AMY is nothing if not bold. It’s also frustrating and dated, but the insistence on particularly risky design decisions put this odd, survival horror downloadable title in a category almost of its own. Fighting off a zombie virus from within isn’t a foreign concept for films but games have yet to really explore how the debilitating infection can affect the player-character. It’s a worthwhile pursuit, but falls far short of its intended goal.
Here’s what we liked:
Symbiosis - The game casts players as Lana, a young woman looking after a mute, psychic girl (Amy) as they trek through a zombie-infested town. Lana needs Amy to use her unexplained healing abilities to hold off the zombie virus from completely taking over Lana’s body (can also be done with syringes, gas masks), and Amy needs Lana to lead her from hidden locker to hidden desk to escape the nightmare. The nature of their relationship is complex and engaging, though not fully realized.
Stealth - Combat is a mess, perhaps intentionally so, and stealth is often the best or only option for navigating each level. Hiding places, puzzles, and the ability to blend with zombies while partially infected make stealth maneuvers interesting and sometimes unique. Unfortunately, the mechanics aren’t well-tuned, but the idea is engaging.
Here’s what we didn’t like:
Combat – Much worse than the sluggish movement is the unpredictably awkward combat, which ranges from unbearably easy to frustratingly impassable. Lana can’t fight bare-handed, at all, so breakable weapons are her only option. If they break (and they do, often), Lana is out of luck until she picks up another. The dodge mechanic works, sometimes, and fighting more than one enemy doesn’t.
Puzzles – The redeeming quality of a few recurring symbol puzzles don’t cover the blight that is the majority of puzzles in AMY. Although many use the symbiotic tension of Lana and Amy’s relationship, they are overly simple or mechanically cumbersome. When the difficulty of a puzzle stems from the challenge of wrangling the controls to the player’s intent, there’s a real problem.
Action – As in movement or execution. Tied to the imprecise gauntlets of the game’s puzzles, things as simple as item selection, running, and interacting with the environment are needlessly complicated from a control scheme standpoint. Back in the era of the N64 and PlayStation, byzantine design like this was commonplace and accepted. Today, there’s no excuse.
Narrative – What could have been the absolute driving force behind Amy becomes its most baffling and ultimately least satisfying element. Amy and Lana are trying to escape from “The Center”, an organization with soldiers that pursue the pair throughout the game. Amy was apparently abused, presumably for her powers, at The Center, but this is never confirmed or expanded on. In fact, none of the key elements of this game are done any justice by anything as simple as some audio logs or some measly character development.
After seeing all the hands-off previews of AMY over the last year, I was as disappointed as any to finally play the game. What begins as a promising premise derails as quickly as the game’s introductory scene and stays there, kicking itself in the shins, for around eight hours. Like Hydrophobia, this may be a downloadable game that succeeds after a major overhaul of basic design decisions. As it is now, AMY is the worst kind of horrifying.
Score: Skip It
AMY was developed by VectorCell and published by Lexis Numerique. A copy was provided for review purposes.
AMY Review is a post from: PSN Fans
