Anna

Anna is a 2012 puzzle video game for Microsoft Windows, OS X and Linux. Anna is a psychological horror set in an abandoned sawmill high in the Italian mountains. The player must find gruesome clues to solve puzzles related to the character's dark past. The player's behavior determines the main character's sanity, changes the settings and reveals new secrets that lead to different endings. On April 13, 2013, the Extended Edition was released, which includes new environments, puzzles, user interface, music, improved graphics and a new character. ACT: The story of Anna is about a man with memory loss who dreams of a sawmill in the mountains near his town. He decides to go there to find out the connection with his missing memories and a woman named "Anna" who seems to call out to him, and enters the house solving puzzles in the garden. After observing several strange phenomena, he realizes that the house is haunted. As the protagonist explores the house, he hears voices belonging to himself and the eponymous Anna, among others. Through these voices and texts he finds in the sawmill, he discovers that he had an obsessive history with an ancient deity named Anna that he had since forgotten. One interpretation states that in earlier times Anna seduced people into worshiping her, causing them to murder their loved ones or starve to death at the feet of her statue. The other interpretation portrays the protagonist as the villain who meets a human avatar of Anna in the forest and falls in love with her. However, after she left him because of his obsession with her and his abusive personality, he sacrificed children to summon her back. The game has three main endings; in an inversion of the norm, the more effort you put into reaching an ending, the less optimistic the conclusion. In the first scenario, the protagonist concludes that Anna was burned as a witch centuries ago, leaves, and vows never to return. In the second scenario, the protagonist remembers Anna, realizes that he cannot live without her, and opens himself up to being possessed by her by joining the many mannequins found throughout the house. In the third ending, the protagonist remembers that he killed his real wife after she desecrated Anna's statue, and finds the statue along with his children's mannequins in a small chamber. When the tunnel to the chamber collapses, he realizes that he will stay in the chamber forever, but he doesn't care because he has "Anna" with him. The plot is ambiguous because the protagonist does not know if the sawmill is real or just a dream, and because in the course of the story strange phenomena appear and the voices are vague and incoherent. DEVELOPMENT: Development studio Dreampainters based the story on legends from the Val D'Ayas region of Italy, specifically a legend about a sawmill where a lumberjack killed his family. The game's emphasis was on puzzle solving and exploration, allowing the player to discover the plot at his/her own pace. One of Anna's most notorious features, the ability to pick up any item (regardless of whether it is needed later in the game), was apparently based on the developers' hatred of adventure games and cartoons, in which the important items were made more obvious to the viewer. Anna supposedly had a feature where the game interpreted the player's actions to scare them; for example, if a player focused on a particular object for too long, that object would appear more frequently. However, there was no such function in the game. Dreampainters also claimed that the extent of the protagonist's descent into madness would determine the ending, but the ending was actually determined by when the player decided to leave the sawmill. RECEPTION: Anna received mixed reviews from critics. The graphics, story and sound were praised, but it was criticized for the opaque narrative, the complexity of the interface and the difficulty of the puzzles. The horror elements were both praised and criticized in various reviews; IGN said that the lack of death eliminated any sense of threat, while Zero Punctuation praised the horror but claimed that immersion was broken by the need for a walkthrough. It received a score of 49.13% on GameRankings and 55/100 on Metacritic.