This characteristic, Grip explains, actually happened wholly by accident. "You're not really hiding from it line of sight wise you're hiding from it element-wise," Grip says, likening the encounters to being a game of hot lava, only with water being the death trap instead. You ultimately deal with it in a completely different way from the other monsters you encounter in Amnesia, which is what makes it so memorable. You can throw meat for it to munch on for a few seconds-great for opening up a door-or throw a box just to bait it in an opposite direction for a few much-needed seconds. Of course, there are ways to distract it. The Kaernk is attracted to meat, and being a walking hunk of flesh, that means you're always a target. The Water Lurker appears throughout the story, and makes you scared of any water you see because of it. After the run-in with the Water Lurker the first time, that fear passes onto the player: now you're afraid of any water you see, and the game plays with that. "I think that's the first time you actually see water in the game, so every single time you encounter water again you're gonna think, 'Could the monster be here?'" It also feeds into another major mechanic of Amnesia: the protagonist's sanity, and his intense fear of the dark. "The idea was to instill fear so the monster is only like, when you encounter it for the first time, you sort of associate it with the water it's in," says Grip. During the development of a puzzle in Amnesia though, Frictional Games realized that the Water Lurker would be a silly name to have appear in-game, so according to Grip, writer Mikael Hedberg came up with the "official" name. Internally, Kaernk is referred to as the Water Lurker, which remains its most recognizable moniker. Probably the most benign monster ever in terms of visually." "What it actually is like in the game is that it's just, I think, it is a sphere that's red and we just said don't draw. It's just my water splashes, so I have no idea what it looks like," he says. In my pre-interview research, I even found a sketch that was labeled as concept art for the water monster on a fan-curated Wiki page. It was an early design in terms of Amnesia's development, with it being discussed at least two years before its release. The memorable splashes ended up being scary enough, but if there had been a "super big budget," Grip says the Water Lurker easily could have had tentacles squirming all the way out of the water, as if they were trying to grab the player. We have to figure out something simpler here." Grip wondered what the team could get away with, when splashes entered his mind. "Then when it came to actually making the monster, I was like Shit, we don't have time. That was the initial seed, having tentacle-something coming out of the water," Amnesia co-designer and co-founder of Frictional Games, Thomas Grip, tells me. So we wanted, or at least I wanted, something like that from the beginning. I think it was the first Star Wars movie when they're all in this waste disposal thingy and there's water and there's lots of garbage and there's tentacles coming up. It was actually inspired by, do you remember. "The initial idea was that there was supposed to be tentacles. It's petrifying.Īnd the monster? It's not even visible, and it's because of time constraints at developer Frictional Games. When you venture into the flooded archival room for the first time, it's easy to think, 'Okay, the coast is clear.' But soon though, you see splashing about. Its scariest monster is one that's become synonymous with it in the years since: the Water Lurker, also known as the Kaernk. In college, I fell into an accidental tradition with it: I would dive back in around Halloween time, play it for a couple hours, and then be too scared to continue until the next year. And even then, it took me years to properly beat it. I was one of its many fans-though I was a year late to the party, only picking it up in 2011. It jumpstarted Let's Plays and streaming like no other horror game before it compilations of people playing it and screaming quickly crowded the likes of YouTube. Stay tuned for more in the weeks to come!Īmnesia: The Dark Descent was a phenomenon. Monster of the Week is a three-part series where we dive into the creation of iconic monsters from video games with the game developers who helped bring them to life. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team. This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247.
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