You guys all played Amnesia: The Dark Descent, right? That whole game "happened" before I came onboard at Kotaku, but I hope that everyone here had a chance to play it and talk about it to the extent that it deserved. Because seriously: scary, rad game.

Thomas Grip, the founder of Frictional Games, the studio behind Amnesia, has posted a lengthy blog post in honor of the game's one-year anniversary. "Everybody in the company has gotten raised salaries," reads the post, "and we have more than enough money to complete our next game… Reactions to the game are still pouring in, and it feels extremely good and humbling to be able to have that kind of impact on people."

(I'm guessing that by "that kind of effect" Grip means "Making thousands of people post hilarious videos of themselves pissing their pants in fear.")

After post-morteming a bunch of things regarding the launch and reception of the game, Grip moves to the question "What's next?" He starts with consoles:

Another big change for the future will be consoles. The main reason for choosing consoles is purely financial. Right now our main income comes from very few channels, and we need to spread out the risk somehow. The other reason is that we feel we are missing out on exposure by not being on a console and not reaching as many players as we should be able to.

And while Grip notes that console tech is "really old compared to the PC right now," he assures readers that "Our current thinking is to make the console get a lower end version and make sure console specs influence the PC version as little as possible." If I had to guess, I'd say that the time is right for a downloadable console port of Amnesia, much like Crytek recently announced with the original Crysis.

Lastly, Grip discusses Frictional's next game:

Finally, in regards to what our next project is about, the basic idea is to use lessons learned from Amnesia and then take it to the next level. We have mentioned before that the next game will not be as horror focused as our past ones, but still have a scary atmosphere. Our intention this time is to dig into deeper and more intellectually demanding subjects. Another goal for us is to get past having classical puzzles that break the flow, but without making the game into a spoon-fed type of experience.

It's always cool to see an indie have enough financial success with a first project to really stretch out with a follow-up—kinda like what Jonathan Blow is doing with his phenomenal-looking Braid follow-up The Witness.

Very much looking forward to learning more about Grip and his team's next project which, toned-down horror elements or no, should prove to be a creepy good time.

Amnesia - One Year Later [Frictional Games via Game Informer]