I recently played Amnesia Dark Descent for the first time, which uses the Half Life 2 style of movement i.e. extremely quick and snappy camera movement, you start and stop moving on a dime, any interactions have maybe 3-5 frames of animation max, and most contextual actions are just a small icon/button-prompt on the screen which does the action (like pressing a button or unlocking a door) without any sort of animation at all. You can also jump on all the tables whenever you want. The game was absolutely horrifying, and I felt incredibly immersed from start to finish, never once actually thinking about the controls. Then I beat it and started playing Alien Isolation.

It was absolutely jarring how sluggish everything felt. Moving the camera has a “wind-up/wind-down,” speed curve, your character starts/stops walking a half-second after you let go of the stick, and absolutely everything has some long, drawn out animation, even things like crawling into a vent which should just be “press crouch and walk forward,” involve a contextual button prompt plus 5 second animation of crawling into the vent. There’s also no jump button, so every time you have to jump it’s a quick time event. To be clear, I think this game is fantastic otherwise, but going from one control style to the other is really bizarre.

I know this is almost certainly done for the sake of immersion since the HL2/Amnesia style isn’t realistic at all, but I can’t help but feel the opposite, that the former style is more immersive. I personally find myself being taken out of the experience far more when I have to push a button and wait for 5 seconds for the character to do something, or when camera control is yanked away just to “show me something cool.” In short, I find myself actually thinking about the controller in my hand far more when playing Alien Isolation that I ever did playing Amnesia. Anyone else feel the same way, or am I just weird?