These mechanics were only vaguely defined in The Dark Descent, but they were vital in maintaining the feeling of anxiety, fear, and survivalism. Then again, The Dark Descent also had a sweet package of gameplay mechanics that deliberately played off your fear: looking directly at a monster would drain your sanity, as would staying in the dark for too long, but crouching and hiding would decrease your chances of being spotted. The need for light drove the need for oil and tinderboxes, and the scarce supplies emphasized the ‘survival’ aspect of survival horror. In The Dark Descent, light was necessary for maintaining your sanity, giving the player a gameplay motivation that mirrored classic psychological responses: you always wanted to stand in the light. While it’s true that this minimizing does serve to keep the focus on the environment and surrounding visuals, there’s an enormous loss to the experience that the original mechanics provided. The original idea may have been to encourage the player to stay in-the-scene, to have a more organic and less game-like experience. The decision to cut these key parts of the game was a risky one… and it simply doesn’t feel like it paid off at all. Your lamp never runs out of oil, and lights no longer require tinderboxes. There is no health tracking, no sanity meter, and no inventory. Unfortunately, the new level of aesthetic detail and design has come at a harsh price: most of the core gameplay elements have been entirely stripped from the title. Likewise the soundscape itself, which is so vital to the horror genre, has been expanded wonderfully, even going so far as to use the recorded screams of the franchise’s fans, sent in as a publicity event during development.
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The soundtrack has a greater variety of styles and sounds, and whereas in the original game the standard ‘monster-chasing’ music was always the same, in Machine for Pigs the tense moments are each given their distinct musical styles. In the same vein, the music and sound of A Machine For Pigs also represents a bold step forward for the franchise. It’s a different kind of horror: a horror based in a world where science is ominous and uncanny, and where the rise of industry is truly captured in a terrible sense of the unfeeling, unthinking ‘Machine’. It feels more Lovecraftian than even the Lovecraft games, and it’s impressive to find just how horrific the giant pistons and engine rooms can be, even when compared to the dank hallways of The Dark Descent. Taking a bold and refreshing departure from the locations of the first Amnesia, this title avoids simply falling back on the old world castle feel and instead replaces it with a steampunk-horror mashup. Each of these locations is lovingly rendered and is a pleasure to explore.
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The sheer variety of settings alone is intriguing: wealthy upper-class residences, dingy backstreet alleys, ominous rustic churches, creaking slaughterhouses. A short exploration of the mansion fills Mandus with the need to find his two missing sons, and a mysterious voice on the telephone tells him that they are being held captive deep beneath the home.Īs far as exploration and visual appeal go, A Machine for Pigs is a solid success.
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You play the role of the wealth Londoner Oswald Mandus, who awakens in his empty house with no memory of the past few months. So it was with great excitement that I first heard about two of my favorite video game creators teaming up on a project together: Frictional Games (The Penumbra Series, Amnesia: The Dark Descent) and thechineseroom (Dear Esther).Ī Machine for Pigs starts off following closely in the footsteps of its predecessor, in a first-person adventure mode with only basic object manipulation available. In the industries, we occasionally get the thrill of seeing creators build powerhouse partnerships in the same way, like Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett teaming up for Good Omens. We all doff our hats at whatever brave young person first stumbled on the idea of putting chocolate and peanut butter together. There’s a special art to mixing things together.