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Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (2016, Playstation 4) Review


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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