This article discusses plot points from the entirety of Amnesia: Rebirth.

There is a moment, late in Amnesia: Rebirth, when the player character, Tasi Trianon, is offered a choice. Tasi, who has fought her way through the Algerian desert and a dark, uncanny alien world that at times intrudes upon and at times seems entirely separate from our own, learns that her unborn child suffers from the same wasting illness that killed her first daughter. The mysterious spectral woman who has on occasion guided Tasi to safety tells her that the only way to help her daughter is by injecting herself with “vitae,” the substance that powers the dark world's technology, and is extracted from the torture and murder of living people.

Tasi is presented with a victim, and in order to extract vitae, the game tasks the player with repairing and operating an extraction mechanism. Tasi can choose water or fire as her tool (there are two different ways to repair the machine), but in either case the player must hold the activation lever in place until the victim is tortured sufficiently to complete the extraction. Or, if the player prefers, Tasi can simply leave the room and move on to the next location.

Complicity is often a troublesome concept to incorporate into interactive narrative. It is not an easy task to give the player sufficient agency to create a sense of responsibility for character actions. Too often, these attempts end up failing to offer even the illusion of choice, such as in the first The Last of Us game when Joel decides to disregard Ellie’s decision to sacrifice her life in hope that a cure for the cordyceps fungus can be found. While the game encourages the player to share Joel’s attachment to Ellie, even making Ellie the player character for a brief stretch of the story, completing the game requires the player to perform Joel’s actions without offering any opportunity to influence them. Joel fights his way through the Firefly hospital regardless of whether the player would choose to do so. By the time the player reaches the operating room, where Ellie is already under anesthesia, it doesn’t seem to make much difference whether the player kills the unarmed surgeons, or even realizes that it’s possible to walk away with Ellie after killing the doctor who threatens Joel with a scalpel. 

In Amnesia: Rebirth, if the player chooses to have Tasi extract vitae—and it is important in this context that the game never frames extraction as an explicit either/or choice, it simply gives the player a task and offers the opportunity for the player to discover that this task isn’t mandatory—Tasi tries to make sense of her actions as she rides a transport to the next environment. “What else,” Tasi asks herself, but addressing her unborn child, “could we have done?” Realizing that she has implicated her child in her own horrific actions, Tasi immediately corrects herself, “What else could I have done? This place, it’s making me into one of them.”

This last sentence is intended as a bit of foreshadowing. Tasi, as she suspects but does not yet know, is slowly being transformed into one of the same monsters that she spends the game attempting to evade. It also acknowledges that no choices ever take place in a moral or ethical vacuum. Complicity always functions in a context. When Tasi is asked to torture an innocent person in order to save her child, she is being offered a horrific task in a world built on horrors. The person in the machine is one of many, and if Tasi doesn’t extract vitae, someone else eventually will. Tasi can, in this one specific instance, keep her hands clean, but she has already used vitae containers to power the machinery of the dark world when she did not know what they were, and completing the game requires that she use them again. Even if Tasi personally declines to be a torturer, she is complicit in the torture that powers her efforts to save her child and return home.

Even before his bloody path through the Firefly hospital, Joel is a murderer and the player is complicit in his actions. However, by making the player’s participation in Joel’s violence a matter of explicit (and fairly ham-handed) coercion, The Last of Us ends up alienating the player from a sense of responsibility for Joel’s actions, and makes it easier to dismiss any implication of complicity with Joel’s other morally questionable choices.

I am not a murderer, the player (rightly) says. None of these people are real, and if I don’t “kill” them, they will “kill” me! Pushing this button doesn’t make me any more responsible for Joel’s actions than turning the pages makes me responsible for the (equally fictional) actions of the characters in a novel. This game may give me something to think about, but it doesn’t tell me who I am.

I am not a torturer, the player can say, if they make Tasi walk away. But unlike in The Last of Us, the story in Amnesia: Rebirth continues to reach beyond its immediate setting in time and place+. After playing the game, I’m not sure whether Rebirth does much more than gesture to the political and social realities of Algeria under French colonial rule—the disparity in their political, social, and racial statuses are why French citizen Tasi and her common-law Algerian husband Salim are not able to legally marry, and Salim seems to disappear entirely from consideration when Tasi finds his body and remembers that she is pregnant—but even these gestures make it a bit easier for us to do the work of linking the horrors of Rebirth’s dark world to the realities of colonial occupation. Both are worlds built on suffering, and both are worlds in which complicity is inherent and unavoidable. It doesn’t matter whether I am the one pushing the button when I live in a world where vitae provides the light and heat.

Personal virtue is insufficient response to structural oppression.

Tasi may not be one of the French legionnaires whose notes record their desire to slaughter the Algerian population, and concoct a rationale, if necessary, after the fact. But the Paris whose existence offers memories of comfort and the promise of sanctuary if Tasi can find a way to return is built on the resources, wealth, and labor extracted by those legionnaires. Tasi might not torture the man in the machine in front of her, but she cannot save him either, or any of the people like him.

And yet, there is still something in not pulling the lever.

Horror, at its best, exceeds even tragedy in declining to flinch in the presentation of cosmic indifference. There is a certain romanticism in tragedy that leads even The Last of Us astray in its portrait of Joel. There is, after all, no plausible reason to expect that Joel would actually be able to rescue Ellie after she is taken to the operating room. The scenario only makes sense in terms of videogame logic. Amnesia: Rebirth offers no similar illusions. There is no consequence beyond the moment of action in the choice of whether or not to make Tasi a torturer. Vitae cannot cure her child. It can only keep her alive, albeit indefinitely. The world simply does not care about Tasi’s virtue or degradation. The production of its desires is left to no such uncertainty. In the end, Tasi cannot save her child, or herself, for more than a short time. She can, if the player chooses, leave her child to survive as the beneficiary of the suffering and extinction of others. Tasi can choose to destroy the dark world, even if doing so offers no salvation for herself, her child, or anyone else. There is no win state. Rebirth is a better game than that. It doesn’t pretend that one person can save the world.

The world will make us one of them, if we let it. It will tell us we had no other option. Worse, it will assure us that if we do not push the button ourselves that we are not one of the monsters. We can save ourselves and our children, and that is enough. There is no way to save the man in the machine, so it is enough to walk away. The horrors of the past are past. The vitae has already been extracted. If using the vitae is intolerable, we can simply choose not to. We can get out, each of us alone. We can forget a history that we tell ourselves isn’t ours.

Amnesia, at least, seems to know that this is a lie. We are complicit. We cannot escape, but we can look beyond ourselves into the darkness, and choose to do something about what we see. We can care when the world does not. We can know that caring without sacrifice is never enough.

///

+ I am obviously discounting The Last of Us Part II when I state that the story in The Last of Us doesn’t continue on. As an individual, discrete narrative unit, rescuing Ellie from the Fireflies is the last performative action for the player in The Last of Us. And others have written about the same issue with the problem of a narrative built apparently on a sense of player complicity in a story environment that offers no functional player agency in The Last of Us Part II. I will admit to not being terribly interested in devoting a couple dozen hours to the same thing all over again.

+++

Gavin Craig is a writer and critic who lives in Maryland. His work has appeared in Unwinnable, Electric Literature, Snarkmarket, Kill Screen, Bit Creature, and Videodame.