SQUEAL LIKE YOU MEAN IT
Also for: Linux, Macintosh, Nintendo Switch, Windows, Xbox One
In creating the second major entry in the Amnesia series,
Frictional Games handed the reins over to The Chinese Room,
creators of the story exploration games Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. This was originally intended to be a
shorter, experimental title set in the Amnesia universe, but grew to become
its own beast, a stand-alone release that feels more like a Chinese Room joint
than a Frictional one.
This is less of a survival horror game, and more of an interactive horror
tale. Like other Chinese Room titles, exploration and story takes the steering wheel and the survival mechanics are all but gone. This omission is
concerning, but Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs has other qualities that
makes it an almost equally jarring first playthrough. And I gotta admit I
like that title: "A Machine for Pigs". It is upfront about what to expect and full of implied
disgust.
Like its predecessor, this game skillfully uses sound and visual design
to torment the player. And like before, this game is a dark descent. But
where the original mimicked the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft, this
is a more personal descent into the deranged psyche of its protagonist. It
ends up in a nightmarish state more akin to the works of
Edgar Allan Poe. The constantly oppressing atmosphere and the
slaughterhouse horrors so vividly described makes for an engaging thrillride. It doesn't need much gameplay to be effective.
You assume the role of Oswald Mandus, a self-centered, wealthy food
manufacturer who awakens on a dreary night beside his bed after imbibing an
amnesia potion. It's New Year's Eve 1899, and something terrible has taken
place. Your end goal is to ascertain exactly what and why. You remember
nothing, but somehow get the notion that your twin kids are trapped somewhere
deep beneath your mansion, where your meat processing plant lies, and that you
must rescue them. Someone has sabotaged the machine, and in order to reach
them you need to get it running again.
A Machine for Pigs tells a sinister story. Conveyed through audiograms,
auditory flashbacks and written diary entries, it portrays a man's descent
into alienation, depression and hatred in the waning days of the industrial revolution, following a string of misfortunes. The
writing and dialogue sometimes teeters on the edge of unbearable
pretentiousness, but Mandus' great voice actor (Toby Longworth) carefully steers it back on track. His convincing line deliveries
channels Mandus' monologues as the statements of a broken mind.
The gloominess of the protagonist's frail psyche is mirrored in the facility's persistent
darkness. Although outfitted with electric lights, the darkness only seems to become more intense by the lights, feeding on lux to cast stronger
shadows. Everything looks scarier in the dark, and The Chinese Room skillfully inserts items like hunting trophies, disturbing paintings and prosthetic body parts in the environments to keep you on your toes. And wherever you go, you find
pig masks intentionally left behind to upset you.
A disembodied voice guides you through the game, calling you on the phones
scattered throughout the building. As you find your way into the basement,
which descends far deeper than it should, the late-Victorian aesthetic gives way to
the horrifying steampunk setting of an imposing slaughterhouse. The rusty
pipes and machines, all wheezing, puffing and creaking through cramped corridors,
creates a claustrophobic dread. The horror further intensifies as it later
becomes intermixed with the squealings of disfigured creatures roaming in the
dark.
But the creature encounters are a major letdown when compared to the great
hide-and-seek gameplay of The Dark Descent. The cramped hallways make the game
too linear for that. The Chinese Room instead throws a few cheap chase sequences and
fakeout close encounters with the beasts. Some half-hearted AI-driven open
sections still exist, but they are few and far apart. Once again you are
unarmed, but now you can easily outrun almost every monster, and if you get
hurt you heal automatically after a few seconds. Resources are not an issue
here, and neither is sanity, which makes the horror suffer.
The predecessor's feature of scarce lantern oil and tinderboxes for candles is
replaced by an electric torch with unlimited batteries. This reduces your
incentive to explore, which in turn lowers your alertness. Whenever an enemy
comes close the lights start to flicker, which is more helpful than scary. This might be what inclined the
developers to incorporate more jump scares and false alarms. My playthrough for this review was a replay, and remembering how much more forgiving it is, I never felt
the dread of my Amnesia: The Dark Descent replay.
The puzzles are hardly an obstacle. Very few items are interactable, which
makes the puzzle solutions painfully apparent. They mostly consist of finding
and turning valves or pushing buttons. You don't have an inventory, so if you
need to replace a piece of broken machinery, you look for a replacement part
in the vicinity, drag it over and watch it slide neatly into place.
Disappointingly, that's all the designers did to utilize the developer tool's
(the HPL Engine 2) elaborate physics engine.
But the unraveling plot is very disturbing. Some vague lore
connections to The Dark Descent exist, but this is an entirely self-contained
story that might be an appropriate introduction to the franchise. Although
light on gameplay, the story is so creepy on all levels that it makes up for
its shortcomings. It approaches matters of the human soul with the same
unsettling self-righteousness as the explicit killings of innocent beings.
From a sales perspective A Machine for Pigs obviously got a boost by belonging to the
"Amnesia"-brand, but the word-of-mouth hasn't been all that kind. A
number of people felt let down by the change in direction. Fans expected the predecessor's level of interactivity, of systemic horror sprung out of escaping gross AI-controlled monsters. A lot of discussions about this game
seems to revolve around what is missing, instead of what it
accomplishes. Maybe releasing it as its own separate brand would have
served it better in the long run.
But to me, the writing, voice acting and visuals have improved quite a bit in this sequel.
The atmosphere alone proves that horror games doesn't necessarily need a lot
of gameplay. All a player wants is to be engaged in some way, and when they're
constantly stressed out by fear and disturbed by the images suggested by the
storytelling, that's more than enough to keep at least some of them
entertained.
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