of mystery in the opening cutscene dissipates into a series of clichéd scenes masquerading as a story, so jumbled that it’s difficult to work out what’s going on half the time. Voice actors that initially sounded invested in the drama begin to sound weary, bored, as if they’re just reading from the script as quickly as they can so they can go grab a beer, to hell with any tonal inconsistencies that might appear on the way. Within a couple of hours, even the subtitle writers have decided it’s not worth the bother, so you get one lot of dialogue spoken while the accompanying text displays something completely different.

There’s more. The hysterically inappropriate music, the muddy visuals that make navigation a nightmare. The unfeasible yelps Lana emits every bloody time there’s the slightest noise. The dialogue repetition that made me want to slam my head against a wall. The list of problems seems so endless that, in a twisted sort of way, it’s quite an impressive achievement.

ICO with zombies. That’s the game I remember first hearing about. A survival horror title about nurturing, working together, and the emotional connection that can form between an adult and a child. It could so easily have worked, and yet the remnants of the idea are strewn among hours of tedious combat, illogical puzzles and fearsomely bad stealth sections.

At least most bad games are forgettably bad. At least most flawed gems still flaunt their ambition. Amy is neither: it takes a promising concept, then hacks away any semblance of a solid game that may once have surrounded it. That’s why it’s so tragic. The ideas that no doubt birthed this project are barely anywhere to be found.

When you die in Amy, the game offers you the chance to retry from the previous checkpoint. It defaults to ‘no’, which is the most sensible decision the game makes.

One of the worst games this generation is made all the more unpalatable by its potential to be so interesting. You’ll spend every second baffled by what on Earth its developers were thinking.

Amy, from Lexis Numerique and VectorCell, is available now for Xbox 360 via XBLA (reviewed) and PS3 via PSN.