Ironically, Amnesia will be forgotten.

Text adventures explored with greater distance and detail than their visual counterparts. The mind, filling in and aggrandizing the gaps between sentences in ways only the written word can.

Having an author pen a text adventure sounds appealing. Especially when the adventure recreates New York City, block by block, in as much detail as the author could. (Ultimately this attempt left him limited by computer memory available 1986.)

My very short time spent with Amnesia was a dreamlike haze. A plethora of options and outcomes were seemingly ready to unfold but my modern sensibilities left me stumbling in the dark. My cerebral toes were obliterated, quickly stubbed from unfathomable cornered outlines in its digital space.

While the concept was intriguing, a man wakes in a hotel room with no memory, its cultural sensibilities of the 1980's roared in full force. Amnesia, rather its author, Thomas M. Disch, was DESPERATE to make it immediately clear that the character you're playing is blond haired white male, and absolutely not gay. This was done by interacting with a TV in the hotel room which you start, finding porn on the first discovered channel. The character remarks their interest, despite the amnesia.

I found myself looking at the back of my skull from rolling my eyes.

My interest to stumble further into Amnesias world disappeared. Amnesias development was waist deep into the aids crisis, so I assume it brings all the discomfort a middle aged sci fi author of its time could muster.

I am curious to know how much the game relies on the assumptions and knowledge of its 80's target audience to succeed in the adventure. Ones understanding of New York City would be of help but now details in history. Manhattan is vastly different 3 decades later.

While this may be a footnote of interest to gaming history, Amnesia is destined to be forgotten by modern audiences by disinterest or on purpose.