You won't be hiding in any more cupboards, barricading doors or watching them get knocked down - and finally, and most disappointingly, The Dark Descent's sanity meter is gone. Gone is the need to maintain the oil in your lantern or hoard tinderboxes to light candles. Amnesia's feature list is an awful lot smaller in A Machine for Pigs. Whatever you think this game's secret is, by the way, you're wrong.īut no small amount of butchery has taken place here. If that was you, stay well away from A Machine for Pigs. I know an awful lot of people who couldn't get past the first hour or two of Amnesia because it was too scary. Most importantly of all, once again you're given no means to fight said Things, just a single lantern that attracts them. It's an exhausting journey through a good few miles of flickering lights, nasty surprises and Things that want to make mincemeat out of you. It would have to be: "Did you find it less scary than the first Amnesia, too?"Īnd then, slightly sheepishly: "And. Though, if I'm honest, the first thing I'd say to another escapee of the Machine for Pigs is nothing to do with the plot.
I'm looking forward to meeting other people who've finished it, just so I can share my favourite mouthfuls of dialogue, my favourite dingy reveal. A horror game with a passable plot running right the way through is one of the rarest things in gaming, and in places A Machine for Pigs' plot, imagery and ideas can feel succulent. There are failings in the storytelling the game can hinge heavily on found diary scraps rather than environmental cues, but I can't bring myself to complain. Without wanting to spoil anything, A Machine for Pigs' tale of a slaughterhouse gone wrong offers a more refined narrative, more coherent themes and explains less in its final act, letting the story leave the tracks entirely and go sailing into the abyss - which feels entirely correct. As terrifying and inventive as The Dark Descent was, it struggled to answer any players who were brave or detached enough to reach its final third, where the plot devolved into a porridge-y mixture of alchemy, cults, alternate dimensions and imperfect set-pieces. It's these large questions that drive you through A Machine for Pigs' six or so hours - and it's actually in its plot that it eclipses the first Amnesia. These are slippery questions that redouble themselves as you march through the dark, which is always growing larger, more horrible: "Who are you really? What is this place, really?" A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes, you know. Players once again find themselves in a sprawling, dingy complex with no idea who they are or what happened here. Mostly though, Frictional's tactile first-person horror is intact. I'm sad to say I didn't invent any monsters in Amnesia's indirect sequel, A Machine for Pigs - co-developed by Dear Esther studio The Chinese Room - and the devil's in the details. This hall was meant to be a break from the game's nauseating tension, and I was flattening myself against walls, jumping at every dripping pipe, solving the puzzle and then running as fast as possible away from absolutely nothing. The game's atmosphere was so overpowering, its rules so murky, that in a well-lit pump room I became convinced that an invisible monster was in there with me. The most memorable monster I encountered in it was one that didn't exist. There's one story I always tell about the first Amnesia.
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