I guess if throwing switches counts as puzzles, and three-four survival sequences count as survival horror. You can't really argue with that.BleedingPride said:
Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs Review - Squeals and Fury
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
- Start date
Hmmm, I'm browsing The Escapist while I download this game. To be honest I've been hoping for the development of some good horror games for a while. I buy bunches of them and donate to kickstarters when I can in hope that the genere has the chance for some decent development. For the most part it seems to be moving along in baby steps but will get there.
To be honest I was not a fan of the original Amnesia for a lot of the reasons that they removed from this game. I for one thought the whole "sanity" mechanic was more of an annoyance than anything and seemed like a contrived mechanism to remove enjoyment from the game. Having a cool environment I have to struggle to explore because of limited light, and cool monsters I can't even look at. This on some levels is the same problem I had with the recent "Outlast" which while it had enough light still strove to put pressure on you to not really explore the environments the developers carefully constructed.
The stumbling block I get from most "Machine For Pigs" reviews seems to be that they removed a lot of the annoyance mechanics, but in doing so wound up making it hard to create a sense of jeopardy especially seeing as they wanted to stay away from combat at all.
"Outlast" tried to blend itself with "Mirror's Edge" by making chases a big part of the game along with the stealth mechanics where at a few points you need to run from the bad guys, block doors, slam doors, and other things while trying to get enough distance to hide, in order to create a bit of active jeopardy along with the standard stealth elements and "find the interactive thingy or needed items" puzzles.
It occurs to me that right now we have a lot of different horror games coming out, and between them we have the right building blocks for something truly epic to be created. It seems everyone has the right idea on how to create creepy enviroments, and use the environment to tell parts of a story, but as far as making the game actually a game it gets tricky.
Right now I personally think the right solution is going to be when people finally realize that removing combat mechanics was the wrong approach to take. What people should be looking towards oddly enough is an old game called "Condemned" (not the sequel for reasons that should be obvious to those who played it) for how combat should work in this kind of environment. That way you encourage stealth without requiring it at all times, can add resource management (a staple of survival horror) and in the process create some things to do and a sense of jeopardy without turning it into an exercise in doing nothing but watching patrol patterns. I'll also say that Outlast had some cool bits with the running and avoidance even it wasn't totally intuitive, one sequence reminded me a bit of the Innsmouth section of "Call Of Cthulhu: Dark Corners Of The Earth" without being as annoyingly touchy.
Whether you agree with my overall comments or not, I will say that even with the mixed reviews, "A Machine For Pigs" is a game I suggest genere fans support (like I did, as I said DLing it now despite everything said) as opposed to waiting for sales where it will mean less, although we should be vocal with the problems. The more games like this succeed the more love the genere will get, and the more we'll see the formula perfected. We've got a big bubble of effort being made (Huntsman: The Orphanage is due out in two days, and I plan to pick that up too), we need to support the efforts while remaining critical of where these things go wrong. Everyone points out the problems with "A Machine For Pigs" so hopefully that will be being noted for the next wave of similar games.
To be honest I was not a fan of the original Amnesia for a lot of the reasons that they removed from this game. I for one thought the whole "sanity" mechanic was more of an annoyance than anything and seemed like a contrived mechanism to remove enjoyment from the game. Having a cool environment I have to struggle to explore because of limited light, and cool monsters I can't even look at. This on some levels is the same problem I had with the recent "Outlast" which while it had enough light still strove to put pressure on you to not really explore the environments the developers carefully constructed.
The stumbling block I get from most "Machine For Pigs" reviews seems to be that they removed a lot of the annoyance mechanics, but in doing so wound up making it hard to create a sense of jeopardy especially seeing as they wanted to stay away from combat at all.
"Outlast" tried to blend itself with "Mirror's Edge" by making chases a big part of the game along with the stealth mechanics where at a few points you need to run from the bad guys, block doors, slam doors, and other things while trying to get enough distance to hide, in order to create a bit of active jeopardy along with the standard stealth elements and "find the interactive thingy or needed items" puzzles.
It occurs to me that right now we have a lot of different horror games coming out, and between them we have the right building blocks for something truly epic to be created. It seems everyone has the right idea on how to create creepy enviroments, and use the environment to tell parts of a story, but as far as making the game actually a game it gets tricky.
Right now I personally think the right solution is going to be when people finally realize that removing combat mechanics was the wrong approach to take. What people should be looking towards oddly enough is an old game called "Condemned" (not the sequel for reasons that should be obvious to those who played it) for how combat should work in this kind of environment. That way you encourage stealth without requiring it at all times, can add resource management (a staple of survival horror) and in the process create some things to do and a sense of jeopardy without turning it into an exercise in doing nothing but watching patrol patterns. I'll also say that Outlast had some cool bits with the running and avoidance even it wasn't totally intuitive, one sequence reminded me a bit of the Innsmouth section of "Call Of Cthulhu: Dark Corners Of The Earth" without being as annoyingly touchy.
Whether you agree with my overall comments or not, I will say that even with the mixed reviews, "A Machine For Pigs" is a game I suggest genere fans support (like I did, as I said DLing it now despite everything said) as opposed to waiting for sales where it will mean less, although we should be vocal with the problems. The more games like this succeed the more love the genere will get, and the more we'll see the formula perfected. We've got a big bubble of effort being made (Huntsman: The Orphanage is due out in two days, and I plan to pick that up too), we need to support the efforts while remaining critical of where these things go wrong. Everyone points out the problems with "A Machine For Pigs" so hopefully that will be being noted for the next wave of similar games.
A Machine for Pigs isn't survival horror, it's psychological horror. I wonder, did you ever play silent hill 2? Same type of horror. Silent Hill 2 wasn't scary, but it was disturbing, similar to this. Now, please don't get into a rant about how Silent Hill had better puzzles than this, because that's not what I'm referring to.Lovely Mixture said:
I am the same way. Sadly I have to still beat TDD because I'm a wuss and it takes me forever but maybe by the time I finish I will have forgotten how mediocre the sequel is and how frustrated I am that I didn't know that Dear Ester devs made it.Voren said:
Nice to see a small studio pull a fast one after receiving so much good will from the gaming community. That will teach us to support horror games.
I think Torque does have a point, but on the other hand I think that your points are perfectly valid as well. I just finished the game and I do think a lot of the answers are in there if you put some thought behind it but I don't think that Torque has the story quite right. I agree with Torque in that the game is much more story-driven, where the "fear" comes from revealing the story that happened before you had amnesia, much less from figuring out how you're going to prevent a shambling monstrosity from chewing your face off. Yet your criticism is perfectly valid in that it's much less a survival-horror "game" than it is a psychological-horror "experience". The thing plays like a movie, and considering it's length, it really might as well have been a movie. It's definitely a different flavor than the first game, and just like how some people can't stand chocolate ice-cream, not everyone is going to like this "flavor" for their Amnesia games.Andy Chalk said:
Mechanically: the game is flawed in its simplicity. But I think the real question is "did you like the story?" If yes then you're going to like the game, if no - or, as in your case, you didn't get it - then you're not going to like the game. I do appreciate that you gave the game a 3/5 because that's really about what I'd give it. I'm a person who loves a good story so for me I might even bump it up to a 4/5 with the only thing holding it back from the perfect score being that fact that it indeed plays like a movie.
Now since I hate using the phrase "you didn't get it" without offering an explanation on what there is to get, allow me to try to answer the questions posed in your review and offer up my own interpretation as to what was going on in this story.
Incoming Wall-o-Text, though I'd say worth the read if you're REALLY interested in the answers you pose in your review.
The first thing I want to explain is what I believe to be the central, most important journal note that you find in the game. It's the one in which Mandus is explaining to his kids how the Aztecs would cut out the hearts of sacrificial humans in order to keep the sky from falling. What would happen if the sky fell? It'd be the end of the world. It'd be absolute chaos and destruction.
Where was Mandus when he had this discussion with his children? In the very temple where he found the Orb. This would imply that - much as Mandus describes the Orb whispering to him - it was whispering to the Aztecs as well, telling them to commit all these sacrifices to prevent the chaos and destruction that was to come. Keep this in mind.
Now, onto the questions mentioned in the review, first up is "What's the deal with all the pigs?" This is quite obviously a euphemism for people, in fact towards the end of the game it even says this. We're all pigs. The whole world is A Machine for Pigs, made only to be slaughtered. A key component to this game - and one that is necessary in order to understand the game's story - is that Mandus is quite delightfully mad. Mad in the "mad scientist" kind of way. He listened to the Orb and was granted visions of the future. In it he saw the absolute filth that was humanity, he saw how we're all disgusting pigs. He saw the horrors that man will commit upon itself, "chaos and destruction" as I mentioned before, and decided that he was going to do something about it. So he creates a grand machine for slaughtering humans and pigs alike. The left-overs are ground up and sold as a cheap food supply (as seen in one of the loading screen pictures that shows a bunch of meat flowing out of a big pipe into a vat that's being used to fill up little carts being hauled away by workers). "Why pigs?" Because much like how Batman uses the image of a bat to signify the terror he wishes to inflict upon criminals, Mandus uses pigs to signify the disgusting abominations that he sees mankind to be.
Other possible explanations - this one actually coming from Myth Busters which apparently makes it "known" science - is that apparently pigs and humans have remarkably similar physiologies. If you're planning on building an army of human-animal hybrids, it'd make sense to start with an animal that is already physiologically similar to humans. Though personally I think using pigs makes sense purely on the fact that Mandus sees all of humanity as nothing but a bunch of pigs. Add to it the fact that pigs are a major food source - and being able to provide a cheap food source is integral to Mandus' plan - also goes into it. This brings us to "What's the deal with the church?"
The Church is explained in a couple notes you actually find inside the church itself. Essentially Mandus was giving out a very cheap food source to the poor, orphans, and other down-trodden folk of the city. This caused masses of people to gravitate towards his charity. All of those people would be rounded up and turned into pig-men. It's all about how perfectly efficient the machine is. Throughout the game are references to how every single aspect of the machine is used to run another aspect of the machine. Heat from one part of the machine is taken away from a place that needs to be cool and it is instead used to heat another part of the machine. Noxious gasses from all the left-overs are turned into a fuel source. The flow of all the entrails and waste water is used to power turbines. The same is true here: the meaty waste of creating human-pig hybrids is used to lure in more humans so that they can be turned into human-pig hybrids, which makes more food to lure in more people, etc.
Now onto the "why". As in: "Why create a vast army of pig-men?" Again: the visions of the future that Mandus was granted. His goal wasn't to create a charitable food supply, his goal was only ever to create an army of man-pigs to unleash upon society. The dead would be harvested and taken to The Machine, turned into more man-pigs, and sent out to kill some more people and continue the process. He was going to wipe clean the scum of the earth by killing everyone on it, thus preventing the "chaos and destruction" that he saw in his visions. Again, tying back into the note about the Aztec sacrifices, one of the lines in it was "They were certainly not savages, it was likely that they just couldn't sacrifice enough to prevent the sky from falling." With the modern technology of the day, Mandus COULD sacrifice enough to "prevent the sky from falling". Really I see similarities between this story and Mass Effect 3. Just like how The Reapers were supposed to wipe out advanced organic life before it became too advanced and created synthetic life that would wipe out ALL organic life, so too would Mandus wipe out all human life and replace it with pig-men so that way there could be no WWI, no WWII, no Atomic Bomb, none of the horrors that he had seen in his visions from the Orb.
That's right, Mandus was a Reaper.
That's why all of this was necessary. The Orb drove Mandus to madness. It caused him to kill his children in the temple, rip out their hearts, and sacrifice them to it. Why did it pick Mandus? Because he was a wealthy industrialist who could complete the designs that it had for the human race. Again, the Aztecs just couldn't sacrifice enough to prevent the sky from falling...but Mandus had the means to do so. Why did he sacrifice his children to it? Well at one point one of the kids says "You can hear the sea", but that's not really "whispering". It does, however, imply that the Orb was giving off some kind of "signal" (for lack of a better term). I'm pretty sure that once you realize that the voice in your head is the voice of the Machine - and by extension, the Orb itself - it mentions that in order to become partners with it you first had to bath it in the blood of your children. You had to sacrifice them in order to give the Orb its voice. From there, the Orb became "The Engineer" that Mandus mentions partnered with him. It was someone who shared his vision of the future because it was the very source of his vision of the future.
As for how Mandus ends up with amnesia, that's actually explained in another journal note. Mandus is pondering over what makes a man, is he defined by his actions? Can a man's very soul be remade like clockwork? He talks about how he's going to reach for the exposed wires. He hopes that he'll wake up and be able to start anew, but if he dies, then maybe it's for the best that he dies amongst his creations. This was obviously written after Mandus began sabotaging his own machine, and also explains why - if killing himself would forever power-down the machine - he didn't just kill himself in the first place. Well he was hoping that if he zapped himself with enough electricity he'd lose his memory and just start over with a completely fresh new life. He had already manually shut down the machine, so he was hoping he could start over. Clearly this was not the case as when he woke up, the madness was still there and it guided him through the steps necessary to restart the machine. That does, however, bring us to the one question that I don't have the answer for, but rather a shaky theory on.
To me, the big question is "How was Mandus connected to his machine?" I have to say that I think Torque's interpretation was correct: the chair you sit in with all the metal arms and such does seem to imply that it was designed specifically to kill Mandus. In fact the little monologue at the end definitely implies that Mandus was now dead. Buuuuuuut how does killing himself stop the machine? If he was completely mad while listening to the stone, why would he build in such a failsafe? I don't know if Torque is right about the Orb being inside Mandus the whole time...everything I found suggested that Mandus just took it home and put it on the mantel. But seeing as how his explanation makes about as much sense as anything I could come up with, I'll go with it. Perhaps that machine at the end was the very thing that put the orb inside Mandus to being with and all it did at the end was take the Orb back out. We already know through notes that Mandus was bringing dead things back to life, so maybe he is, himself, a "Compound X" zombie.
Even so, that STILL doesn't answer how Mandus dying - or even the Orb being removed from his chest if that is indeed the case - would forever stop the machine from working again. I gotta say I don't buy into the "there were two Mandus-es" as Torque suggested, there really isn't anything to suggest that's the case. But it's obvious that the machine was somehow connected to Mandus in some way. I'll probably have to play through the game another time or two to see if there's any way to answer that question. As for the rest of the questions, I think the answers are indeed there and not particularly vague or hard to piece together. Hopefully my explanations have shown that the story, at least, wasn't as incoherent and piece-meal as you first suspected.
Where was Mandus when he had this discussion with his children? In the very temple where he found the Orb. This would imply that - much as Mandus describes the Orb whispering to him - it was whispering to the Aztecs as well, telling them to commit all these sacrifices to prevent the chaos and destruction that was to come. Keep this in mind.
Now, onto the questions mentioned in the review, first up is "What's the deal with all the pigs?" This is quite obviously a euphemism for people, in fact towards the end of the game it even says this. We're all pigs. The whole world is A Machine for Pigs, made only to be slaughtered. A key component to this game - and one that is necessary in order to understand the game's story - is that Mandus is quite delightfully mad. Mad in the "mad scientist" kind of way. He listened to the Orb and was granted visions of the future. In it he saw the absolute filth that was humanity, he saw how we're all disgusting pigs. He saw the horrors that man will commit upon itself, "chaos and destruction" as I mentioned before, and decided that he was going to do something about it. So he creates a grand machine for slaughtering humans and pigs alike. The left-overs are ground up and sold as a cheap food supply (as seen in one of the loading screen pictures that shows a bunch of meat flowing out of a big pipe into a vat that's being used to fill up little carts being hauled away by workers). "Why pigs?" Because much like how Batman uses the image of a bat to signify the terror he wishes to inflict upon criminals, Mandus uses pigs to signify the disgusting abominations that he sees mankind to be.
Other possible explanations - this one actually coming from Myth Busters which apparently makes it "known" science
- is that apparently pigs and humans have remarkably similar physiologies. If you're planning on building an army of human-animal hybrids, it'd make sense to start with an animal that is already physiologically similar to humans. Though personally I think using pigs makes sense purely on the fact that Mandus sees all of humanity as nothing but a bunch of pigs. Add to it the fact that pigs are a major food source - and being able to provide a cheap food source is integral to Mandus' plan - also goes into it. This brings us to "What's the deal with the church?"The Church is explained in a couple notes you actually find inside the church itself. Essentially Mandus was giving out a very cheap food source to the poor, orphans, and other down-trodden folk of the city. This caused masses of people to gravitate towards his charity. All of those people would be rounded up and turned into pig-men. It's all about how perfectly efficient the machine is. Throughout the game are references to how every single aspect of the machine is used to run another aspect of the machine. Heat from one part of the machine is taken away from a place that needs to be cool and it is instead used to heat another part of the machine. Noxious gasses from all the left-overs are turned into a fuel source. The flow of all the entrails and waste water is used to power turbines. The same is true here: the meaty waste of creating human-pig hybrids is used to lure in more humans so that they can be turned into human-pig hybrids, which makes more food to lure in more people, etc.
Now onto the "why". As in: "Why create a vast army of pig-men?" Again: the visions of the future that Mandus was granted. His goal wasn't to create a charitable food supply, his goal was only ever to create an army of man-pigs to unleash upon society. The dead would be harvested and taken to The Machine, turned into more man-pigs, and sent out to kill some more people and continue the process. He was going to wipe clean the scum of the earth by killing everyone on it, thus preventing the "chaos and destruction" that he saw in his visions. Again, tying back into the note about the Aztec sacrifices, one of the lines in it was "They were certainly not savages, it was likely that they just couldn't sacrifice enough to prevent the sky from falling." With the modern technology of the day, Mandus COULD sacrifice enough to "prevent the sky from falling". Really I see similarities between this story and Mass Effect 3. Just like how The Reapers were supposed to wipe out advanced organic life before it became too advanced and created synthetic life that would wipe out ALL organic life, so too would Mandus wipe out all human life and replace it with pig-men so that way there could be no WWI, no WWII, no Atomic Bomb, none of the horrors that he had seen in his visions from the Orb.
That's right, Mandus was a Reaper.
That's why all of this was necessary. The Orb drove Mandus to madness. It caused him to kill his children in the temple, rip out their hearts, and sacrifice them to it. Why did it pick Mandus? Because he was a wealthy industrialist who could complete the designs that it had for the human race. Again, the Aztecs just couldn't sacrifice enough to prevent the sky from falling...but Mandus had the means to do so. Why did he sacrifice his children to it? Well at one point one of the kids says "You can hear the sea", but that's not really "whispering". It does, however, imply that the Orb was giving off some kind of "signal" (for lack of a better term). I'm pretty sure that once you realize that the voice in your head is the voice of the Machine - and by extension, the Orb itself - it mentions that in order to become partners with it you first had to bath it in the blood of your children. You had to sacrifice them in order to give the Orb its voice. From there, the Orb became "The Engineer" that Mandus mentions partnered with him. It was someone who shared his vision of the future because it was the very source of his vision of the future.
As for how Mandus ends up with amnesia, that's actually explained in another journal note. Mandus is pondering over what makes a man, is he defined by his actions? Can a man's very soul be remade like clockwork? He talks about how he's going to reach for the exposed wires. He hopes that he'll wake up and be able to start anew, but if he dies, then maybe it's for the best that he dies amongst his creations. This was obviously written after Mandus began sabotaging his own machine, and also explains why - if killing himself would forever power-down the machine - he didn't just kill himself in the first place. Well he was hoping that if he zapped himself with enough electricity he'd lose his memory and just start over with a completely fresh new life. He had already manually shut down the machine, so he was hoping he could start over. Clearly this was not the case as when he woke up, the madness was still there and it guided him through the steps necessary to restart the machine. That does, however, bring us to the one question that I don't have the answer for, but rather a shaky theory on.
To me, the big question is "How was Mandus connected to his machine?" I have to say that I think Torque's interpretation was correct: the chair you sit in with all the metal arms and such does seem to imply that it was designed specifically to kill Mandus. In fact the little monologue at the end definitely implies that Mandus was now dead. Buuuuuuut how does killing himself stop the machine? If he was completely mad while listening to the stone, why would he build in such a failsafe? I don't know if Torque is right about the Orb being inside Mandus the whole time...everything I found suggested that Mandus just took it home and put it on the mantel. But seeing as how his explanation makes about as much sense as anything I could come up with, I'll go with it. Perhaps that machine at the end was the very thing that put the orb inside Mandus to being with and all it did at the end was take the Orb back out. We already know through notes that Mandus was bringing dead things back to life, so maybe he is, himself, a "Compound X" zombie.
Even so, that STILL doesn't answer how Mandus dying - or even the Orb being removed from his chest if that is indeed the case - would forever stop the machine from working again. I gotta say I don't buy into the "there were two Mandus-es" as Torque suggested, there really isn't anything to suggest that's the case. But it's obvious that the machine was somehow connected to Mandus in some way. I'll probably have to play through the game another time or two to see if there's any way to answer that question. As for the rest of the questions, I think the answers are indeed there and not particularly vague or hard to piece together. Hopefully my explanations have shown that the story, at least, wasn't as incoherent and piece-meal as you first suspected.
So there we have it. Like I said, I enjoy a good story and I thought this was a good one. Is it VERY different than Dark Decent? Definitely. Are all your criticisms about the mechanics perfectly valid? Certainly. But I'd argue that the story IS coherent once you gather all the pieces and put them together. Just as a jig-saw puzzle starts out as absolutely nothing but a blank table (like waking up with amnesia), once you put all the pieces together you get the full picture. Whether or not you found that picture to be scary, however, is an entirely different subject and I'd argue that boils down completely to taste. As Torque mentioned in a previous post, this game is much more about a scary/oppressive environment. If you find dark brick hallways with pipes and confined spaces that induce claustrophobia to be creepy, then this game will keep you trembling. If that's not your bag, then yeah, you'll just be strolling around trying not to disturb the Manbearpigs.
Just want to drop my thoughts into the bucket, so to speak. I have played the game for only two hours, and I am BORED. It is decently scary at times, but not nearly as scary as TDD. Also, I have only seen the monster a few times, but the scariness of said monster is already dwindling. The removal of the sanity meter makes the game less annoying at times, but it has the unfortunate impact of letting you stare directly at the monster, revealing how goofy it actually looks. The monsters in TDD were even more goofy, but the game knew that, and so it refused to let you stare at them, which made them more terrifying.
I do like the removal of oil and tinderboxes. Those were pointless in my opinion, since your character's eyes could adjust to the dark somewhat in TDD, giving you a decent level of vision even without the lantern. In AMFP they removed the aspect of dark-vision, so when the lantern is off, it is almost impossible to see. This is a good idea in theory. You have to turn the lantern on to navigate, but the light reveals your position, leading to tension. However, even with the lantern on the environments are WAY too dark, so many times I couldn't navigate properly even with the lantern on. This is exacerbated by truly awful visual design in some areas. Everything ends up looking like identical rusty metal machinery, leaving you with no way to navigate. Certain zones, such as the church, are interesting, but then you go through long stretches of boring, repetitive, dark industrial areas. Everything just looks so dark and muddy and boring. There are also few bright areas to offer a change of pace. Even areas that have a lot of stationary lights only seem bright in the area directly adjacent to the light. They do not give off nearly the amount of ambient light throughout the room that they should, making even the "well lit" areas drearily dark. In addition, the monster can see you very easily when the light is on, but wont spot you even if you are 5 feet away when the light is off, so you basically HAVE to leave the lantern off in a lot of areas, leading to tedious and frustrating blundering about until you find the exit.
I can't comment too much on the story, since I am not that far in, but what I have seen is not very engaging. TDD opened with an interesting hook and a clear sense of purpose. In AMFP I couldn't even figure out who the main character was for a good while. The character has amnesia, but the game never tells you this or even alludes to it. He clearly remembers his kids and who and where he is, but then he starts talking about not knowing what lies ahead when he goes into the factory attached to his own damn house. Also, the notes left lying around are not voice acted anymore and do not convey the personality of the writer very much. This leaves us with a bland, empty shell of a main character. His journal entries should flesh out his character, but they don't. So far, they all follow the formula of 'comment on something that just happened or give a hint about a puzzle, then say how he doesn't know what lies ahead but he will continue for the sake of his children'. All of them but one or two have been like that so far. I REALLY liked the story of Dear Esther, so this is a real disappointment. Dear Esther's story was intriguingly mysterious and I hoped that that writing style would work really well with a story about amnesia, but they don't make use of that element very well.
All in all, this is really disappointing. I was excited when I found out that TheChineseRoom were developing this game, but they messed with the gameplay far too much and failed to deliver on the level of writing quality I expected. If they had left in the sanity drain, but removed the resource management aspect, the gameplay would have been better. If they made the environments have more ambient light, color, and variety, the art would have been better. If they had a stronger main character and some extra exposition early on the story would have been better. This is such a shame. This collaboration between two interesting developers could have been wondrous, but instead it is a dud.
I do like the removal of oil and tinderboxes. Those were pointless in my opinion, since your character's eyes could adjust to the dark somewhat in TDD, giving you a decent level of vision even without the lantern. In AMFP they removed the aspect of dark-vision, so when the lantern is off, it is almost impossible to see. This is a good idea in theory. You have to turn the lantern on to navigate, but the light reveals your position, leading to tension. However, even with the lantern on the environments are WAY too dark, so many times I couldn't navigate properly even with the lantern on. This is exacerbated by truly awful visual design in some areas. Everything ends up looking like identical rusty metal machinery, leaving you with no way to navigate. Certain zones, such as the church, are interesting, but then you go through long stretches of boring, repetitive, dark industrial areas. Everything just looks so dark and muddy and boring. There are also few bright areas to offer a change of pace. Even areas that have a lot of stationary lights only seem bright in the area directly adjacent to the light. They do not give off nearly the amount of ambient light throughout the room that they should, making even the "well lit" areas drearily dark. In addition, the monster can see you very easily when the light is on, but wont spot you even if you are 5 feet away when the light is off, so you basically HAVE to leave the lantern off in a lot of areas, leading to tedious and frustrating blundering about until you find the exit.
I can't comment too much on the story, since I am not that far in, but what I have seen is not very engaging. TDD opened with an interesting hook and a clear sense of purpose. In AMFP I couldn't even figure out who the main character was for a good while. The character has amnesia, but the game never tells you this or even alludes to it. He clearly remembers his kids and who and where he is, but then he starts talking about not knowing what lies ahead when he goes into the factory attached to his own damn house. Also, the notes left lying around are not voice acted anymore and do not convey the personality of the writer very much. This leaves us with a bland, empty shell of a main character. His journal entries should flesh out his character, but they don't. So far, they all follow the formula of 'comment on something that just happened or give a hint about a puzzle, then say how he doesn't know what lies ahead but he will continue for the sake of his children'. All of them but one or two have been like that so far. I REALLY liked the story of Dear Esther, so this is a real disappointment. Dear Esther's story was intriguingly mysterious and I hoped that that writing style would work really well with a story about amnesia, but they don't make use of that element very well.
All in all, this is really disappointing. I was excited when I found out that TheChineseRoom were developing this game, but they messed with the gameplay far too much and failed to deliver on the level of writing quality I expected. If they had left in the sanity drain, but removed the resource management aspect, the gameplay would have been better. If they made the environments have more ambient light, color, and variety, the art would have been better. If they had a stronger main character and some extra exposition early on the story would have been better. This is such a shame. This collaboration between two interesting developers could have been wondrous, but instead it is a dud.
I feel a bit guilty responding to your wall of text with what is going to be a much shorter message, but such is life. Anyway, your thoughts do seem to run largely parallel to Torque's, and I think in terms of "what happened" you're both probably as close to "right" as anyone's going to be, at least with regards to the pre-amnesiac portion of the game. But it still relies too heavily on "he did crazy shit because he's crazy," which is actually an explanation someone else - Kirk Hamilton from Kotaku, I think - brought up on Twitter. It's valid, but I think it's kind of a lazy way to justify elements of the game that look cool but don't really make a hell of a lot of sense.
Again, story notwithstanding, AAMFP fails to generate anywhere near the fright factor of TDD, and on that point alone it fails as a horror game. It's kinda creepy, and maybe it puts up an interesting narrative (although that's obviously very subjective) but as a horror game - which is what any reasonable person would expect from a sequel to Amnesia - it just doesn't work.
I do think it's pretty cool that it has sparked so much conversation, though. It's certainly arguable that even if you didn't care for the game, the post-game discussions are worth the price of admission.
The church is one of the best examples of this. I loved it, I loved the imagery, I loved the creepy altar, the whole thing was great as a very narrow slice of the game, but what sense does it make? Why does Mandus need a church to indulge his charitable activities, and why wouldn't anyone entering the church think, whoa, there's something a little dodgy going on here? The idea of Mandus spontaneously splitting in two as if he suffered some kind of Victorian transporter accident is a real stretch, too. Sure, it explains who that guy is, but what's the basis for it?
Again, story notwithstanding, AAMFP fails to generate anywhere near the fright factor of TDD, and on that point alone it fails as a horror game. It's kinda creepy, and maybe it puts up an interesting narrative (although that's obviously very subjective) but as a horror game - which is what any reasonable person would expect from a sequel to Amnesia - it just doesn't work.
I do think it's pretty cool that it has sparked so much conversation, though. It's certainly arguable that even if you didn't care for the game, the post-game discussions are worth the price of admission.
Dear God, it's exactly what I thought! This game was not scary, I did not feel weak at any moment, unlike as Daniel I could stare at these monsters and get a close look at them if I wanted (which I so very much did), which took a lot of the "I don't know where it is" scare-factor away.
I won't lie, I regret my pre-order. I expected the feeling I felt with the first game, that was not what I got. Not even close. While the area design and lighting were splendid and the encounters were very intense, I found the game very predictable story-wise, which led to a very dull let's play in which I thought of playing the game through again, alone, confused as to why I was not feeling fear.
Here's another plus, though, the Kaernk made a brief reappearance! Seriously, I stepped around every corner, walked through every corridor hoping to hear a gasp in reaction to a deep growl signalling the arrival of a deformed monstrosity, ready to patrol, it's skin rubbing upon itself, as it moves its mangled body, with intent to embed its claws in my FPV. Of course I'm talking about a Servant Grunt!
Contort my vision, piggies! I want to hear the terror meter, that voice from the void! Give me THE DARK DESCENT!
All this said, it certainly wasn't a terrible game.
I won't lie, I regret my pre-order. I expected the feeling I felt with the first game, that was not what I got. Not even close. While the area design and lighting were splendid and the encounters were very intense, I found the game very predictable story-wise, which led to a very dull let's play in which I thought of playing the game through again, alone, confused as to why I was not feeling fear.
Here's another plus, though, the Kaernk made a brief reappearance! Seriously, I stepped around every corner, walked through every corridor hoping to hear a gasp in reaction to a deep growl signalling the arrival of a deformed monstrosity, ready to patrol, it's skin rubbing upon itself, as it moves its mangled body, with intent to embed its claws in my FPV. Of course I'm talking about a Servant Grunt!
Contort my vision, piggies! I want to hear the terror meter, that voice from the void! Give me THE DARK DESCENT!
All this said, it certainly wasn't a terrible game.
This is a strawman -- I never said that *you* said that we couldn't have any expectations. I responded, specifically, to your terminology.Aposthebest said:
No, that's not true. At all. Why would you say that? What does McDonalds have to do with a sequel?Aposthebest said:
I pointed out that sequels create expectations that their producers market in order to generate sales. Your counteranalogy was completely irrelevant. I mean, completely. I responded to your terms accurately; please pay me the same courtesy.
Totally and completely irrelevant. You've moved the goalposts so far that they're in the parking lot. No one said that this game had to be as good as a triple-A game or that its price tag was at variance with its quality. It is criticized for being marketed as a particular type of horror game but failing to be that type of horror game and, as a direct result of that failure, failing to be a good horror game.Aposthebest said:
Stop strawmanning, please. If your point doesn't tackle the "failed horror game" point, you're not talking to anyone but yourself, and masturbation should be done in private. Or on paysites. Either way, definitely not here.
This is all complete B.S. and is directly addressed in my first post. How much they charged is irrelevant and they DID market the game as a sequel.Aposthebest said:
Totally false. Game buyers wanted a quality horror game, not nostalgia. Amnesia isn't even _old_enough_ to generate nostalgia. The game is criticized for being of poor quality -- you are deliberately avoiding addressing that point.Aposthebest said:
Look, if you liked the game, you liked the game, but that doesn't make criticisms of the game somehow mystically invalid.
I know it's not. That was my point, it has the bare minimum incluson of mechanics for "survival-horror gameplay" but it's such a small part of the game that it can't even be considered a survival horror game. Dark Descent was survival horror, it made surviving monster encounters a core aspect of its gameplay.BleedingPride said:
I'll amend my walking simulator statement: "It's a walking simulator with a tiny bit of gameplay added."
No worries about having a short response to my "essay", after all it was just meant to be an attempt at answering the questions you raised and I hoped that it did well. As I said before the "horror" of the game is an entirely different flavor of horror from the first game and clearly you - and a lot of others - didn't find it particularly appealing. Again, it's just like Torque said: it's much more of an environmental horror than a more substantial horror. You're supposed to feel creeped out by the place you're in, by the atrocities committed there, about the implications of what's going on rather than being scared for your life as you run and hide from some shambling horror. I'm not trying to get you to find the game scarier than you did when you played it since what works for some doesn't work for others. As I said, your complaints about the game are all perfectly valid and justified.Andy Chalk said:
Personally I found the place to be creepy, but that's just me. I was never really terrified or even "scared", but I had a continuing sense of unease throughout the game. I think that's what they were going for, a more subtle form of fear that just lingers in the back of your mind rather than taking a firm grip of your senses. I could be wrong. Perhaps they were trying to be as scary as possible. If that's the case then yeah, they really fell short of the mark.
One last note about the church:
Churches were gathering places and sanctuaries to the down-trodden. Again going back to my Mass Effect comparison, it's much like how Sanctuary was supposed to be a place where refugees could find...well...sanctuary from the horrors of the war. In reality it was a Cerberus lab where people were being rounded up and used in horrific experiments. It was promising something the people were desperate for and capturing them for a nefarious purpose.
The same is true with the church in this game. You build a church as part of your pig-man factory and the less fortunate will naturally flock to it. Especially if they're being offered free food. If you haven't eaten for the past two days and you hear about a church giving out plentiful free food, are you REALLY going to care that much that the stained-glass windows show pictures of pigs rather than of Jesus? You might walk in and say "This seems a bit odd...what's with all the pig imagery?" But then your stomach would growl and you'd get in the food line. You wouldn't care that the person feeding you is a bit "eccentric" in beliefs...he's giving you free food. As I described before, it all ties into how perfectly efficient the machine was. The church was just another cog in its workings.
As for "Crazy Mandus is Crazy", yeah that pretty much explains his motives, but the game is itself meant to be a big metaphor. It's spelled out in the line "The world is a machine! A Machine for Pigs! Meant only to be slaughtered!" Basically it's just a comparison that, considering all the horrible things that man will do to itself in the coming century, the world is no different than the machine that Mandus built. With Mandus' machine, people are brought in, fed, and then slaughtered. In the world, people are born, raised, then sent off to die in a war (or any of the other horrible ways that are mentioned).
And lastly, I don't buy into Torgue's belief that Mandus was split...at least not physically. I think an argument could be made that the Orb shattered his psyche into split-personalities (which would explain the voice in his head), but to assume that there were two physical Mandus-es, one in the machine and one trying to stop the machine, I agree is a huge stretch.
The same is true with the church in this game. You build a church as part of your pig-man factory and the less fortunate will naturally flock to it. Especially if they're being offered free food. If you haven't eaten for the past two days and you hear about a church giving out plentiful free food, are you REALLY going to care that much that the stained-glass windows show pictures of pigs rather than of Jesus? You might walk in and say "This seems a bit odd...what's with all the pig imagery?" But then your stomach would growl and you'd get in the food line. You wouldn't care that the person feeding you is a bit "eccentric" in beliefs...he's giving you free food. As I described before, it all ties into how perfectly efficient the machine was. The church was just another cog in its workings.
As for "Crazy Mandus is Crazy", yeah that pretty much explains his motives, but the game is itself meant to be a big metaphor. It's spelled out in the line "The world is a machine! A Machine for Pigs! Meant only to be slaughtered!" Basically it's just a comparison that, considering all the horrible things that man will do to itself in the coming century, the world is no different than the machine that Mandus built. With Mandus' machine, people are brought in, fed, and then slaughtered. In the world, people are born, raised, then sent off to die in a war (or any of the other horrible ways that are mentioned).
And lastly, I don't buy into Torgue's belief that Mandus was split...at least not physically. I think an argument could be made that the Orb shattered his psyche into split-personalities (which would explain the voice in his head), but to assume that there were two physical Mandus-es, one in the machine and one trying to stop the machine, I agree is a huge stretch.
I haven't finished it yet, and yeah, it's not as scary as the first one, but it still freaks me out and makes me extremely uncomfortable. I don't like the exclusion of the inventory, sanity, and the lantern oil/tinderbox thing, but I don't think it suffers because they're gone, necessarily. Well...maybe the sanity meter. But the other two not so much. I mean, I hardly used the lantern in the first one anyway, and I'm only using it in this one because my computers graphics can't handle it on the highest setting so everything's dark as shit and full of pixel-y mostly-opaque steam. -_-
I don't like to hear that there's no real conclusion/wrap-up/explanation though. I have a good theory for what's going on; if it's not what happened or isn't implied, I might have to make a story out of it...
I don't like to hear that there's no real conclusion/wrap-up/explanation though. I have a good theory for what's going on; if it's not what happened or isn't implied, I might have to make a story out of it...
Well you're in luck there is a pretty damn good conclusion waiting for you. You might have to replay the game once more, or visit the forums to get the full gist of it.abominableangel said:
I just beat it tonight. I think it was a fun game, and had a very interesting story, or premise, but it was not scary at all. Like others said, most of the tension comes not from the monsters, but from the environment, as well as the history behind everything. The problem with that is that it doesn't make the game scary, just unnerving. If you look at this thread, you will see RJ 17 summed up the story quite well, and challenged the notion that it was incomplete(dont check it out if you do not want spoilers). The problem is that you have to read a lot of the letters scattered about to fully understand what is happening, as well as the implications of your characters decisions in the game.abominableangel said:
All in all, I would say that it was a good game with a very interesting story; just not a good Amnesia game. The removal of tinderboxes and lantern oil kind of killed a lot of potential tension the game could have had. The first game had small bits of survival horror in it(do I save my tinderboxes, or use them now? Should I have my lantern on so I can see, as well as avoid insanity effects, or should I have it off to avoid monsters and preserve oil?) There was very little consequences for using the lantern in A Machine for Pigs, as
most of the encounters lasted less than 30 seconds anyways
Why should Amnesia be shackled to one type of horror? Why not explore other genres to see what they come up with? They did state this was an experiment that got bigger as the development went on, and as far as experiments go, they had mixed results. Gameplay was less scary, but the story, atmosphere, and sound design were great! The next game frictional makes will probably take notes from both predecessors. I guess we'll agree to disagree, because you seem more bitter about this argument than objective, but that's fine. It wasn't what you were expecting.Lovely Mixture said:
I never said it should. In fact, I consider the first game to be both psychological horror and survival horror.BleedingPride said:
It was an experiment that they've done several times. They did Dear Esther, they did Korsakovia. They have done nothing new. Gameplay driven stories can not use the "they're experimental" defense, especially if they're by the same developer.BleedingPride said:
For Korsakovia and Dear Esther they had leeway, they were stand-alone projects, they could do whatever they wanted. For Amnesia they were doing an official sequel.
I only come off as bitter because every argument I've had with people defending this game seem to think that TCR can do no wrong.BleedingPride said:
I've backed up what's wrong with the game several times, but most arguments have been "your expectations were off."
It's not just that people's expectations were "off." They (as well as I) found the game to be bad, as both an Amnesia sequel or a stand-alone game.
It's not that hard to improve on the original Amnesia, some custom stories have done it well others have done it horrible. If you charge 15 dollars, people expect quality above the level of a mod that someone can make NOT below that level.
So far TCR has failed to deliver anything above that level. At this point, calling them a developer is generous.
Gosh this game is bad.
I didn't really mind removing the inventory. Tinder boxes and the oil were never an issue in TDD. I did mind, when it was obvious that the puzzle had been dumbed down to accomodate it. In one case there is even an pneumatic delivery system acting as an inventory so you can be chased by monsters without a floating cylinder in view. This really helped the narrative experience...
Graphics are too dark. London streets look like they were taken from Thief 1. The truck model is a joke.
The enemies are awfully animated. Yeah I know the nurses of Silent Hill had choppy movement too. But here it makes the pigmen unpredictable. You can't know when they will turn because they are doing these 180 degree instant turns and have no wind up animation. Their movement looks worse when they are running. Like a movie on fast forward.
The enemy encounters are somewhat improved, since most of the times you can't just die to make them disappear (the most glaring issue TDD had), but have to replay the encounter. I think Frictional did itself a disservice when they removed combat altogether in Penumbra: Black Plague. I might be the only one, but I like the botched combat system in the first Penumbra. Nothing like standing on a box trying to hit two undead dogs with a browstick to feel helpless and weak ;-)
The music is more annoying than mood building. Nothing like the piano music in the main menu in Penumbra: Overture.
The game is full of horror tropes:
- ghostly children who are also twins - check!
Can we please stop using them? Now! Thanks.
- ominous messages from the Management - check!
- a side story that's directly stolen from Edgar Allen Poe - check!
The story is nothing to write home about. The game is titled a machine for pigs. The mansion at the start has a picture of a boy with a pig head. There are pig face masks everywhere. Not to mention the church or the pig monsters.
Suprise Suprise! The machine is turning humans into pigs, that Mandus built because he thinks humans are pigs. Gosh didn't see that coming. There are several elements that do not really fit in the narrative and just seem to be there for shock value.
Despite this I actually enjoyed the story until two thirds into the game. The ending ruined it big time for me. It reveals stuff we already phantom (the children being already dead) and then just petered out with the push of a button. Nowhere in the game is it more obvious that the developers made Dead Esther. The last 15 minutes have you running through small corridors with no other route, just pushing levers to get to the ending. And NOW it must end. The ending leaves too many open questions. What is the goal of the machine/the orb? How does turning people into manpigs prevent the sky from falling? In TDD the antagonist wanted to escape his fate.
If you like the predecessor or horror games in general avoid this at all cost. The chinese room clearly had not enough experience to develop a game of this scope.
I didn't really mind removing the inventory. Tinder boxes and the oil were never an issue in TDD. I did mind, when it was obvious that the puzzle had been dumbed down to accomodate it. In one case there is even an pneumatic delivery system acting as an inventory so you can be chased by monsters without a floating cylinder in view. This really helped the narrative experience...
Graphics are too dark. London streets look like they were taken from Thief 1. The truck model is a joke.
The enemies are awfully animated. Yeah I know the nurses of Silent Hill had choppy movement too. But here it makes the pigmen unpredictable. You can't know when they will turn because they are doing these 180 degree instant turns and have no wind up animation. Their movement looks worse when they are running. Like a movie on fast forward.
The enemy encounters are somewhat improved, since most of the times you can't just die to make them disappear (the most glaring issue TDD had), but have to replay the encounter. I think Frictional did itself a disservice when they removed combat altogether in Penumbra: Black Plague. I might be the only one, but I like the botched combat system in the first Penumbra. Nothing like standing on a box trying to hit two undead dogs with a browstick to feel helpless and weak ;-)
The music is more annoying than mood building. Nothing like the piano music in the main menu in Penumbra: Overture.
The game is full of horror tropes:
- ghostly children who are also twins - check!
Can we please stop using them? Now! Thanks.
- ominous messages from the Management - check!
- a side story that's directly stolen from Edgar Allen Poe - check!
The story is nothing to write home about. The game is titled a machine for pigs. The mansion at the start has a picture of a boy with a pig head. There are pig face masks everywhere. Not to mention the church or the pig monsters.
Suprise Suprise! The machine is turning humans into pigs, that Mandus built because he thinks humans are pigs. Gosh didn't see that coming. There are several elements that do not really fit in the narrative and just seem to be there for shock value.
Despite this I actually enjoyed the story until two thirds into the game. The ending ruined it big time for me. It reveals stuff we already phantom (the children being already dead) and then just petered out with the push of a button. Nowhere in the game is it more obvious that the developers made Dead Esther. The last 15 minutes have you running through small corridors with no other route, just pushing levers to get to the ending. And NOW it must end. The ending leaves too many open questions. What is the goal of the machine/the orb? How does turning people into manpigs prevent the sky from falling? In TDD the antagonist wanted to escape his fate.
If you like the predecessor or horror games in general avoid this at all cost. The chinese room clearly had not enough experience to develop a game of this scope.
Not surprised at all to see people not enjoying this game as much as the original. The Chinese Room should stick to what they know best, pretentious interactive fiction, instead of barging in on well beloved horror games.
I'll likely still end up playing this eventually, when it goes on sale, but it's disheartening to see such an awesome series not reach it's potential.
I'll likely still end up playing this eventually, when it goes on sale, but it's disheartening to see such an awesome series not reach it's potential.
