Review: Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is a first-person horror stroll for the PC, Mac, and Linux. It was developed by The Chinese Room and published by Frictional Games, who developed the first Amnesia game.

Mandus exploring the machine.

A business tycoon named Oswald Mandus wakes up in his empty house and starts looking for his twin sons, who he keeps hearing off in the distance. Someone calls Mandus on his phone and tells him that his kids are trapped in the giant labyrinthine machine under his house and factory, and that Mandus has to descend into the machine and repair it. Mandus does so, learning about the inhuman monsters running around it, his part in the whole thing, and where his children are in the process.

There is not much going on in A Machine for Pigs. You as Mandus travel through the machine, and solve a few puzzles, and avoid a couple of monster guards. You do no explore that much as your path is very clear and has few deviations, enforced with many locked doors and narrow pathways. There are a few puzzles, but they amount to little more than bringing an object from point A to point B. There are a couple of instances when you have to avoid a monster guard, but for those you either have to outrun them until you reach a door, or hide in a corner with your light off.

What is most damning though about AMfP is that it is not scary. The setting is not scary, the monsters that attack you are not scary, the ambient sounds are creepy at first but you get used to them rather quickly when you realize they do not signal the approach of anything, especially if you are playing while do something like watching TV or talking to other people or anything besides completely isolating yourself.

Most of the game takes place in and around the titular building sized machine, and for the most part it is nothing but a maze of tunnels and catwalks and other 19^th century factory parts. It’s sort of gloomy, and the cages and all the blood splatter are a bit unsettling, but for the most part it is just grates and pipes and tubes.

The monster patrolling the machine are not scary either. They are basically hunchback men. Whether you find them scary is entirely dependent on how scary you find pig faces and pig screeches, I do not think either of those are scary, so I was mostly indifferent those rare times when Mandus encountered one.

The only genuinely frightening part is at the very beginning, when you wake up in Mandus’ mansion, with its unsettling paintings and secret passages and children’s toys everywhere, when you still do not know what is going on. If only the entire game took place there.

Or at least on the surface.

Maybe it would be scary if I psyched myself up and played totally alone in pitch black darkness, but I should not have to work that hard to be scared by something.

Most of the story is nothing beyond delving into the bowels of the machine to find Mandus’ kids and fix the machine. You find journal pages lying around that explain the backstory some more, but a lot of them are ramblings and do nothing more than beat you over the head with how evil the builder of the machine is. Mandus also experiences flashbacks which do the same. While I can appreciate not wanting to explain everything to the player, eventually there should have been some reason for why Mandus and the guy on the phone did what they did or a better explanation of the machine. Instead they come off as two dimensional, and the machine is nothing more than a needlessly complicated setting. More explanation might have helped the ending too, which is confusing and a wee bit pretentious.

I will say that the game looks great, and very detailed. Even if most of it takes place in what is basically a giant not scary factory, The Chinese Room put effort into making each part of the factory look different. I would bet (though not much) that I could identify any part of the game from screenshots.

At least the non-hallway parts.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is not scary, painfully linear, barely interactive, and if none of that bothers you, really short. It does not have a reason to exist as a video game, and after playing it once and knowing what is going on there is little reason to go back a second time.