Quick Look: Solo: Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

Not a game for me :D

I would love to see a endurance run of this game.

That lady singing in the last room was truly something. The game does such a great job with making it feel like something is about to happen. I thought a pig monster was behind every corner for the last 7 minutes of the video.

@zurv: cool story bro, you don't have to watch

Going to finish the Dark Descent before I buy this or Outlast. Going to finish it, I say!!

patrick you forgot to cut out you disabling the steam notifications

Patrick should play with his back to the wall so he doesn't get spooked.

Amnesia never really scared me, can't say it did much of anything for me. Not saying I'm some steel nerved badass as slender scares the ever loving piss out of me but Amnesia just always falled flat for me.

@freshbandito said:

I always preferred the slow, nerve wracking build of games like Amnesia to stuff like Slender and (it seems like) Outlast. It's just different styles of horror, I guess.

Praise be to Patrick after this recent cavalcade of horror games. The man is putting up some great content for the site, even if it scares the shit out of me.

BEHIND THE SCENES! REAL-TIME! (I will cut this out but it will take a bit.)

I love that even a guy who plays a lot of horror games looks as scared as I do on the occasions that I play one.

I love a lot of what this game is doing but probably don't have the balls to play it.

The writing is FANTASTIC though, wow.

Fascinating, because Slender bored me to no end while the tension in Amnesia is nerve-wrecking to me.

Isn't Quick Look Solo just Spookin WIth Scoops EX?

I wasn't a fan of the sanity system in the original Amnesia so I'm glad they took it out here. Unfortunately, it seems like you can also see the influence from The Chinese Room. There was a whole lot of nothing going on in that QL, a little too much Dear Esther and not enough Amnesia for my taste.

I think Patrick needs to start wearing a heart monitor for these segments. I am curious as to actually how much his heart rate goes up and down.

I think the big problem for me was I always felt like amnesia was a game where I walked to a puzzle, solved a puzzle and then hid in a corner until the monster walked away. I couldn't push the game loop to the back of my head to enjoy the atmosphere, almost definitely more a problem on my end than the games. Amnesia tried so hard to push it's oppressive atmosphere on me that it smothered my ability to put my own fear in and so instead became a binary this is supposed to be a scary moment / this is a quiet moment.

Meanwhile Slender just very simply played on my fear of something just out of the corner of my eye inexorably moving towards me with malicious intent. In it's simplicity it allowed my imagination to fill in the gaps with my own fears.

It's very much an each their own situation but when it comes to scary games I very much prefer a more open and simple setting that lets my imagination run wild as the person who knows how best to scare me is of course myself.

I think the big problem for me was I always felt like amnesia was a game where I walked to a puzzle, solved a puzzle and then hid in a corner until the monster walked away. I couldn't push the game loop to the back of my head to enjoy the atmosphere, almost definitely more a problem on my end than the games. Amnesia tried so hard to push it's oppressive atmosphere on me that it smothered my ability to put my own fear in and so instead became a binary this is supposed to be a scary moment / this is a quiet moment.

Meanwhile Slender just very simply played on my fear of something just out of the corner of my eye inexorably moving towards me with malicious intent. In it's simplicity it allowed my imagination to fill in the gaps with my own fears.

It's very much an each their own situation but when it comes to scary games I very much prefer a more open and simple setting that lets my imagination run wild as the person who knows how best to scare me is of course myself.

Really depends on what you define as "Nothing".

Yeah it's very much an each to their own kind of thing. I just don't seem to get that bothered by slow builds of tension in horror games as I find myself then second guessing how next they will ratchet the tension up in a very analytical way that leaves me running through the game in a very detached way instead of letting my imagination get the better of me.

Slender and Outlast have a very real and sometimes immediate shock to the system that helps keep my mind in the present and unable to think too far ahead on where the tension will be built and because of that my mind can only react in a way that plays upon my fears and my own internal fears will always do a better job of unnerving me than someone else looking to do the same.

Party Klepek

Amnesia 1 was pretty spooky for a short while before its mechanics became clear as day and it became impossible to lose. But then there was a neat story left to enjoy, so I can't complain. Also, I remember the Choir area being incredibly unnerving thanks to great design.

Lever Flipper: The Game: Scary Noises Edition

The lack of character motivation and absence of a confirmed source of danger deflate most of the tension in this for me.

@patrickklepek One of the users pointed out that you should use a heart-monitor and rig it up alongside your portrait that we might see how you're steadily growing more unnerved as opposed to simply witnessing the jump-scares. Now, it might just be me (and that guy), but I think that's a terrific idea to try out in Spooking with Scoops.

Also, I wanted to say thanks for introducing me to Outlast, played through it just the other day and loved the living crap out of it. It's a good time for horror games.

Were is the bacon!? Show me the bacon!

I GOT BALLS OF STEEL

I played maybe 10 minutes of Amnesia: The Dark Descent before I had to turn it off. I fully expect I'll be just as bad with A Machine for Pigs.

Is that possible? Someone point me towards a device!

@crusader8463: It's all about the atmosphere. It's actually pretty creepy and unsettling and just watching someone play it wouldn't do anything, headphones + playing at night alone would be the best thing to do if you really wanted to get into it. I don't understand the people that jump like maniacs at the smallest thing either, though.

Been watching a Let's Play and the story and writing are really amazing. If we're talking about "literary merit" I would argue this game is better than BioShock Infinite and even The Last of Us, which are great as blockbuster entertainment and very well written in their own right, but in my opinion aren't very complicated thematically.

That said (and I know many people won't agree with this) I wish there was a "lights on" sort of option for this game a la Gone Home. The tension stresses me out too much with the constant threat of a monster that could jump out from behind a closed door. I'd love the option to be able to play through without jump scares, which is something The Last of Us nailed--tense and scary but not cheap.

Also this may sound weird but the movie Upstream Color bares significant resemblance to this game thematically, which I thought was interesting.

No, I felt the same. There's just an immediacy to Outlast that grabs you and keeps you in the present. There's rarely enough time to try and analyze the game for its next scare, and even when I did find myself overthinking things, I was typically wrong.

I'm actually pretty horrified by weird animal/human amalgamations in most horror (Pigsy in Manhunt, the kids in the weird masks in the original Wicker Man), but A Machine for Pigs has so far taken way too long to show its hand. The first hour wasn't creepy in the least for me, just incredibly boring. Weird, because I was terrified of the first Amnesia. Hopefully things will pick up soon though

Holy geez, that music at the end had me on edge.

Only if it acts like a Resident Evil health meter and starts saying DANGER whenever his pulse accelerates.

Also this game seems profoundly discomforting, even moreso than the first Amnesia. Something about the industrial setting really grates on my psyche.

Loving all these new horror releases at the moment. They're keeping Patrick busy, and me happy as a result.

@spilledmilkfactory: it didn't, and wtf was that 'God Pig' anyway? Nope this game did nothing for me, anytime a pig showed up I just thought... "oh, a pig" also the attempts to bind Castle Brenenburg into the story felt forced.

I couldn't even make it through Fatal Frame 1 in my youth, I doubt I can make it through this QL. But damn, I really want to be able to play Amnesia some day. (Maybe if I HAD Amnesia...?)

Well that was 45 minutes of straight-up nothing. Atmosphere is cool, but it does nothing for me without actually having something happen. Also having something run after you and kill you doesn't do much for me, either. What is it that draws people into these games? I don't understand how atmosphere alone is enough to scare someone. I get the whole "fear of the unknown" thing, but the unknown is known, because you know that the worst that can happen is a black screen and a restart button.

Is it a disconnect from video games that prevents me from being affected in any way? I'm unable to be truly immersed, because I know it's a video game. With the discussions about violence in video games and the separation of games from real life, I assumed that I am not alone in my ability to decipher real life from works of fiction. So if there is no true immersion, because we know it's fake, how is anyone able to actually derive a feeling of fear when playing video games?

Does anyone have any article recommendations or anything? I would actually like to hear some proper explanations.

I like how all the telephones look so frightened... this game seems pretty intense, even though there wasn't any real enemy...besides FEAR, the biggest enemy of all. I definitely want to see more now.

And for some reason I was thinking a lot about schnitzel during this video...weird.

I think I made it 15 before the oppressive atmosphere got to me. I think I have a similar stance as Alex, I have no problem watching someone like @patrickklepek play Amnesia, but when I am the person who has to do that thing that I would never logically do because I know what's going to happen, I can't do it.

Yea, Im not a huge fan of Amnesia. I tried several times, and am trying again to get through the first one. Just hit the first encounter in ^ Machine for Pigs. I gotta say I really liked Outlast, thought the ending was not exactly great.

@pixeldemon: there is character motivation, which is finding and saving your children. the danger comes from the sinister nature of your environment, and later on becomes something more tangible.

however, i do agree that there is something kind of missing here. I was never a fan of horror games and movies, not because they're scary but becomes they're mostly kind of boring.

That part at the end with the music and the windows and the lighting seemed like the perfect time to introduce a monster.

woah in the room that had all the stuffed animals & bear, the owl statue moved after he turned the valve

Knowing that games are fake doesn't mean that people can't be immersed in them; same goes for any fictional media.

There's a thing called suspension of disbelief that allows people to immerse themselves into a work of fiction and feel similar emotions to if it was real, even though they consciously know that it isn't. This applies to pretty much any genre of anything.

If you've ever cared about a fictional character in any film, book or game then you've experienced suspension of disbelief. It's a bit of a shame if you haven't!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief

:O

I wish I could sneak up on Patrick while hes playing. My brother and I used to do that to each other when playing DaggerFall Arena back in the day. It had some pretty great sound FX for its time, and could be fairly nerve wracking. Scared the ever living shit out of each other.

But dat vid description doe.

@zurv: oh give it a fucking rest