The Swine are Rising! In 2010 Frictional Games terrified the world with the cult horror Amnesia: A Dark Descent. Now they bring you a new nightmare. Created by The Chinese Room, the studio behind Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is an intense and terrifying journey into the heart of darkness that lurks within us all. The year is 1899. Wealthy industrialist Oswald Mandus awakes in his bed, wracked with fever and haunted by dreams of a dark and hellish engine. Tortured by visions of a disastrous expedition to Mexico, broken on the failing dreams of an industrial utopia, wracked with guilt and tropical disease, he wakes into a nightmare. The house is silent, the ground beneath him shaking at the will of some infernal machine: all he knows is that his children are in grave peril, and it is up to him to save them. Step back into the horror.
It borrows elements from Amnesia and Dear Esther but manages not to attain a fraction of the brilliance of either. It doesn't have the gameplay that made Amnesia great. I'm not talking about the lack of a sanity meter (which felt contrived anyway) or the infinite oil lamp, but rather no interactivity/exploring or running/hiding. Inventory is gone and naturally there wasn’t a single difficult puzzle – barely anything that could be called a puzzle at all. Putting gears into the engine when they are right next to the engine, for example. Or flicking switches at random to make things explode. This seemed like a wasted opportunity, especially as this engine does puzzles so well.
And it felt as if a chapter was missing – surely there should have been more made of a level in the actual slaughterhouse where pigs are being killed/gore everywhere/carcasses on hooks etc? I was dreading this for the whole game and it never really happened. Then the pig rampage also seemed anticlimactic.
+Story. The central theme/philosophy however was a bit heavy handed.
+Music
+It seems to understand what made Silent Hill 2 great. The character study of a damaged mind, whom you can relate to, care about. Empathize as things progressively become more hopeless. Its atmosphere is no where near as oppressive as Silents hill's though..
-Very few scares, or times where you face a monster, you don't feel motivated to continue on. Your life has to be under-threat for you to care. I thought this was supposed to be horror.
-Easy. No difficult puzzles. Very few chase scenes. You can count them on one hand.
-Lack of interactivity, for some reason the vast majority of objects are not interactable. I'm not just talking about the child proofed draws/cupboards but just normal objects that look like they can be picked up, can't be.
-That horrible giant room with lots of dead pigs, guts sprawled everywhere slaughterhouse... never came.
-Shorter than expected... 5-6 hours for a slow playthrough.