Anna - Extended Edition

The story in Anna is significantly changed in the Extended Edition. The following applies to that version of the game.

Anna concerns an unnamed protagonist who, after a series of dreams centered around a sawmill nestled somewhere in the Italian mountains, finds an envelope containing photographs of him being in the Val D'Ayas Valley, a location he has no recollection of visiting. As his mental state declines, he collapses while giving a lecture on history. Following a short stay in a nearby hospital, a visiting colleague accidentally forces him to open the envelope. Contained within the envelope are pictures of the sawmill haunting the protagonist's dreams. Silently vowing his love to a figure known only as Anna, he sets out in search of the sawmill.

Dreampainters, the development studio, based the story on legends from the Val D'Ayas region of Italy, particularly one about a sawmill where a lumberjack killed his family. They claimed that the game's focus was on mystery-solving and exploration, with the player being able to discover the plot at their own pace. One of Anna's particularly infamous features, the ability to pick up any object (no matter if it will be used later on in the game), was apparently based on the developers' hatred for adventure games and cartoons where the important objects were made more obvious to the viewer.

Anna would reportedly have a feature whereby the game would interpret the player's actions to try and scare them; for example, if a player focused on a particular object for too long, that object would appear more often. However, no such feature appeared in the game. Dreampainters also claimed that the extent of the protagonist's descent into madness would determine the ending, but the ending was actually determined by when the player decided to leave the sawmill.

Anna received "Mixed or average reviews," according to Metacritic. The graphics, story and sound were praised, but it was criticized for the obscurity of its narrative, complexity of its interface, poor translation, and difficulty of its puzzles. The horror elements were both praised and criticized by different reviews; IGN's Anthony Gallegos initially praised the horror aspects but lamented that "most of the fear factor is neutered after you realize nothing can harm you." Destructoid's Holly Green praised the atmosphere, but claimed "the pre-release screenshots feel a bit misleading."

VideoGamer's Lewis Denby liked the "genuine scares here and there," but felt similarly to Gallego about the lack of challenge. The puzzles met a far more divisive reaction. Denby thought that "Most of the puzzles don't make any sense," while Gallegos confided that many of the puzzles were "anger-inducing," describing them as "really just trial and error situations." Green noted that the lack of hints turned the puzzle-solving into "a game of pin the tail on the donkey," but noted that the interface helped reduce the frustration of pixel-hunting.