Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a first-person survival horror game where you explore a dark, decaying castle as Daniel, solving puzzles and evading monsters while managing limited lantern oil and your character's sanity. There is no combat; tension comes from hiding, careful movement, and atmospheric dread. Players typically experience it in short, intense sessions, often at night with headphones, focusing on immersion rather than long play marathons. Many run it on modest settings for reliable smoothness, while others apply fan-created graphical overhauls thanks to the game's open-sourced engine. At 4K, the HPL Engine 2's deferred shading, shadow mapping, and sanity-distortion effects gain substantial visual impact. Every light source, volumetric glow, and texture detail is rendered across far more pixels, making the oppressive darkness and sudden reveals far more cinematic. This resolution also exposes limitations in the original 2010 optimizations, particularly when combined with modern mods that introduce high-resolution assets. The main sources of load are dynamic lighting, high-quality shadows, SSAO, and elevated texture demands, which can cause stuttering or inconsistent pacing on underpowered hardware. Common pain points include hitches during tense chase sequences or in complex castle areas that break the carefully crafted fear, and misunderstanding that while the base game is light, pushing it to 4K with mods turns it into a respectable GPU test. Before choosing a 4K PC for this game, understand that your priority is consistent frame delivery and high VRAM capacity to avoid visual artifacts in the mood-critical lighting and effects. The engine scales gracefully with resolution but requires a modern GPU to keep everything fluid when sanity effects and shadows are at their heaviest.