"I can tell from my pristine trousers that the monsters just don't command the same terror that they did in Dark Descent. Probably because in this case, you get a good look at them enough times that you can see they're just generic zombie dudes, and suspense only lasts as long as the mysterious, snarly thing lurking in the dark could be anything from a gelatinous cube to a hungover Orson Welles. The general problem is one of demystification, I think. In The Dark Descent, we only learn scrips and scraps about an evil Lovecraftian other dimension that's causing all the problems, but in Amnesia: Recalcitrant, Tasi gets to physically go to one; in fact, she pops in and out of it every ten minutes like she's never quite convinced that she locked the doors properly the last time she was there. At one point, she takes the public subway train in the evil Lovecraftian dimension and misses her stop because the map was confusing. No, really, this happens; it's one of the things that draws out the run-time like your mum's waistband at the cock buffet."