Puzzles make up half of the game (the other half is blindly stumbling around in dark, terrified and praying to God you don’t run into any monsters), but they aren’t really puzzles. I can’t understand why the developers would choose to ditch this when there was an excellent opportunity to greatly expand on and improve it. In the previous outing, exposure to monsters or too long in the dark caused blurred vision and hallucinations, but no such repercussions are present in A Machine for Pigs. Perhaps the biggest feature removed is the sanity meter. Tinderboxes are no great loss, but carefully managing your oil reserves in Dark Descent added another layer of tension that is noticeably absent. Without the inventory screen, there are no tinderboxes to light candles to provide extra sources of safe, soothing light, and the electric lantern requires no sustenance, unlike its oil-based forefather. This sequel deviates quite a bit from its predecessor by taking the already minimal mechanics and stripping them back even further. Every step forward requires courage and the game becomes increasingly adept at introducing new ways to unnerve you.
It’s true to genre and really makes you feel helpless. You’re only tool is an electric lantern that is both a blessing and a curse, illuminating the way but also drawing the attention of the scores of monsters that lurk in the shadows. Instead you’re forced to either run, hide or die. There are no weapons to defend yourself with, no inventory to carry items.
A second playthrough would probably be more rewarding, as you’d pick up on some of the more subtle hints missed the first time around, but that really shouldn’t have to be the case.Ī Machine for Pigs is very minimal from a gameplay perspective. And while the plot is solid, this disjointed presentation may cause the story to appear a bit nonsensical to some. Information is drip-fed in a non linear fashion, so that you’re kept guessing as to what the real truth is, right up to the end. While the title of the game might reveal a seemingly large part of the plot, the real truth is hidden deeper in the game. Phonographs can be found in certain places, containing recordings of a conversation between Mandus and someone called “The Professor” while phone conversations with a vaguely familiar voice offer some guidance as to your immediate objective. The plot is slowly revealed through several devices: Mandus’ journal takes notes and expands on events witnessed in the game, and scraps of a mysterious diary offer additional insight. It is what compels you to keep going, keep playing so that you might uncover the truth behind all the foreshadowing and hidden clues. It’s hard to go into detail without spoiling the plot completely, and with a game such as this, the story is the key driving force. The search takes him across the streets of London, into abandoned factories, an empty church and finally down below, into the heart of the infernal machine itself. Now that he is finally recovered and coherent, he begins to search the empty mansion for his twin boys, who are all that remains of his family after his wife passed a year ago. It was here that he spent the last few months recovering from an illness contracted in Mexico, and during this time he was plagued by visions and feverish nightmares of a great machine.
Set on New Years Eve 1899, in London, the player is introduced to the world through the tired, bleary eyes of wealthy industrialist Oswald Mandus as he wakes from a deep sleep in his empty chambers. Thankfully, they did better than expected, and managed to create a game that can stand proudly alongside its elder sibling. Enthralled by the 2010 original, I knew that if they captured even half of that nightmarish atmosphere, it would make a worthy sequel. With the old guard failing as their sequel numbers increase (Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Dead Space, to name a few), I feared the worst for Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. Hell, so many so-called “survival horrors” fail to even meet the basic premise of the genre itself, and seem to blindly ignore the “survival” part. Glancing into the recent past, it’s surprising how few horror games actually live up to the title.
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