Amnesia is a text adventure game produced in 1986 at the height of the popularity of the genre. With the story and text written by science fiction author Thomas Disch (who, interestingly, also authored The Brave Little Toaster), the prose is a cut above most of its contemporaries. As one can infer from the title, the game places you in the role of an amnesiac. The game opens as you awake in a hotel room in Manhattan without any idea of who you are or, as you quickly find out, what you have done.
Soon you learn that you were just married, that someone is out to kill you, that the police might like to have a little chat with you about something that happened in Texas, and all sorts of other important little details about your life.
The game takes place in Manhattan and was designed to realistic enough that a hard-copy map was included in the original packaging. You could travel around the city on foot, by subway, or by taxi. The setting was vast and the potential for exploration was staggering. But the game is programmed with real world concerns that force you to stay on task: you have to eat, but you don’t have any money. You have to sleep, but once you leave
your hotel, you can’t get back in. And there’s that pesky fellow who keeps trying to shoot you in the head…
The beauty of the text adventure is that it was a format that was not designed to exploit hardware and system capabilities that are now obsolete. As such, the game has lost nothing of its original charm despite being more than twenty years old. Amnesia provides an entertaining and thought-provoking chance to test your powers of observation and intuition in a well-written and engaging storyline.
As for me, I remember the game as quite challenging. However, I was fairly young at the time, so that fact may have biased my perception somewhat. I never managed to complete the game, so I am not able to comment on the ending. However, given the high quality of the prose and the compelling nature of the storyline from the portion of the game I did navigate successfully, I am sure that it would be worthwhile and satisfying.
