Monday Mods: Amnesia: The Dark Descent Remastered

An extensive mod intended to remaster the entire game has released for classic psychological horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent, in the form of Amnesia: The Dark Descent – Remastered. With extensive work going into reworking every single texture, implementation of physics-based rendering, and a newly implemented shadow system, this is a very comprehensive mod. The goal of this mod is to bring the game up to date with a more modern aesthetic and visual presentation style, as well as introduce some new features, and tweak the overall design somewhat.

Check out this comparison trailer, which showcases the difference in visuals between the original release of the game and this new mod.

This project has been in development since 2016, and it’s finally available in finished form. There were a couple of earlier revisions of this mod, which had a few bugs and incompatibilities, but they’ve been worked out now, so it’s ready for prime time.

Here are the rather straightforward installation instructions:

  1. Drag and drop the “Amnesia The Dark Descent” folder into:
    Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common (drop it inside “common” folder, and replace all the files)
  2. Drag and drop the “main_settings.cfg” file into:
    User\Documents\Amnesia\Main (drop it inside “main” folder, and replace the file)

That’s for the Steam version, for other versions the instructions are the same, but the precise folder instructions will be different.

In what must be one of the more rewarding responses for any mod-maker, the developer of the original game, Frictional Games, chimed in with their thoughts for this mod. They’ve long been passionate supporters of their mod community, and have a well-earned reputation for being in touch with their players, so it’s not too surprising to see that they have their finger on the pulse for this mod. On the game’s Reddit page, developer Frictional Games posted:

“The amount of work that must have gone into this is impressive! We’ll post this in our mod showcase channel on Discord!”

Since this mod uses more demanding visual effects and rendering techniques than the original game shipped with, it will require a more modern GPU. The minimum recommended GPU is a GTX 1050, which is what the mod was most extensively tested on. Depending on your exact settings and resolution etc, you may need a more powerful GPU.

If you want to check out this mod, the base game is currently extremely cheap as part of the Steam Sale, but only for a few more days. Head over here to check out our other recommendations from the Steam Sale.