Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

"Don't need to be the one who does it to you
Don't need to twist the knife or push it through
Just want to see that you're in misery too
Just like me inside

I think you're better off dead"

 

Aesthetic Perfection - Schadenfreude

 

 

Horror movies, books or games not being muh thang (never silenced a hill) though I definitely enjoyed Amnesia: The Dark Descent and even saw some value in the more amateurish Penumbra series I lost track of continuing the Amnesias. Only now, after Rogue Trader's drow city planted the suggestion in my head, did I get around to A Machine for Pigs, bought the year it came out thinking I'd get "into" the genre after the original's great impression. Twelve years later... it's good!

Eat the rich. And everyone else while you're at it.

I'm always leery of series being handed off to new developers but The Chinese Room's presentation managed to surpass the original while still maintaining its central theme of personal guilt. (Giving me a fair bit of hope for the success of Bloodlines 2.) Note I said presentation. While the execution is excellent, the plot's basic moralism is fairly trite, and better discussed alongside Rogue Trader's failure to entice me with its heresy. (And giving me a fair bit of anxiety about potentially watered-down bloodsuckery; so it goes.)

 

Pigs' first impression is of more lush environments than the original, if a bit of 2000s 3D blockiness yet lingered. Level design proves not merely consistently adept in herding you toward your next objective-

Oh! Ta, love. Ever so helpful.

- but rendering tangible that brassy turn-of-the-previous-century steampunk aesthetic and playing on gamer expectations. The moment you see a pig mask it's obvious what kind of monster will be Abbotting and Costelloeing you around your palatial works. To their credit they didn't insult your intelligence by faking any secrecy about the title. To their greater credit, they made the pig masks not realistic but painted them garishly like piggy-banks, contrasting all the more with the decidedly earthy brutes themselves once you meet them.

Take the very start of the story, for instance.

You come to the main entrance of your mansion, giant luxurious double doors. Not just part of the background, but tantalizingly interactable, and tauntingly locked. We intuit that we won't be permitted to simply... leave. But yes, of course any gamer worth his salt will nonetheless want to test that alternate path before writing it off. Being denied egress explicitly and not just passively just reinforces your whole situation's horror story menace. Your entrance to said entrance hall is also greeted with a mighty, ominous rumble and a heavy rattling of chains. Not from bedsheet spectres, but the giant chandeliers. Psych!

 

The puzzles are middle of the road, not brilliant but well fitted to your plot advancement, avoiding standard adventure game obtuseness. The action sequences are just frequent enough to spice up your dark descent. Just enough call-backs crop up (like the thing in the water) to maintain some minimal continuity without rehashing its predecessor. The plot is... blunt... and primitive in its emotional appeals... but at least it plays its cards in proper suit, openly shoving its monsters' repulsiveness down your throat instead of forcing you to look away.

 

But it distinguishes itself (surprisingly for a genre where storytelling mostly consists of pregnant silences, ominous creaking and the occasional mad howl) by writing and voice acting. Backstory voiceovers are delivered with the aplomb of old radio dramas, journal notes in flowery Victorian style with a baked-in dose of the ironic or comically macabre: "like pigs to truffles" or directing sewage back into the Thames where it belongs.

 

Nice. With a less conventionally moralizing climax it could've been a classic, but still, nice. As a parting shot, I will remark it's funny the pig-men are so much more interesting here than in Weird West. Did that later trainwreck try to copy Amnesia and fail in this as it did in everything else?