Posted on: September 11, 2013

dyscode

Games: Reviews: 36

A Dear Esther for the Pigs

SHORT: If Dear Esther is your GOTY: you will enjoy this game. If you love Amnesia: stay away from this! This game is NOTHING like Amnesia, more like Requiem, minus the puzzles! LONG: The game lasts 8 to 10 hours and is just a corridor semi scary machinery and 4 or 5 hide and seek encounters, incl. a semi boss fight. Amnesia managed to scare me to the bone within an hour and kept the level until the end. AMFP just drags through many forced even triggers and off-screen scares that fall flat. The Fade-to-White is too often used as dramatic means to bear any weight. There are a few hints on Amnesia's story, and a acutally clever ending twist but too late to bear any weight for the crudely bolted story that always shys away when things get interesting. AMFP also let's you look at the horror all you want, unlike Amnesia. The really horrible thing in this game is the pale color palette, with so little contrast, it gives you a headache from the strain on your eyes, early on. Puzzles, are basically just for throwing you some interactive bones, to let you do something at all and besides letters there is nothing to find or to explore, giving AMFP a Just-Look-Don't-Touch feel. Two stars are for some scenes that are as disturbing as humanly touching. Very few but powerful. I thought Dear Esther was a design choice, and was quite fine for what it is and it was upfront about what it meant to convey. But now it is obvious that Chinese Room just cannot do any better or anything else.

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Posted on: December 15, 2013

Grogger

Verified owner

Games: Reviews: 7

Not up to par or scares.

If you're an Amnesia fan playing this you'll forever be waiting for this to step up its game to the level of Amnesia but it never will, leaving you somewhat confused, pretty disappointed and hollow upon a quick completion. Looking at this as an Amnesia game, it falls well short of what a fan would expect. This isn't simply because it lacks important things such as the sanity meter, the limited lantern or inventory, it's because it just doesn't cut it and wouldn't even if it still had those things. You can't turn an adventure/mystery game into a horror game just by making it dark and adding some noises and blood. You won't find yourself cowering in a corner terrified to move while loosing your sanity in the darkness. You won't find yourself on the edge of your seat trying to run faster because *something* has spotted you and is after you. It instead relies on cheap tricks and sounds to make you jump, like a low budget movie. It's only a matter of time before you start catching onto their tricks, and will even be able to tell when you're safe by the level design, which is almost always. The scares are few and far between without being all that jarring, forever building up suspense without being able to deliver the punch leaving you with one anticlimax after another.

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Posted on: September 13, 2013

daktari999

Verified owner

Games: 19 Reviews: 1

Quit the game after 90 minutes

I'm unable to write a full review because I'm quitting after 90 minutes of running down boring corridors. The first Amnesia was a masterpiece but this game should be avoided at all costs.

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Posted on: September 22, 2013

Metah

Games: 13 Reviews: 1

The Worst Non-game I Have Ever Played

The best way to describe A Machine for Pigs is that it is basically the movie Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. Except for rotating valves and opening doors there are no gameplay mechanics to speak of. No tinderboxes or oil to collect. This game makes Final Fantasy 13 look nonlinear. There is not a single iota of challenge to be found: puzzles are boringly easy and enemies are few and far between. Unlike A Dark Descent, where enemies spawn randomly, here they always spawn in the same place and have a stomping ground of about 10 cm. There isn't even a penalty for standing in the darkness where enemies can't detect you! Not only is the story shockingly bad, it is extremely over-reaching, over-dramatic and pointless. The game is not scary. The player is given such a long period of time to recognize what is happening that no jump scare will ever get you, and the subject matter is far from disturbing. I find the Teletubbies to be more frightening than A Machine for Pigs. Surprisingly there is uncensored male nudity in this game, including a scene where there is a literal respirator attached to a boy's genitalia, which is just absurd to the point of hilarity. Read that sentence again just for good measure. Pretty much the whole time I played this game I was making fun of it for how bad it is. The best thing about this game is how short it is. I can't believe I paid $20 for such a bad non-game. I would not recommend this game to anyone.

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Posted on: December 17, 2013

AiwaZ

Games: 73 Reviews: 2

A pretentious walking simulator

Walking linear corridors all the time, trying to understand a cryptic yet silly and stupid storyline doesnt make this game worth a bite, simply because you would be too upset to play it for how bad it is compared to A Dark Descent, AMFP is a huge stepdown and while it is horrendously short (2 hours on record and i was taking my pace) it hasnt an interesting story, which is i am afraid, the only thing this game has.

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