You know... Back to almost a full year ago when it was announced that Thechineseroom, the guys who made Dear Esther, were making the next Amnesia title I thought "Hm. This will either be 'decent' or they will promptly fuck it up".
While I held out hope that they would at least not fuck it up, I knew that if they did fuck up it would be like this: A game produced where the game-play and mechanics are neglected and completely uninteresting as sacrifice for a "m'kay" story.
I'm not even hopping on a bandwagon here - I've always thought Thechineseroom were pretentious chumps. Dear Esther did not impress me, it was a dry, boring walking simulator where TCR gambled everything on the player seeing the purty scenery, the grey skies, and depressing monologue and reacting with "Oh, this game is SO DEEP! The atmosphere built totally distracts me from the fact that all I'm doing is walking while some emo tool goes on about loss or some shit for 20 minutes!".
Oh, look at that - it turns out TCR doesn't get horror and apparently just made a walking simulator with some jump-scares and creepy post-it notes. Of course, I have to admit that this sounds like an improvement over their last "game" (I don't care, it was NOT a game. It was literally just a long fucking cutscene!), as I remember wishing while "playing" that self-hating geriatric-simulator that they added the much-desired element of manbearpig butchering the shit out of you to free you from the monotony of the protagonist shuffling his feet for 20 minutes lamenting his existence.
But by the end of this, I wonder if TCR is truly to blame, or Frictional for being suckered in by TCR's "Oh-look-at-me-I'm-so-intellectual-and-deep" pretentious bullshit claim on narrative to give them the go-ahead in the first place.
[On another note, you don't really need a sanity mechanic, as I was a big fan of Frictional's earlier works, the Penumbra series which didn't have one and was still scary and tense. However, it was a really ingenious way to keep players from seeing too much of the monsters as well as just adding some neat things like fake monsters, roaches, and warped paintings - real mindscrews that added to the unpredictable nature of the first playthroughs.]
I hope that we've all learned a lesson in that just because the devs from TCR claim to be the smartest, most mature and artistically-talented in the works of literary atmosphere - it does NOT translate to a game that delivers narrative as successfully. Hopefully, it means they'll be doing less games in the future too, but I'll settle for tarnished rep.