Amnesia: The Dark Descent is, without doubt, one of the most influential Survival Horror games ever made. It had set trendsin its genre for years to come and played a major part in launching careers of such titans of Let's Play as PewDiePie and Markiplier.
However, this game has a major downside...
Once you had had collected all achievments and saw all three endings of the game, it has pretty much no replay value, due to the game largely relying on the story and atmosphere, as well as scripted monster encounters providing almost no room for any creative tactics.A Letsplayer who had launched his or her career on Amnesia, would have quickly run out of the material for new content.
Here, the modding community comes to the rescue. In the years after the Amnesia's release, more than a thousand of the various mods for the game were created. Using the possibilities of the game's engine and the official level editor, fans were able to create a bunch of the new exciting and terrifying adventures, some of which rival the original game in the terms of storytelling and immersion...The remaining 10% of them, of course.
Before we go further, an important distinction must be made. All non-cosmetic Amnesia mods follow into two categories:
- Custom Story. A custom campaign that can be started from the special Custom Story menu, accessible from the game's main menu. A Custom Story is, technically, just a bunch of new maps for the base game, linked together by the scripts and some sort of a story(well, usually). They can contain custom content you would expect for a map to contain, such as new models, textures and voice acting, but some of the more basic parts of a game, such as GUI, cannot be altered. Most notably, it is impossible for the player's character to have any sort of altered lantern.
- Full Conversion mod (sometimes also called Total Conversion mod). These mods are launched not from the game's main menu, but from their own separate executable file and provide to the mod maker a lot more creative freedom. In these mods, it is possible not only have a custom lantern model, its own GUI and its own main menu, but also alter some of the game's base mechanics to a reasonable degree. For example, a mod can completely throw away Sanity Meter, if it's creator decides his or her story doesn't need this mechanic.
However, in practice a lot of fans use the term Custom Story to refer to all Amnesia mods, and this page lists the tropes from both Custom Stories and Full Conversions.
It should also be noted that is impossible to list the tropes from every out of more than a thousand mods out there, so this page would only cover some of the most popular in the community ones:
- Alliterative Name: Dr. Patrick Parr from White Night.
- Amnesiacs are Innocent: David, an amnesiac protagonist of White Night, is shocked and disturbed to learn that he used to be a Serial Killer before his hospitalisation to such a degree he refuses to really believe in it for the majority of the story. Played With in that David turns out to be right - he was innocent of the murders and the person pretending to be his psychyatryst is gaslighting him. It can be argued that pre-amnesia David was a bit of jerk, but no more that that.
- Amnesiac Hero: A lot of the custom stories, just like the original game, have the protagonist wake up in the room with either not remembering how they had got there, either full-blown Identity Amnesia. This serves as a convenient excuse for the modmakers to not make introcuction cutscenes, which are hard to properly do with the game's engine.
- Antagonist Title: In Gustav, the titular character is Alexander's prodigy, who eventually turned into More Despicable Minion and The Starscream.
- The Artifact: Some custom stories do not use tinderboxes, diaries or mementos at all, but due to the limitations of the engine, all of these are still present in the pause menu's GUI when you are playing them.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: A variation occurs in Gustav. During their alchemical experiments, the antagonists have found a way to cause humans (and animals) to grow to enormous size; however the process turns subjects mindless, rendering them of no use for the antagonists' goals. The player character finds one of the subjects still alive in one of the rooms in the laboratory chained up to the wall; however, due to his mindlessness, he is completely docile and cannot harm the player.
- Bad Guy Wins: In White Night, Grace and Sofia sucessfully take over the hospital, kidnap David, torture him to insanity, and seem to suffer no consquences for it.
- Bedlam House: Played With in White Night. The story is set in the modern days, and the reason behind David's horrible expierences in the mental hospital is that the hospital was taken over by the group of patients who killed all of the doctors and started impersonating them.
- Big Bad Duumvirate:
- In Gustav, the duo of antagonists are Alexander from the original game and the Canon Foreigner Gustav.
- Sofia and evil!Grace in White Night
- Big Fancy Castle\Haunted Castle: A lot of the custom stories are set in one of those, since the original game was set in one of these as well and thus, the modmaker wouldn't need to search for assets when making their story.
- Big Fancy House: Other custom stories have as their setting a mansion of some sort, using the Archives\Study assets from the original game.
- Bittersweet Ending: In Obscurity, Simon stops the mad leader of the communion who has been sacrificing townspeople, including his sister, to the monsters. With the last of the communion dead and the village abandoned, he finds his long lost mother and everything seems fine until he hears rumors of disappearances near the village. This, coupled with his chronic nightmares, drives him mad. At this point, he decides that the monsters must be dealt with... by having the mine reopened and the village repopulated so that HE can continue the sacrifices.
- Body Horror: Gustav features plenty of those. Considering most of the story happens inside the medieval human experimentation dungeon, this is a given.
- Crusading Widower: Implied to be the protagonist's motivation in the second half of The Machine after he fails to save his wife from the demon.
- Cut and Paste Environments: Certain locations from the original game gets reused a lot in the custom stories, in particular a lot of the modmakers cannot resist plagiarising the infamous flooded basement with an invisible monster.
- Damsel in Distress: The Machine starts with the wife of the Featureless Protagonist being kidnapped by an unseen force during the celebration in lord Harris's mansion, and the protagonist descending to the mansion's basement in an attempt to rescue her.
- Death of a Child:
- Elizabeth in Obscurity.
- Sammy in Amadeus. He gets better, though. The titular character also counts.
- Disproportionate Retribution: In White Night, David is kidnapped, induced with amnesia, and tortured in retalitation for planning to abandon his criminally insane girlfriend in a mental hospital.
- Downer Ending: Given that this is a horror franshise, quite a lot of the custom stories do not have a good ending.
- Driven to Suicide: At the end of Obscurity, Simon learns that this is what had happened to his father after being forced to sacrifice his own daughter.
- Dug Too Deep: The gruesome incidents in the Crescent Village in Obscurity started happening after the village's miners dug into something... otherwordly deep below the village.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: The main antagonist of the Lost the Lights seems to have geniunely cared about his wife and daughter.
- Evil Is Not a Toy: Lord Harris from The Machine had attempted to built a Steampunk "thinking machine" in the basement under his mansion, and eventually resorted to using occult powers to power it.Guess how that turned out.
- Excuse Plot: A lot of the custom stories, usually the more poorly-made ones, have these.
- Fate Worse than Death: At the end of White Night, David fails to escape his captors and is remains trapped as evil!Grace's toy forever.
- Featureless Protagonist: A lot of the stories has those.
- Jekyll & Hyde: It turns out Grace in White Night suffers from this.
- Jumpscare: While the original game was praised for generally averthing this trope, a lot of the low-quality custom stories play it straight as one of the main sources of the scariness. In particular, the infamous "Iron maiden jumpscare" (the sole instance of this trope happening in the original game) became somewhat of a meme among the custom stories community due to a lot of modmakers blantantly plagiarising it in their own stories.
- Haunted House: The setting of many custom stories, most notably Disponentia.
- Hidden in Plain Sight: A rather clever usage of this trope happens in the very beginning of Lost the Lights. The protagonist wakes up inside a locked room from where the only way to escape is though a breakable window... but it is impossible to actually go though it without the light source due to the need to do a bunch of platforming above the bottomless pit right after going though the window, and it's pitch black outside. The lantern itself is not hidden anywhere and sits openly on top of the drawer, but the oil to actually light it... The bottle of oil is hidden beneath the very bed the protagonist woke up on.
- Human Sacrifice: The cult from Obscurity sacrifices people to the demonic entities living in caves under the Crescent Village in hopes to prevent the entities from attacking the surface dwellers outright. Simon eventually learns that his sister Elizabeth was one of the victims and his father - one of the cult's leaders.
- I'm a Humanitarian:
- The monsters from Obscurity seem to love the taste of a human flesh.
- There is also the really old custom story aptly named Cannibalism.
- Kill and Replace: In White Night, the "Dr. S." nickname wasn't orginally Sofia's...
- Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: The main antagonist of Obscurity is this. Originally he justifies setting up a Human Sacrifice cult with having to pacify the demonic entities living underground and keep them from attecking the surface outright. However, he never really tried to find another way to deal with the monsters or notify the authorities about them, and later admits outright he just enjoys "watching the blood flow".
- Haunted Technology: The Machine is an unusual Steampunk example. Mind you, this custom story actually predates The Machine for Pigs.
- Hollywood Exorcism: The final level of The Machine has the protagonist collecting the ingredients for the exorcism ritual to banish the demonic entity haunting the titular machine.
- Murderous Mannequin: Played Straight and Subverted. Some mannequins (read suits of armor and statues) follow you, some hurt you if you get near them, one talks to and hurts you if you touch it, some seem to move to shield you from view, and at one point some outright talk to you and protect you from a Brute. It Zig Zags all over the place.
- Or Was It a Dream?: After the climatic final confrontation, the protagonist of The Machine wakes up in the same bedroom the story starts and is delighted to realise that all of the horrific events that happened to him were not real. Then he opens the door outside and is treated to the Scare Chord and sight of a Meat Moss mixed with cogworks all over the walls, after which the story abruptly cuts to the ending credits, implying that the protagonist lost the final battle and was posessed by the demon.
- Sadistic Choice: Protagonist in The Machine faces one in the middle of the story. Both his wife and lord Harris are trapped in the Death Trap where one cannot be released without killing another. The player can choose to save either of them, but no matter what choice he makes, it would be immediatedly revealed that the whole thing was a ruse simply made by the demon to toy with the protagonist, and that both the wife and the lord Harris were already dead.
- Surreal Horror: White Night, in a stark departure from the custom stories' usual Gothic Horror setting. In large part, this is achieved through...
- Through the Eyes of Madness: For the majority of White Night, it is impossible to say for sure where reality ends and David's hallucinations begin.
- Totalitarian Utilitarian: This seems to be the motivation of the antagonists in Lost the Lights.
- Town with a Dark Secret: The Crescent Village from Obscurity.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Most custom stories use the default Grunts from the original game as monsters, although what they are supposed to be in-universe varies from story to story. Sometimes there is just no explanation of where they came from.
- Songs in the Key of Lock: Twice, in Amadeus and White Night. Both examples use a piano.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Lord Harris in The Machine.
- Yandere: In White Night, evil!Grace's attitude towards David seems to be this.
