Amnesia: The Dark Descent will be even harder from next week

Frictional Games has announced that Amnesia: The Dark Descent will be getting a "hard mode" on September 28.

In a move that's a huge contrast to the Safe Mode, introduced to Frictional's SOMA, a couple of years ago, Amnesia will now be even more challenging. According to Frictional, the new beefed up difficulty will make it "a little harder to beat the game."

The changes from the original difficulty mean autosaves will be disabled, manual saving will cost four tinderboxes, losing all sanity will result in death, and oil and tinderboxes will be more hard to come by. 

And if that's not enough to get you crying into your keyboard, monsters will be able to locate you more easily, they'll be faster when they do, and are likely to make shorter work of you as their damage has also been increased. They'll stick around for longer too, presumably to bask in your misery and/or death. Yikes.

Completing the game on Hard mode will net you a sparkly, new trophy, aptly called 'Masochist'. You'll be able to choose between 'normal' and 'hard' mode when starting a new game but will be unable to switch part-way through, so choose carefully.  

Sarah James
Guides Writer

Sarah started as a freelance writer in 2018, writing for PCGamesN, TechRadar, GamingBible, Red Bull Gaming and more. In 2021, she was offered a full-time position on the PC Gamer team where she takes every possible opportunity to talk about World of Warcraft and Elden Ring. When not writing guides, most of her spare time is spent in Azeroth—though she's quite partial to JRPGs too. One of her fondest hopes is to one day play through the ending of Final Fantasy X without breaking down into a sobbing heap. She probably has more wolves in Valheim than you.