kalirion: How many "easy" survival horror games are there?
bevinator: I didn't find Amnesia to be particularly hard. I mean, I'm not even sure you can die through sanity loss, you just have to put up with increasingly irritating interface screw. If there's a sanity breakpoint that causes you to commit suicide like in the Call of Cthulhu game, I certainly never reached it. And the monsters have such short attention spans you're only in danger of physical death from the invisible water-monsters or if you get trapped in a closet or something.
Amnesia has almost no challenge whatsoever.
The designer's deliberately eliminated anything they felt could start to be traditionally challenging. Particularly with the sanity meter and the AI. Originally there were consequences for losing sanity, but they didn't like how it felt and decided to make it an ambient feature instead. As far as the AI goes, monsters will actively try to KEEP from finding you, but will ACT like they're trying to hunt you down. And yeah, they simply despawn after awhile. Plus, there's no setback for dying. Or rarely, at least.