A Machine For Disappointment
When Frictional Games and The Chinese Room set out to make Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs they had some pretty big shoes to fill. The first game in the series, Amnesia: The Dark Decent, is considered by many to be one of the best titles that the survival horror genre has to offer. Sadly, A Machine For Pigs completely fails to succeed, or even recreate, anything that made the original title a classic.
The first thing one will notice right off the bat is that somehow the developers have failed to get something as basic as darkness right. For most of the areas in the game darkness isn't simply blackness, instead its this ugly blue that looks like somebody ran the game through a color filter. However, bothersome aesthetic choices are the least of this game's problems.
As soon as you get your lantern another one of the game's problem becomes apparent - you have no inventory, no sanity and your lantern never runs out of fuel. The removal of these key features from The Dark Decent is absently baffling, and their effects can be seen on the entire game. With a lantern that has infinite power there is now no longer a reason to explore the area in search of oil to maintain your power. Not only that, but since you will have your lantern on 24/7 you will always have the comfort of having a constant light source all throughout the game, ridding the experience of the primal fear of the dark. This goes hand-in-hand with the removal of sanity, which in The Dark Decent, made the game screw with you the lower it was and while you lost sanity in the dark the only way to gain it back was the be in the light. However, in The Dark Decent the best way to get away from monsters was to hide from in the darkness, creating a risk vs. reward system that was vital to the experience.
On the subject of puzzles, which was a major part of the first game, the removal of an inventory has made it so you have no reoccurring items to use for puzzles and all items must be held in front of you, forcing you to throw them on the ground when you want to interact with something else. This isn't helped by the fact that puzzles in A Machine For Pigs tend to be very repetitious and simplistic, with little more than "go here and get thing A come back and put it into thing B." Another consequence of the removal of inventory is the loss of health items, and since health items are no longer present this means that A Machine For Pigs has regenerating health, which really hurts the fear factor of this game. Without the need to heal this means that no longer will surviving an encounter mean that you have to find some way to restore your health, instead you simply shake it off and move on.
This leads to the biggest problem with A Machine For Pigs, it isn't scary. Many changes have been made to accommodate the loss of features but even with these accommodations the inherent effect of discarding these features is still felt. With no reason to explore the area, the game has been made very linear, making it less threatening since all of the scares are in scripted areas and you no longer run the risk of being attacked while searching for oil or health. Since the lantern never runs out of juice and sanity is no longer present there is no risk in hiding from the monsters so the levels have been designed to force you to run from monsters rather than hide from them. However, areas where you run from the monsters are so small that any tension that could have been had is completely defused. On top of all of this, the monsters are just giant pigs. Not even particularly horribly deformed pigs they're just really big pigs, with some humanoid pigs showing up near the end of the game. And pigs just aren't scary.
Perhaps the final flaw worth mentioning is the plot, which is simply a number of horror cliches stacked upon each other wrapped in vagueness to try and hide it. And even then the parts of the plot that do work is dragged down by the fact that this game strongly violates the rules of show, don't tell. Rather than imply the history of the factory that you spend most of the game in through the environment like a good game would do you are instead constantly being thrown rather lengthy and wordy notes that outright tell you everything that's happened. It almost makes you wonder if perhaps there is a better medium in which The Chinese Room could have told this game's story.
At the end of the day, A Machine For Pigs is a mediocre, not horrible, but certainly mediocre, game that has the burden of having to live up to Amnesia: The Dark Decent. Although the game showed quite a bit of promise you can't help but walk away from the experience feeling like your $20 could have been spent elsewhere. It doesn't help that the game is only half the length of the original, only clocking in about around 3-4 hours. If you must play A Machine For Pigs, wait until it's on sale for cheap on Steam. Otherwise, I'd recommend that you skip Frictional's newest offering.
