Written by: Ian

 

 

 

"AMY" has gotten a lot of press for being a dreadful, dreadful game. Should you run away in horror from this indie survival game?

 

 

Amy tells the story of a mute girl who has special powers. Her carer are on the way to see a doctor when they see an explosion, and their train crashes. When Lana wakes up, there are zombies everywhere, rumblings of the apocalypse, and miles between the station and the lab where her friend works. You need to guide Amy through this mess and to safety.

 

Unfortunately it feels like several levels were cut, with nothing done to patch the story up- it’s very lacking, with huge plot holes and massive gaps.

 

 

Amy is a classic survival horror, with a lack of weapons, clumsy controls (although it’s hard to tell if this is deliberate), a slow pace, jump scares, and loads of zombies. It also has some of the most terribly designed and contrived puzzles in gaming history, as well as plenty of bizarre and awful design decisions. The pace is just too slow. Lana wears heels throughout, and moves with all the grace and speed like a pig in jelly.

 

 

Given the game is more puzzle than combat focused, it’s certainly not ideal. Combat is really clunky, with just melee weapons, a basic attack and dodge that rely on the exaggerated movements in combat to judge when to time things correctly. It only gets hard at the end of chapter 4, and then it just gets frustrating. When you die, the checkpoints are hard, and you also lose all your inventory items- health packs, weapons- you name it, gone. This makes your second playthrough harder- just weird. The game clearly is capable of saving items, because the game gets screwed up in chapter 5. You do keep your items, but any time a zombie spots you, you fail the mission, which is just plain odd.

 

The game does have a couple of interesting ideas- the zombifying element is in the air, so you slowly get infected over time. You can heal yourself using the healing items, or by holding hands with Amy. But, if you get close enough to turning into a zombie (to the point the screen has odd effects on it), they start to ignore you as you change facially. It’s probably the one interesting element to the game.

 

Many of the puzzles, however, require you to use Amy, by fitting her into conveniently sized holes you would never see in real life. They are incredibly contrived and always annoying. She can also read glyphs to gain powers, but these have a limited charge, and again, are wiped when reloading. It also looks like most were wiped from the game at some point, because they are accessed from (a terrible to use) clickwheel, but you only ever use 2 powers in the whole game.

 

 

The whole thing is only 6 short chapters, the last of which is just a boss. If you were to play through without ever dying, the game is probably less than 3 hours long. However, it is tough, you will die, and probably throw your controller away with frustration as you play another 20 minute segment in one go, doing the same stupid puzzles and moving at the same slow pace.