Frankly, most of the complaints here apply to other horror games, including Clock Tower, Fatal Frame, Silent Hill, and Resident Evil (especially Silent Hill and Resident Evil). Hell, your problems with the sanity meter are problems with death in pretty much every single video game ever made, except for a select few with no saves or something similar like Steel Battalion. You are taking a limitation of the medium as one of the specific game; it's like criticizing a horror book for not being able to show a monster's appearance.
You are also rather vague at some parts, which might be symptomatic of the word limit on these reviews. How is the art style amateurish? How does it lack the special touch? How is the music standard goth chords (And what do you mean by goth?)?
Finally, Amnesia is one of the games with the most natural transitions into horror out there in gaming. Most games give you an enemy to fight or run away from in the first few areas, but there are none like that in Amnesia until the waterway, and even that creature is invisible (Which means you don't get a faceful of its gruesome mug). It's not until the cellar area that you actually really have to come into close-contact with the creatures visually, which is a very good use of pacing. Instead of the approach most games take of shoving a monster in your face, Amnesia simply implies that they're out there by showing them from a distance, which is the exact opposite of the "This is a scary part, now FEEL SCARED." approach taken by less scary titles like Resident Evil. Later, they do appear close, but by this time the player should have naturally transitioned into the state where he or she would be afraid of them.
Fight. Struggle. Endure. Suffer. LIVE.
No, my issue with the game's use of Sanity isn't that it's a gameplay mechanic, but an unjustified and arbitrary one whose sake seems nothing more than to scare the player more — ja, the quintessential ingredient of imposing some clock countdown, so the player feels all the more anxious to find light sources. I don't remember the game ever exploring much Daniel's mental breakdowns whenever he steps into an ounce of shadow.
Yet noting the Lovecraft inspirations, Sanity here is an inspired element put in the wrong context. Call of Cthulhu, another game which also uses sanity as game mechanic, has good reason to when you face grotesque, mind-screwing monsters and real uncanny moments, and the consequences of abusing sanity lead to the PC committing suicide. Here, Daniel must be literally pissing himself every second in the darkness, as if in hopes to mirror the player's own.
Does Daniel have some uncontrollable phobia, rooted somewhere in unconscious memories? (And no, don't give me that Daniel has repressed memories of doing bad things for Alexander excuse.) It would certainly give the game a much-needed psychological edge if this played into the game's story. Otherwise, ditch the Scardy-Cat routine, the darkness is frightening as it is when you can only imagine..
Oh wait the game doesn't let you do that. There's very little in letting subtlety and depth build in the player's subjective experience. Certainly, for a horror game the rub lies in the atmosphere, the feel - and instead of being nuanced, the game is masterful in imposing a predefined mood the developers want me to have. From the thickly laid-on atmosphere, to having my view suddenly shifted to an approaching monster/scary event no. 23 - it leaves nothing to my own imagination, save for "I wonder if I solve this puzzle, then suddenly.. Vegeta!" Its sheer obviousness with the main Shadow antagonist and the monster minions, when something ever goes bad with them, I know about it from the obvious alone - upon entering, the screen rumbling spoils things before I even get to see the gooey shadow for myself. Whatever happened to Silence?
If you open a door, a very loud bang will play and your vision might blur — lo and behold, a monster comes through by the time you're hiding in the dark away from the door. Or go around a bend and the game will force the PC to stop and point the camera in the direction of the monster there, even stopping walking to look at this lovely tourist attraction. When "psychological" horror scenes pop in, the game pauses the PC's movement, and the camera instantly shoots to the direction of the horror as my vision blurs and the music turns into Badly Tune no. 5. What the hell do I feel, besides what I'm supposed to feel? "FEEL SCARED!!!" as I can imagine the developers laying a hand on my shoulder at that moment. It's not natural. It's especially not evocative, except what's just there. It discourages me from reacting on my own unless they say I should react.
It relies too much on scripts, spawns, screen effects and jump scares. Everything is thrown in your face, often literally, stopping to show you rather than you realising it. The only truly terrifying part I remember is running away from the unseen thing in the Waters, shutting the door behind you just for that to get torn down in seconds. That is good. The rest is scripts that you react to, your reactions being "scripted" in turn. When a game has to hand-hold the player like that (like Portal 2's one-true-solution puzzles), that's amore.
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An uninspired frightfest
I look how well a horror game delivers, not only by the emotions and scares it gives, but whether it lingers in my mind like a stone in the shoe. A week later, I remember how strange I felt when the PC (Player Character) has to suffer egg-grinding noises, waiting in the darkness for the monster to pass by. Do you hear that, that's the sound of your Sanity decreasing! If you're lucky, you get to see bugs crawl on your screen like a screen-saver, and even motion-blurred mouse control if your sanity gets low enough. Sanity here is an arbitrary metre, the designers seemed to think it makes the darkness more frightening than it should, and that you should appreciate ze light sources more. But in actuality, it is just an imposed contrivance, a gimmick. The only real problem from lack of sanity is.. fainting. Waaagh!
Apart from the use of sanity/light dichotomy, the core game mechanic relies on hand-control - the drag and drop akin to adventure games where you have hands-on control of your surroundings. It reminds me of Half-Life 2's physics, it's intuitive and there's potential for its adoption in later games, instead of simply pressing E to move boulders. Although there were some puzzles that took advantage of this feature, I feel the game should use it much more besides simply nudging things. The other puzzles are just picking up objects and finding the right hotspot to use them at.
Now looking at the game's horror, I found it dull. Brennenburg Castle didn't feel like a real castle at all, I was just exploring linear Castle-themed levels. The art design lacked that special touch, leaving things amateur and unimmersive for visuals and audio. The music is standard goth chords.
My biggest gripe is that throughout the whole game, I felt that the developers were trying too hard to scare the player, and it shows. "This is a scary part, now FEEL SCARED." The delivered "horror" is as nuanced as Sgt. Hartman using every trick in his handbook and screaming his recruits into submission. From the beginning, the disclaimer, "Don't play to win. Play to be absorbed," to the bland cutscenes interspersed. And all the hints that pop up in sections, "This is a monster! Hide!" The story is Lovecraft-lite: I must run away from Ze Gooey Shadow and Monsterz N The Castle, and on its own it isn't provokingly scary, but clichéd.