Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs
Now, I know what you're probably thinking. "Following up Abyss Odyssey with Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs? What, are you just going through your Steam list alphabetically?" And to that, I sagely respond with "No, shut up." But also: I have a handful of survival horror games on this list and it's probably best I tackle them in the order I received them. Before being known for their sleeper hit (without the hit part) Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, UK developer The Chinese Room took the reins from Frictional Games - who stuck around to help publish the game - to follow in the heavy, creaky footsteps of the terrifying Amnesia: The Dark Descent. A game so instrumental to the genre to which it belongs that it firmly put the keys to the genre's future in fellow Indie developers who learned from Amnesia's lessons in setting a spooky scene by frequently messing around with the player's first-person perspective, who collectively left in the dust the few big publishers willing to give the horror genre a shot with absurdly off-the-mark junk like Resident "We Ran Out of Ideas After We Weren't Allowed to be Racists Anymore" Evil 6, Silent Hill: Downverypoor, Dead Space 3: The Microtransactioning and... I don't even know what the deal was with The Evil Within but a lot of people didn't seem to care for it.
However, The Chinese Room have perhaps only taken Dark Descent's ingenious spin on horror game mainstays, some borrowed from Frictional's prior series Penumbra and others invented for the game from wholecloth, at face value. Instead of the insanity mechanic which grows when staring directly at something that shouldn't exist, or searching for materials to keep your lantern alight, or a recurring hazardous visual effect that shows that either the local environment is starting to descend into madness or you yourself are, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs has... nothing. Well, jump scares. Sometimes it has you pick up an object and carry it over to another fixture. Mostly, though, it's a perfectly linear journey through a bunch of dark corridors, hiding around barrels every so often to evade pig-man monstrosities. It's the Forsaken Fortress from Zelda: Wind Waker, in so many words, and barely as intriguing.
That perhaps isn't too fair though. While A Machine for Pigs has eschewed almost every distinct mechanical feature of note from The Dark Descent, it's doubled down on what the developers clearly believe is integral to the Amnesia experience: a creepy supernatural atmosphere, helped by all manner of spooky visual and audio effects, and a narrative where a nameless protagonist is piecing together the events that led to his memory loss and growing less and less thrilled with each new discovery as they head deeper underground. It's certainly an eerie game, and it likes to have some rough chuckles at your expense: for instance, after a particularly spooky early section where some sinister ambient music starts to swell up, the game chooses that moment to display the tutorial for running. There was no danger there - there's actually very little throughout the game, with the number of times I've had to actually avoid an enemy while sneaking around can be counted on one hand - but the deliberate timing of that tool-tip put me in an anxious mood.
Incidentally, none of those puzzles are tricky at all as the stringently-linear path means the object you need is either directly behind or in front of you. It might take a while to find that candlestick in the church possibly used by Colonel Mustard, if the church didn't have four rooms total. Plus your guy writes down everything in his journal anyway, including what you should be doing next, so it's hard to get lost any way you slice it. Maybe it speaks more to an attempt by the developers to make AMfP more casual-friendly and less obsessed with finding weird keys and solving sliding puzzles, which is what causes most survival horror games to fall into a rut of petty errands and detours bookmarked by jump scares.
As for the actual plot of the game, it seems to revolve around the amnesiac protagonist - possibly a fellow named Mundus, possibly an engineer employee of same - the protagonist's missing sons and a mysterious voice on the other end of a telephone that intermittently gives you advice and direction that you probably shouldn't be heeding. Mundus has built an enormous subterranean abattoir under his stately London home for the production of pork, but it's evidently not the only thing going on down there. Haunted by some as-yet-undisclosed business in Mexico, the notes Mundus has left scattered around paints him as a reclusive misanthrope that has lost faith in humanity and the British Empire and seeks to absolve it of its sins and destructive base instincts by salting the earth and starting anew somehow. Apparently that process also involved, at some point, turning a bunch of poor invalids into moblins. The game then moves from one region of this enormous underground industrial complex to the next, passing through the few vents and doors that aren't bolted shut in a path so linear they might as well stuck me in a ghost house cart ride and dropped pig offal on me at regular intervals.
If I sound dismissive, it's because A Machine for Pigs is a big step down from The Dark Descent; if not necessarily a terrible game considering the abysmal PewDiePie-bait Indie survival horror market as a whole. That's not to say AMfP isn't scary, or that it doesn't establish a mystery aching to be solved that pushes you deeper and deeper into the bowels of the Earth (fitting, since I just passed through a few poopsome sewers), but that it feels like all of the meat has been scooped out of the Amnesia experience and the husk that remains just isn't as alluring or unique. I genuinely don't have a whole lot else to say about it, because there's so little to talk about after you've covered the game's atmosphere and a brief synopsis of the story. You walk around a lot.
The Verdict: I'm so close to the end of the game (well, at least according to one of my ghost children who said I was "almost there", but who can trust those spectral tykes?), that there's no way I'm not seeing it through to the bitter end. However, it's ultimately a very mechanically slight stroll through some scary environments that barely holds a flickering lantern to its predecessor. Just a little disappointing, overall. Three stars (tentatively), and I'll probably start on a fresh game for tomorrow's May Mastery entry.
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