Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs

Amnesia - A Machine for Pigs is an indirect sequel to The Dark Descent, developed by The Chinese Room. This time you play as Oswald Mandus, a man who awakes in his house and goes on to try and find his children. That's it. That's the game. You embark on a not so dark descent, going into the titular machine to Find. The. Children. Did I mention you need to find the children? Because this review will use the word "children" a fraction of its usage in-game. If it can be called a game. This is a walking simulator with extra steps. Gone the masterfully crafted horror of the first game. Your interaction with the world is limited only to the things you absolutely need to progress (and locked doors for extra fun). There is no inventory, no Sanity and no health (well, technically there is, but it will regenerate over time the whole two times you lose it). The puzzles, as a consequence, are much simpler. Since there is no Sanity the dark poses no threat whatsoever, except that your eyes don't adapt to it, so there's never really a reason to turn off your lamp. It doesn't lose oil anyway. The enemies pose zero threat, as there's no Sanity you can gaze upon them all you like. They pat you sometimes, like children. I'm not even sure I was ever in any danger at all. One could say the game is apt for 5 year old children, if they bothered to play horror at all. Anyway, if you can ignore the "Amnesia" in the title, it is decent. Reading the notes provides mild excitement, and admittedly the last part has some cool sections in it. If you find this game in your library and like walking simulators it's not a complete waste of time to play through it. Just don't expect horror of any kind, other than the occasional jumpscare. Otherwise, I would recommend reading "Das Kapital" instead. Both make basically the same point. Both have a lot of talk about children in them. And at least Marx is upfront about what he's offering, unlike this so-called sequel to a great game.

Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs is a lesser version of its predecessor, with stripped-down mechanics and shorter story, but retaining its effective horror experience through a literal and metaphorical descent into madness. It relies more on the atmosphere of dark, yet very well sculpted levels than on the puzzles of it's mostly dead and non-interactive world, this time with a lot more industrial and steampunk feel to it. Aside from a constant uneasy feeling and occasional thrills, the game's most entertaining part is the exploration of its tragic and gruesome themes.

Being a fan of horror literature, I'm rarely satisfied with horror video-games. They either go in the direction of gore and jump scares, drop you in an empty creaky old house, or rip-off ideas done much better elsewhere. And Machine for Pigs doing all three, I wasn't exactly excited playing it. I don't know how you can place someone in an empty house and expect them to get scared. I only got bored. It doesn't help that most of this game is on rails, and your interaction with it is very limited and set in stone. You can only do what the developers want you to do, when they want you to do it. Everything seems to be locked down, and the things that aren't, aren't necessarily interactable. The biggest interaction you'll get is with the doors in this game, which you need to physically open - you can't just click on them, you need to drag the mouse while clicking to move them. Making something as simple as opening doors an unnecessary chore. You can also move chairs around, but that's about it. The game does have a plot, but I couldn't care less about it. And the game constantly holding your hand, telling you where to go in as blatant a way as possible, I never felt I needed to consult the plot to advance. Especially since Machine for Pigs doesn't have puzzles. Rather you go around searching for hotspots. And once you discover the "run" button, you can simply sprint from room to room searching for hotspots to press in order to move forward. As for the visuals, they're severely lacking. I'm reminded of PS1 games as far as quality, and The Sims as far as design goes. Meaning you'll constantly see the same items over and over again. The same writing desks containing the same pointless items, the same levers you need to press, the same lamps you need to turn on, etc. I felt like I was in a 3D horror-themed Sims house, rather than a house built to fit a story. It doesn't help that the attempts at horror only hinder the gameplay - earthquakes, fog, dizziness & flashbacks.

This game is very, very good. Let's start with what the game is. It's a walking simulator with a few relatively simple, but interesting, puzzles thrown in. It is also a very darkly atmospheric game that in several places literally gave me chills, and even had a few solid jump scares. It is an excellent steampunkish Gothic setting that pulls you in and feels very realistic. It's a fairly long exploration with lots of different and interesting environments (including a spooky church that should be out of place but isn't). For your money, you will get a decent amount of playing time. Graphics are excellent and controls are better than most walking simulators I've played. What it is NOT: fast-paced, though there are some heart-pounding moments. It doesn't end at the right place--the endgame stretches a bit too long, and the textures are overused during that time. This is because the environment in that area is far larger than it should be (and in some cases unnecessarily complex). However, the ending is quite good, and well worth waiting for. The game is not difficult. Sometimes the graphics and effects are a bit annoying--shaking sometimes, and smears in areas that make the already very dark environments hard to see. I am a big fan of the Chinese Room's earlier offering _Dear Esther_, which to me is a near perfect walking simulator. _Amnesia_ is a worthy successor and fixes some of the issues with DE, including controls, length, and the addition of the aforementioned puzzles. Buy it, play it, and enjoy it--including the nightmares you might suffer after playing it!

The first Amnesia did something which was interesting: It fused an extremely eerie atmosphere with a gameplay which frightened players who usually get bored by "horror games". More specifically, it used the tension already present with the insanity and the darkness and the eerie sound and mood, added minor startling things but between the two this turned into a terrifying situation for the player. Light was limited, sanity was limited, hence time was limited, and yet you couldn't even look towards the enemy patrolling over there. A Machine For Pigs (AMFP) retains the atmosphere. The lighting, the sound design, the decor, the interactions, this all works splendid, and I feel just as tense and on the edge as I did playing The Dark Descent (TDD). But, unlike TDD, this one never does anything with the atmosphere it creates. It just... yeah. Nothing really. This ultimately makes it very disappointing, because while it isn't a bad experience, it becomes boring *very* fast, a result of simply nothing happening much. The moments of genuine terror, of dread whether to open or not open that door up ahead, they no longer exist. This feels like someone took Dear Esther and filled in Amnesia's atmosphere. Which is exactly what it is, really.