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.
Good game, great story, great musics... but no fear no surival horror like TDD... some scary jumps yes 2 or 3 scary jumps no more than this... Amnesia: The Dark descent is a awesome survival horror game that wins a
9 out 10, but A machine for pigs own a 6, 3 of story, 3 of musics nothing more.
A 3 hour long disappointment.
It wasn't bad. But to say it was totally awesome . Liked the old amnesia more. The old one was a bit of a challenge with alot to discover. Machine of pigs was more like: Follow the ******* path. No side rooms or anything. And ofc nothing to pickup! Although the first hour was a hell of beeing scared but after a while it wasn't that scary anymore XD cute little piggies. Too bad the game was quiet short. Although the music and sounds were really great only the gameplay didn't match up with it.
I have a lot of experience with Amnesia The Dark Decent and was elated to play A Machine for Pigs. To be honest, I'm not really sure why the game is called "Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs" as I saw almost nothing Amnesia related. They used some models and a few textures from the main game but that was it basicly. I did not have an inventory, I did not have to worry about my sanity, health nor oil, I could not use tinderboxes and could barley interact with anything at all.
I tried to immerse myself, but failed pretty badly. It offers low to no challange at all. The puzzles were easy and did not require much intelligence to complete. 80% of the quests did include items I had to find or valves I had to turn, as I didn't have an inventory and the original Amnesia quests was a lost call.
The enemies were way to easy to avoid, as half of them spawned in corridors and could easily be spotted by simply sneak behind a wall or a pillar. Not to mention the lantern that warned me when a monster was nearby by constant flickering.
The pig enemie was glitchy and I was able to go right through the enemie model. While I did, he was unable to hit me.
The water monster was also way too easy to avoid as I rarley had to cross the water. Only time I was in close combat with him was when the game developers forced me down the water against my will.
The levels felt very repetitive and offered a low varation. The storyline was actually decently good, and I'm glad for that. I'm not sure if I could find motivation to continue this game otherwise.
Conclusion:
They did a great work with the plot and the voice acting was super. It just faild to deliver a good Amnesia experience, if you can call this Amnesia. I was not pleased with this. I did except much more from an extension to a really awesome game they created for over two years ago.
6/10 - Decent
Well wasn't as let's put in other words "scary as the first one" but for some strange reason I just like the step sounds, and the lantern and the freakin entities in this one.
I gotta give this a 6/10 tho cause you can't really grab stuff which took away the love for the first amnesia!
After dying to play the game for a long time I must say that the end result was disappointing. The story was very good and it was told in a way I would expect from an amnesia game, the thing I missed was the notes you picked up narrating a bit like in TDD. Another big thing, which did it for me, was the fact that it wasn't very scary at all. In fact, I only witnessed 1 or 2 jumpscares and only 1 part where I was sitting at the edge of my chair. Long story short, I think AAMFP was slightly disappointing. The story was great but the horror part of the game was very lacking. If you ask me, thechineseroom should stick with what they are good at; making story-based games and not try to make a story-based game that says "Boo!" trying to scare you every so often but just doesn't quite get the moment right. I would've given this game an 8/10 at least if it was much scarier and a 10/10 if it also had Custom Story support.
The story was really interesting. That's the only good thing about it...
The biggest disappointment was that there is no insanity: without insanity all the "scares" and pigs were kinda lame.
And what's the point of having a lantern that tells you when to turn it off. When I realized that it would do that it was very annoying.
Also the pigs are kinda funny looking and the animations on them are little bit too fast so it makes them look even funnier. And they are so slow that you can outrun them easily. If only the game had that "terror meter" sound I would know that the pigs are supposed to be afraid of.
Then the electric, teleporting pig... w..t..f.. When I saw that thing I said out loud: "Seriously?!".
I miss TDD's heartbounding atmosphere and scares :(