I downloaded the demo off Steam after Yahtzee's review and I was so freaking bored that I uninstalled it after a few minutes. I guess horror games just don't work for me.
Which has me wondering why it didn't work for me. It's too easy to say that I would only be comfortable facing such a situation with a shot gun and rocket launcher. In fact, I find such a suggestion rude and more than a little dim.
No, I think it's because it took away the ordinance and replaced it with... nothing. At least as far as I can tell. It appeared that the means at the player's disposal was to stealth their way around and running away when a shambling grotesquery gave chase.
This does indeed give the player that feeling of panicky helplessness wear you hope you get where you're going undetected because being detected will fuck things up completely since there is no plan B shotgun.
Or at least it would have except this set up brought me out of the experience. Maybe I just don't like stealth games either, which is basically what this game as. take three hours to walk five feet and still get spotted by that guy you didn't see, mother fucker.
But what really threw me out of the experience was that I felt like I couldn't do anything. This may be the disadvantage games like Amnesia has against ones with guns.
Guns are fairly easy to understand. You point them at stuff you don't like and mash the button to make the loud noise until they fall down. My point is that a shooter game is easy to figure out. Even someone who's never played a video game before could figure out an FPS. It's not that hard to figure out what you're supposed to be doing.
I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing in Amnesia. Oh there was all that text I could have read. But frankly, if I need to read a wall of text to play or care about a game, then the game has failed. I get that the character has amnesia and had left a letter to itself, telling it to go somewhere to do something. Beyond that, I couldn't tell you and the basic controls weren't much help.
It's a concept called "efficacy." Merriam-Webster defines it as "the power to produce an effect." As an example, take the game Pac-Man [http://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/media/pacman_flash/]. The goal is fairly simple, clear all of the dots from the screen while avoiding the monsters.
Now, let's say the controls were changed so that you could only move left and right but not up and down. Your feeling of efficacy would be greatly diminished and you'd likely not play the game.
Let's say you have to time Pac-Man's mouth opening and closing just right to eat any of the dots. If not, then he bounces off the dots since they block his way. Your efficacy is even more diminished. The previous one is probably just a broken joystick that makes the game impossible. This one is possible but so unreasonable that one wonders who though anyone would find this fun.
I'm not saying that Amnesia is like that. I am saying that I felt like I did not have any efficacy. I had little idea what I was supposed to do and nor how to do it.
People can have many reactions to a loss of efficacy. A big one is boredom. If you've ever been to a meeting where you work or at school, you've likely felt this. When you feel like you can't have an effect on something, you lose interest. This is what I felt.
What I'm suggesting is if the developers had done, I don't know, something that somehow kept my interest then I might not have gotten bored with their game so quickly.
That's what happens when you can only play 30-45 minutes at a time. 
