This 2012 Horror Flop Deserves Remaster Treatment

1 week ago 5

Published Feb 1, 2026, 2:30 PM EST

Elena Chapella (She/Her) is a current Writer for DualShockers, formerly an award-winning journalist for local news stations and newspapers in central Indiana.

Elena is passionate about writing, playing Dungeons & Dragons with her friends, and, of course, playing video games.

When she's not writing, Elena is actually a high school teacher by day. She teaches students essential life skills for adulthood, including job readiness, financial literacy, and college preparation.

We've all got games on our shelf that we haven't had the chance to play yet — I especially had a bad habit as a teenager of buying games I wanted to play and then never getting around to it. Cut to me now, over a decade later, booting up my old PlayStation 3 that I've had forever; the classic Resident Evil and Silent Hill games are on that system, and considering my obsession with Silent Hill f, I wanted to dive back into the first game to get even more hype for the remake.

Among the other games I had are other survival horror titles from the early 2010s: I Am Alive, a demo of Telltale's The Walking Dead, and AMY, which had slipped under my radar up until now. Intrigued by the haunting melody from the game launch, I decided now was the time to give it a try.

I think I bought it for like $2 back then, and I remember thinking that it was a steal. Now that I played it some, almost 15 years later, I want my $2 back.

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Seriously, everyone wants to talk about how Resident Evil 6 was, but man, AMY really beat it for the worst horror game (or honestly, just straight up worst game) of 2012. What started with a solid hook quickly devolved into a hot mess.

As bad as it was, though, I couldn't help myself sitting there and wondering: "How different, and how much more enjoyable, would this be if we got a remaster instead?"

Why was AMY Unanimously Hated?

In AMY, you play as a woman named Lana tasked with taking care of a nonverbal, autistic child named Amy, who also has special psychic abilities and an immunity to the recent plague that's infecting everyone and turning them into zombie-like monsters. It's an escort mission, but it has a unique premise with Amy herself and how some mechanics are approached. For example, you can hold Amy's hand and guide her around, but holding her hand will also heal you in a pinch.

So, what was so wrong with AMY that it was perhaps the worst-rated, most unanimously hated survival horror game of 2012, left to be completely forgotten by time? The answer is actually so simple, it's painful: terrible controls.

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Seriously, that's the only thing holding this game back. The bad controls and terrible, sluggish gameplay will have you raging, which is a disappointment, since everything else is honestly fine.

The acting had a bit of camp, but there was a charm similar to the classic Resident Evil games. The puzzles were convoluted, but I love even Silent Hill's most obtuse puzzles, so I don't really care there, either. The story was solid, but absolutely shattered by the gameplay. It's not just with the movement and combat, either; some things in the code just clearly weren't thought through.

For example, when you get hit by an enemy, Lana staggers backwards ... including if she's hit from behind, causing her to stumble right into an enemy's grasp, and it makes things worse from there. That's not even including the quantity of enemies thrown at you, even in the first proper level.

Not to mention, the camera is heavy and unruly, the optimization is so terrible that running less than 20 FPS is the standard (which, too-low framerates give me headaches, so that wasn't fun), and the stealth doesn't even work half of the time (neither do your weapons). Basically, the game is borderline unplayable and completely unfinished, filled with empty promises and rushed, half-baked ideas.

I was lucky that I was able to play it after developers released a single patch to add more autosave points; otherwise, if I played it upon release, it would be literally impossible to progress. I like to think I'm decent at video games; I don't normally die in tutorial areas/first levels, but I struggled to get out of the train station so much that I ended up just turning the game off. Even worse, when I got back on, it started me right at the very beginning of the chapter, so the autosave didn't even work.

Imagine my disappointment upon searching the internet for solutions, only to find that this is the average experience for anyone playing the game. The controls made it so difficult that most players didn't even make it a quarter of the way through.

And considering how the game actually has a really solid premise and neat ideas, I'd like to see the team try again and bring their true vision to life.

Solid Premise, Shaky Execution

As mentioned prior, this game focuses on protecting a nonverbal, autistic child — and considering how this game came out in 2012, when there wasn't a lot of awareness around disabilities (or anything progressive in all honesty), it immediately stood out. Even now, you don't really get a lot of games that bring disability to the limelight like this, while also making the characters not be completely helpless.

As an escort mission, Amy actually isn't terrible. We've talked about how she'll heal Lana when holding her hand, but other unique mechanics include her being able to use telepathy to move things, create cones of silence, and protect us from our infection, so she's not useless in the slightest (many players complain that when you let go of her hand, she has a tendency to wander off, and I get it — but as a teacher, I also understand she's a child and that is age-appropriate behavior).

If we stray from Amy for too long, Lana will actually succumb to her infection, so it's an incentive to keep this little girl attached to your hip. Plus, she's programmed to be curious about the world, wanting to explore with you, and drawing your attention to anything you missed.

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Sure, parts of this dynamic are confusing (such as Amy also being able to full-on hack doors while we just stand there, and how you have to send her to certain areas that only she can squeeze through, but Lana clearly can also fit), but the core of Lana and Amy's relationship was enough to spark interest.

The game actually has a really solid premise and neat ideas

As far as the actual plot and its characters go, it's not terrible. Not the clearest, but I like piecing together lore, the more complicated the better — and AMY's story seemed like a decent foundation. I was pretty intrigued when I first started, ready to ignore the 15 FPS for the sake of a solid story and even good sound design, but as we know, no amount of good story could save the game from its own gameplay.

Because of Amy's special abilities, she's being hunted by a government organization (called the Phoenix Foundation) that you have to protect her from, since they plan to abduct her to exploit her powers. Admittedly, since I didn't finish it, I had to look up the rest of the plot... and that's about it. The events of the game are essentially centered around this (still neat) premise.

As much as I was interested in the story, there was no incentive for me to make it to the end — and that was entirely because of the terrible control scheme and potato optimization. I would have loved to experience this story properly and to play the game with the full richness that developers intended, but that ship has long sailed.

If gameplay is the only thing holding it back, the Remaster Solution starts to look obvious if you think about it.

Horror Deserves to Shine

We are in the Silver Age of Horror Gaming, with countless remakes and remasters perfectly capturing the magic of our favourite games, all while new and innovative titles continue to blow us away. Now is as good a time as ever for AMY to get a remaster. It doesn't have to be a full-blown remake.

Mass Effect, for example, had not only a graphical overhaul in the Mass Effect Legendary Edition (which is a remaster, not a remake), but a significant gameplay update as well. The Mako was infamous for being bouncy and hard to control, but in the remastered version of the game, it's as smooth as butter. It's not even a remake, and yet, any Mass Effect fan would tell you that the Legendary Edition is the best way to experience the whole trilogy.

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Finding beauty in terror is a unique concept, something that these horror games have mastered wholly.

All AMY needs is something similar, some extra TLC to nudge it in the right direction. If this game were to be properly remastered, with a complete overhaul of the controls and a push for better optimization, I can see AMY actually being an incredibly popular game.

The story, characters, and any other survival horror staples can finally be properly appreciated, rather than being overshadowed by terrible gameplay — and even better, it would actually be fun to play through. The unique mechanics AMY features are begging to be noticed and appreciated, and if there were even a gentle refresh, they absolutely would be.

Besides, what's a better redemption arc for a game like this? It's either go down in history as one of the worst horror games of all time, forgotten by the very genre it desperately clung to like a child, or simply try again and potentially come back stronger than ever. For AMY's sake, I hope it's the latter.