When comparing Dying Light vs Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the Slant community recommends Amnesia: The Dark Descent for most people. In the question“What are the best games on Linux?” Amnesia: The Dark Descent is ranked 22nd while Dying Light is ranked 66th. The most important reason people chose Amnesia: The Dark Descent is:
Amnesia offers immersive puzzles to the player by creating interaction that comes natural to the player. When a door needs opened, the player must pull their mouse towards them to actually open the door, same goes for drawers as well. It is through these interactions that the player can feel as if they are actually manipulating these objects instead of just pointing and clicking like so many other puzzle games.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Fluid parkour movement
The main protagonist is capable of scaling buildings, jumping over obstacles and vaulting over zombies with ease making traversing the open world city a lot more enjoyable.
Pro Expansive weapon-crafting system
There are blueprints found throughout the gameworld that can be used to modify existing weapons in a wide variety of ways by adding various elements to them and creating weapons such as enemy seeking grenades, exploding throwing stars, and makeshift bats with nails through them.
Pro Satisfying combat
The combat is impactful, visceral and offers a great deal of variety in terms of available weapons and different enemy types. It presents a reasonable amount of challenge that is rewarding to overcome and offers multiple ways of emerging victorious in each encounter.
Pro Enjoyable co-operative multiplayer
Dying light features up to four player LAN and online co-op.
Pro Rewarding side-missions
There's a wide variety of side-quests and a large chunk of them are multi-part adventures with great storytelling.
Pro Immersive puzzle solving
Amnesia offers immersive puzzles to the player by creating interaction that comes natural to the player. When a door needs opened, the player must pull their mouse towards them to actually open the door, same goes for drawers as well. It is through these interactions that the player can feel as if they are actually manipulating these objects instead of just pointing and clicking like so many other puzzle games.
Pro Excellent, unnerving atmosphere
Much of the game is inspired by Lovecraftian horror wherein the player is constantly assaulted with their sanity being eroded as they try to regain their memories. Monster lurk within the game that are quite frightening and the whole game is sparsely lit with constant sounds surrounding them that could be eluding to their next encounter.
Pro Incredible use of sound effects
As has been mentioned, the atmosphere is incredible, and I was scared out of my mind the whole time. There's mostly silence. A floorboard creaks, a chain rattles, the shuffling of your feet on the floor, it all serves to take your experience to new, terrifying heights.
Pro Epitome of horror, but that's not all
The game manages to keep you tense at all times, but there's more. Even if the monster wasn't there, this would be a great game to walk around, solve puzzles, and read the letters. The atmosphere is just very well crafted.
Pro Tons of extra stories
Users can download and install mods/stories created by other users, which can extend the gameplay of the game by quite a lot. Being that these are custom stories, being able to find one that appeals to the player should be pretty simple enough. A good comparison of the top available stories can be found here.
Cons
Con Poor VR UI
Things such as subtitles, instructions, menus, prompts, etc are hard to see clearly.
Con VR has a downgraded visual experience
VR version of the game is low fidelity and introduces visual glitches that the standard version doesn't have.
Con Poor plot and characters
The story is nothing new with many elements that are too familiar at this point. A Reluctant hero and a cold government agent mixed with a plot that can bee seen from miles away points to a lack of imagination while trying to create a game for the masses.
Con Poor multithreading
Sadly Dying Light does not do multi-threading very well which results in low framerates. For a modern game that is to be played on consoles with 8 cores or PCs that also have multiple cores, to not take advantage of proper multi-threading is pretty mind boggling. Really it just comes down to laziness, something that is not new to Techland and their poorly optimized ports.
Con Enabling VR support isn't straightforward
Enabling VR support requires editing config files. Instructions can be found here.
Con VR may cause motion sickness
In addition to some minor persistence issues, there are some sensory information mismatch issues created by the in-game characters movements and players stationary position that can easily induce nausea. The issue is a lot more prominent during cut-scenes that take the control away from the player completely.
Con Puzzles tend to be easily solved
Sadly the core of the game is the puzzle aspect but they tend to be easily enough solved, which makes for a bit of a let down for players who are used to or looking for difficult gameplay.