Dropping the inventory system and mechanics of its predecessors, AMFP does not allow confrontations and death to detract from its narrative.ĭuring the opening couple of hours, when the total deviation from Amnesia’s template is less obvious, I missed the mechanical parts of the game. Several times, I was wounded and cowered in the dark, bleeding, but there are no health bars or sanity meters – even the lantern is eternally charged. In fact, I don’t even know if it’s possible to die. There are precious few chases or games of hide and seek, and I finished the entire game without dying. While Britain was recoiling in just about every manner that the word suggests – like a fist, a punchdrunk pugilist, a snake – social structures were undergoing recalibration as the dispersal of information, ease of travel and rise of the machines carried both threat and promise.ĪMFP revels in those anxieties and the writing is as interested in the period and the place as it is in sending shivers up the spine. Perhaps it’s the upper class that will fill the role of swine? Selecting a specific target for vitriol at the anxious end of the nineteenth century in London isn’t simple. “That all rather depends, Professor, on what one considers to be a pig.”īut, then, maybe it’s not the dispossessed and the forgotten that are to be fed to the machine. The final line of the trailer conjures cannibalism, mechanised mass murder and the vanishing/victimisation of an underclass. The Machine for Pigs was never going to be a trotter-friendly touchscreen tablet but it was also unlikely that hogs would be the only grist to the slaughter-mill. It’s the story of a Machine, of course, an enormous contraption, all gears and steam, and as we expected, the Machine slaughters pigs and other assorted swine.Īs if the title wasn’t suggestive enough, the trailer makes explicit what everyone had surely guessed. If you haven’t finished the game yet, probably best not to read too much of my witterings, but there will be another warning before we pass the point of no return.
It’s very difficult to talk about what A Machine For Pigs actually is, rather than all the trappings that come from the Amnesia bit of the title, without detracting from its power. Thankfully, they’ve made something far more interesting instead. Not the reaction that a horror game might hope to elicit but thechineseroom’s cleverly concealed secret, hidden behind the dark curtain of that title, is that in some ways they haven’t really constructed a horror game at all. I finished the story at the weekend and spent the last five minutes of the game with a huge grin plastered across my face. I’ve spent most of the week thinking about Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs.
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