Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

They really need to stop pulling that shit of walking down a corridor and listening to conversations. The entire last hour is full of it, on really linear environments, with no patrolling enemies. It's just set piece after set piece, which is odd considering TDD went the other way; early encounters are all highly scripted, later ones are far more unpredictable and freeform.

Telepig at the end was more annoying than scary. It felt so out of place to have a 'Boss Battle' style enemy in a Dark Descent game and all I could think while encountering it was the meeting at The Chinese Room where someone suggested they need a 'bigger monster' to scare people at the end. Monsters aren't scary. The unknown is scary, and we've been playing with pigmen the entire game. Just because this one is sparking and goes invisible doesn't somehow make it nightmarish.

There's a lot of wasted potential here, but I'm not too surprised. Early sequences were fantastic, refueling the tank springs to mind, or just wandering around the house, all felt very tense. The centrifuge area was pretty solidly executed. But it all seems silly compared to how well done TDD was. I'm talking stuff like giving you no option but to go into water as opposed to just dropping you into it, or the cistern in TDD where there isn't even a monster for a long time but every player is freaked the fuck out and paranoid. None of that really happens here.

-Mandus' wife dies in childbirth.
-He lives relatively happily until he takes a vacation to Mexico with his children.
-There, they find the "stone egg," a relic of an ancient god that still holds his spirit or power or whatever.
-The god shows Mandus visions of his sons dying very painful deaths in the Battle of Somme in WW1.
-This drives Mandus to madness, so he kills his sons on the spot in order to spare them that pain.
-However, this sacrifice strengthens the god's power, while simultaneously linking his soul to Mandus or something.
-The god gives Mandus the idea that all of mankind of diseased, and plants the idea of the Machine in his head
-Mandus travels back to London and spends the next year building the Machine for the purpose of making an army of pig men to kill everyone
-But then, somehow, right before he unleashes them upon the world, he has a change of heart and goes about sabotaging the Machine, while simultaneously contracting sudden amnesia
-This is where the game starts. You travel through the guts of the Machine, discover what a dickhole you've been, then kill yourself at the core of the Machine in order to kill the mad god that lives inside you.

Best summary I've seen so far.

General consensus I've noticed is Aztec god/orb gets into Mandus, Mandus goes crazy, starts butchering/converting poor, starts butchering/converting rich, has a change of heart, sabotage, amnesia. In the end he kills himself to kill the intelligence in the machine/himself organising all of this.

There's a few nasty plotholes, like why you have Amnesia, if this thing is the same as what Alexander was in TDD (which never really seemed actively hostile to mankind, just uncaring and wanted to get home).

This one felt a lot less scary than TDD, I rarely had to sprint except in the forced encounters. Despite having unlimited fuel I was content to not use my lantern for a majority of the game, and, after the intro portion, the tension never seemed to increase. probably partially because TDD was a supernatural horror that could throw enemies to you at random, where this one seemed really scripted and entirely predictable the whole way through.
Turning a valve used to be the scariest thing, and i never got a moment of "Fuck, i have to go BACK into the water/X room!?" etc.
The biggest thing is TDD forced you to move or you go insane and the game gets tougher on you, and made you want to not stand in the light OR the dark. none of these elements really appeared in machine for pigs.

And the ending scene where you walk to the machine to rip your heart is both beautiful and terrifying in a psychological way. The Machine's monologue is gorgeous.

Completed the game in under 4 hours according to steam.. not happy at all. I don't think I got a fright once outside of the jump-loud-noise scares. The original Amnesia took me like 10 hours to complete because I was so scared and moved so slowly. Nothing like that in this game. The flickering light every time an enemy is near? Not only does it feel ripped straight from FEAR, it was the one bad thing about FEAR. Why would you want to know when shits about to go down? Ruins any suspense. I thought the puzzles were bad, not that there was many of them, or any complex. With very limited interactivity with the environment (oil, matches, moving objects, why remove this?) you are just walking from point A to B while someone throws fancy words at you and tries to get you to read notes with more fancy words. One positive thing about this game is the audio. Amazing, Dear Esther had fantastic audio as well, it was to be expected. But this feels like a Dear Esther part 2 with Amnesia slapped across the top. The only relief I have is that this was not developed by the guys who made the first game, and I'm sure the Frictional Games developers will redeem my disappointment with their next game.

My fav. non-note part of the game is the desperate rant at the very end about how bad the 20th century is going to be.

The lack of inventory in the game seriously took a toll on the puzzles too. The most elaborate puzzle is when you are trying to get the two items in the centrifuge to produce the acid. All you did was walk to two different rooms that took about 2 minutes each and shove something in a wind tube to transport it to the centrifuge. It required minimal effort or thought. Let's compare that with just one puzzle from the dark descent. Towards the middle-endish portion of the game you have to extract something (A poison I think?) from a corpse. Like 45 minutes prior you collected a needle, and somewhere along you got a small vile, and a third item I can't recall. You had to combine these items and jab them into the corpse to extract the blood.

When you actually figure out that puzzle, you feel accomplished because it was out of the ordinary and involved items you almost thought were worthless until this moment. You had to actually think about how these items could feasibly be Macgyver'd into something that helped with your objective. To draw one more comparison, at any time on the road to that task something could seriously fuck with you. You finally extract the blood and monsters come screaming into the room to ruin your accomplishment.

When we compare this to Machine For Pigs, you have really simple puzzles that are all within close proximity. When you find the fuses you need, they are right next to the machine they need to go into, because it would be seriously annoying to walk for more than 10 seconds having to hold something that wouldn't allow you to open doors without dropping it. They made it so it was a mechanical requirement to have things close to each other because they opted out of having an inventory. The further problem is that I knew when I had an item in my hand I am not going to run into a monster because it would be bad for the game. They can't have a monster appear and cause you to drop/misplace a key item in the game, it would just be stupid. So when I got the fuses, I was fairly certain nothing would come running at me. When I dropped the chemicals into the wind tube and headed back I figured the reason the tube was there was because a monster was probably going to attack me, lo and behold I was right.

When we compare the two scenarios, the first Amnesia destroys the second. They are able to set up involved puzzles that you get a real sense of accomplishment for completing, only to then replacement that feeling with one of absolute fear as monsters come to wreck your shit and you need to figure out where and what you have to do in order to survive. Due to not having an inventory all puzzles are very shallow and unsatisfying and don't really enhance the game in any way.

The monsters were also incredibly shitty compared to Amnesia, and it's not just about the design. If you compare the pigs with the Amnesia monsters, you can probably objectively say the pigs were scarier looking, but the actual appearance wasn't what made the Amnesia monsters scary, it was that they were blurry, shouted at you and caused you to lose your shit. This goes back to how the sanity mechanic played into turning what would be average monsters, into truly scary creatures. The Dark Descent monsters were also much more intelligent and seemed to be a bit more active in pursuing you. You would have to run and hide from them and actively try to avoid them. The first time I encountered the pigs I needed to get past it so I walked up, agro'd the pig and then did some loony toon-ish move by juking him around a crate then running past him. I never once had to hide from a pig, I just ran away and it either stopped following or just magically disappeared with no rhyme or reason. At no point did I ever have to hide in fear, or wait for a monster to pass. I'd either run or juke a monster, which when I can so easily avoid this primary monster in the game it kind of loses the effect since I have no reason to think the pig will ever catch me or ever be in a situation where he can seriously harm me.

WHY THE FUCK DID I JUST PLAY A GAME WHERE I JUST RAN LIKE A PUSSY FROM MANGALORES FROM THE 5TH ELEMENT? WHAT A STUPID STUPID HORRIBLE GAME. SO BAD.

You're basically tossed into the house with zero explanation as to what the hell was going on and they just expect you to finish simple repetitive puzzles. The first time i had to find a hidden lever it was kind of an "Ah hah!" moment for me, but after that it just degraded to a repetitive experience. The segments that were outside were really cool and interesting and it was a nice divergence from the original. I liked that part of the game and it had some cool environments.

Moving forward, going to the church was another pretty cool environment with lack luster puzzles. I thought there was a lot of potential here to introduce more of the key aspects of the story and explain a little further here. They did a bit of explaining with the document about Father Jeremy or whatever his name is, but I think that it was pretty obvious what had been going on at this point.

Once you enter the machine and get to the meat and potatoes of the game, I feel like the game kind of drops off and loses a lot of what the dark descent had going for it. I never felt at risk, I never felt captivated by the environment (except once you get to the main housing of the machine, that was pretty cool) or too scared to continue, The simplistic puzzles never made me venture through the factory for anything, since you couldn't collect items. The water parts of the game were also disappointing and the implementation of them was pretty stupid, especially when you just fall into the water. It made me a little tense, but not scared.

All in all, the stupid lantern mechanics, lack of inventory, and less than compelling reasons to explore the machine added up to make it a disappointing game. The fact that there were only a couple of sections where you didn't have the use of a lantern was disappointing. In the beginning I kept waiting for the scary parts and waiting for the game to make me jump,. It really never happened and I'm just thoroughly disappointed by the gameplay.